The SAP CRM interaction center (IC) can be connected to external communication management software (CMS) systems that provide communication integration such as telephony, email, fax, and chat. Some of these systems have limits regarding the number of users that
can log on to a single instance of the CMS system, e.g. 500 users per CRM instance. Therefore, it can be necessary to connect multiple CMS instances to one SAP CRM system. In such cases, third party load balancers can be used to handle the message traffic between the SAP CRM interaction center and the CMS system.
The third party load balancers assure that:
- IC agents who log on to the interaction center are (evenly) distributed between the CMS instances
- Subsequent messages from IC agents are always sent to the correct CMS instance
Until now, the session ID or user ID of the IC session was not part of the HTTP header of the ICI SOAP messages sent by the SAP CRM system. This meant that third party load balancers (that were connected between the CRM system and the external CMS system) had to
extract the SOAP messages to obtain the user information from the message body. This information could then be used for load balancing. However, the extraction usually required extra coding on the load balancer side and was not supported by some third party load balancing tools.
To resolve this, SAP introduced the user and session information in the HTTP message header of the ICI SOAP messages in a configurable way with SAP Note 1640673. The third party load balancer can now route messages based on the HTTP header information provided by SAP.
