Before opening the book for new SAP Cloud Platform Integration stories and new features in 2018 we took the opportunity in our last instance of the 2017 webinar series to take a step back and share with you
- what were the most frequently asked questions by our customers and partners and
- what were the key features that we added to our SAP Cloud Platform Integration stack over the past 12 month
In case you missed our live webinar on December 12th, here’s the
Session Recording and Slides for you to have a look.
The features we added to our stack in 2017 went hand in hand with the top 10 questions we heard from our customers and partners over the past month – and here are they are:
When will you provide a tool-supported content transport for SAP Cloud Platform Integration artifacts?
Customers were asking for a tool-supported mechanism to seamlessly transport integration artifacts through their integration landscape, e.g. from the test to production envirionment. As of 2017 this can be done in a controlled fashion with the help of CTS+ (content transport plus for non-ABAP based objects), either through your SAP Solution Manager or NetWeaver on-premise system.
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What is the Service Level Agreement for SAP Cloud Platform Integration and how can I get a better insight into my customer tenant’s availability?
Choosing an Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) solution has manifold advantages. At the same time, customers want to have transparency on the Service Level Agreements for the integration platform run by SAP in the cloud, as well as insight into the health status and availability of their customer tenants.
→ Check out the Service Level Agreement for SAP Cloud Platform Integration at this
site
→ Get real-time insight into the availability of our SAP Data Centers in the
SAP Trust Center and check the health status of your individual customer tenant in the
SAP Cloud Availability Center.
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How can we run regression tests before new feature are added to the stack and the codeline g*ets update on our tenants during the monthly upgrade?
In fact SAP’ Integration and Acceptence Test (IAT) team runs an extensive test catalog every month before the monthly upgrades of our SAP Cloud Platform Integration codeline to ensure downwards compatibility.
Still there might be integration flows where customers have done certain custom extensions, or where customers want to have an extra-level of assurance that their running key integration service will not break after the upgrade. For these cases SAP offers a new charged service to include these artifacts in our regression tests. If you are interested in this service send a mail to:
anette.asmus@sap.com.
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Will SAP share sample Performance Numbers for the SAP Cloud Platform Integration service?
Yes, in the webinar we discussed the various influencing factors for the message throughput of integration flow and shared some sample measures that we did.
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When will have High Performance Messaging capabilities on SAP Cloud Platform Integration?
For asynchronous Messaging with retry mechanism SAP offers a JMS adapter and an embedded Message Broker on the SAP Cloud Platform Integration stack, as of 2017. The feature set is available on the SAP Cloud Platform Integration, Enterprise Edition.
Check out the following blogs that highlight the functionality in detail:
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When will we have the same the same feature set available in the Web Designer as we already have today in the Eclipse Environment?
Feature parity was almost achieved over the past month, and the development teams are working full steam ahead to also make the remaining features available on the Web UI.
A very nice example for an improved user experience through the Web UI is the
Self Service for Keystore Deployment
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When will we see more reference templates published on the API Business Hub?
In 2017 there were quite some additions to the reference packages, both provided by SAP application experts, as well as by our partner community.
Some recent examples include
→ For SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud integrations
→ SAP Partner developed Content from KaTe
→ B2B templates
Check out the latest and greatest content at
https://api.sap.com/!
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When will we have B2B capabilities enabled on SAP Cloud Platform Integration?
Talking of B2B reference templates: Along with these refence templates: In 2017 SAP has released B2B capabilities (available only with SAP Cloud Platform Integration, Enterprise Edition) for enabling the B2B customers to securely transfer the EDI documents over AS2 protocol and provision a way to split, validate and convert the EDI documents to XML.
During the webinar Meghna Shishodiya showed us how to get started with B2B integrations step by step!
Further Information on the topic can also be found in the following blogs:
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What is SAP Cloud Platform Integration's take on Premium Disaster Recovery?
Already today SAP has very strong alerting and disaster recovery mechanisms in place for its data centers, also see information provided in the SAP Trust Center.
In addition, customers wish for documented Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that they can rely on. This is what we understand as ‘premium disaster recovery’ - SAP will offer a new, extra service for this going into 2018.
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When will the Tracing Feature be available in the SAP Cloud Platform Integration Web Environment?
Tracing comes in very handy for every integration developer during the Integration flow development. As of today, this feature is only available in our Eclipse Environment, but we are planning to bring this feature to the Web Environment in Q1/2018.
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Will you support the content re-use for integration artifacts, like scripts and mappings?
Yes, this requirement is on our future roadmap.
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When will SAP Cloud Platform Integration offer an XI adapter?
Soon, this is planned to be released in Q1/2018. Also see our
SAP Cloud Platform Integration roadmap on the topic.
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At the end of the session Meghna highlighted her recently released Best Practice Templates, which comprise tips and tricks on how to best make use of the various features for our SAP Cloud Platform Integration service.
Check out the
Cloud Integration -Exemplars on the SAP API Business Hub! and read Meghna's blog on the topic
here.
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We concluded the sessions with Q&A from the audience, here are the questions we got:
Q: When will the AS2 channels become available on customer/partner tenants?
A: The AS2 adapter is already available for all customers that are running on a SAP Cloud Platform, Enterprise Edition license.
Q: Any forecast on the availability of the XI adapter enablement in cloud?
A: Our current forecast is to support the XI adapter in Q1/2018. Also see our product Roadmap
here.
Q: Are there ways to add custom external parameters via Web UI?
A: Yes, please see Finny Babu’s blog
Externalizing Parameters using SAP Cloud Platform Integration’s Web Application on the topic.
Q: What is the Iflow Problems Tab?
A: The feature is planned to be released for SAP Cloud Platform Integration Web UI in Q1/2018. Similar to the problems view in Eclipse it will show you any consistency issues for the iflow in question.
Q: When will the tracing feature be available in the SAP Cloud Platform Integration Web UI?
A: The Tracing Feature is also planned to be released in Q1/2018.
Q: How do we handle bulk data loads involving ETL ..Should we use SAP Cloud Platform Integration Data Services in such cases?
A: Right, for ETL scenarios we typically recommend to use our SAP Cloud Platform Integration, data services solution.
Q: Do we have any feature available to cancel the messages which went into infinite loop and showing into "Processing Mode"?
A: As of now there is no means to actively cancel or delete these messages. Only when the Message Processing Log (MPL) clean-up job will run automatically these messages will be deleted after 30 days.
Q: I came across something called as Ariba Cloud Integration Gateway (CIG)? Can you explain about it?
A: With the help of the new Ariba Cloud Integration Gateway suppliers that are using standards, other than Ariba’s cXML standard, can now easily integrate with the ARIBA Network. An easy-to-use integration wizard guides users through a set of questions that help the tooling to automatically derive the transaction configurations.
Also see our Q3/2016
webinar recording and
blog on the topic.
Q: When will it be possible to authorize on message monitoring level, say this group can only view iflow
A: This feature request is unfortunately not yet on our 2018 product roadmap.
Q: Where can I see the SAP Cloud Platform Codeline release schedule and when will it affect my tenant?
A: The
release notes for our service are publicly shared on a monthly basis in the SAP Help Portal. The release notes summarize the feature set that will be added to the stack with the upcoming upgrade. They also indicate the next date for the upgrade.
Q: Are there any webinars or blogs available for information regarding using JMS Queues in addition to the official documentation?
A: The JMS adapter was productively released in 2017 and we have covered the feature in our
Q2/2017 webinar. Further information you can also found in these community blogs:
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Are you looking for our previous webinars? Watch the recordings or access the offline presentations
here .
