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Author's profile photo Former Member
Former Member
May 29, 2010 1 minute read

SAP & Mac OS X – Introduction

There is no doubt that the market share of Apple is increasing. A lot of people have (re) discovered the elegance, power and simplicity of Apple products. Besides the more traditional home markets of Apple such as image processing and DTP, an increasing number of Macintosh computers can be found at offices. This market share growth comes to no surprise. Besides the obvious Microsoft Office 2008 and the built-in Exchange compatibility for Mail and iCal, a lot of business applications have been made available for the Mac. Even SAP offers the SAPGui for Java in a dedicated Macintosh variant.

The times one could operate a SAP R/3 landscape with a simple Telnet terminal program and a SAPGui as the primary user interface have since long gone. This study will explore whether a standard Apple computer, a MacBook Pro for example, can be used as the tool of choice for end-users, sysadmins and developers. If so, which tooling and utilities are needed? If not, which functionality is missing and must be obtained elsewhere.

Apple Corporation is using SAP technology in its back-office systems. Over the years they have managed to integrate SAP and Apple products to run a highly effective organization. Did you know that all purchases within iTunes are managed by SAP ERP systems? For more details see some presentations on YouTube. The question is, is this also possible for companies who are not prepared to put effort into adoption of Apple technology to coexist with SAP technology?

This blog is not intended to bash Microsoft. So please, if you need to complain about a software or hardware platform please look for a forum elsewhere. Every platform has pro’s and con’s. It is up to the reader to decide about what tooling is best used to get the job done.

Did you know there is even a forum dedicated to SAP and Mac issues? Go to the SDN forums and look for “SAP Community Network Forums » Community Discussions » SAP Mac Users”. Besides finding answers to your questions you might help others solving their issues.

In this blog series the following topics will be covered:

  1. Basic Tooling – tools for remote access like Remote Desktop Client and X11
  2. Systems Management – the SAP tools like Visual Administrator and Download Manager
  3. SAPGui and Web Browsers – the major tools for all users to interact with SAP systems
  4. Software Development – tooling like the ABAP editor and NWDS

As not all planned blog posts are ready yet, the links will be come operational within a few weeks. A summary of the blogs series can be found here.

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      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member
      This series of posts will help a lot of us, no doubt. However, I would love to know about the directions of the GUI development, too. The Java and HTML GUIs cannot be used with the new transactions applying screen painter. The Netweaver Business Client (NWBC) uses .Not technology, that is officially only supported on MS Windows.
      While more and more SAP users change for Linux or Mac (mostly the first one), the future of SAP GUI is not published yet.
      I personally would love to have a web-based solution, with all the functionality of the current Windows GUI. HTML5 offers a real alternative for desktop applications, independently from OS. In case of performance issues, I could imagine applying one (or more) of the middle-ware solutions, either Google's Native Client, or Flash from Adobe, or Java from SUN - I mean, Oracle. All of them is supported on the most widely used operating systems