The ways of the modern ABAP developer – with Microsoft

ABAP Cloud

With SAP S/4HANA 2022 the new ABAP Cloud model was made available for on-prem systems. A previous blog post from Boris Gebhardt explains the different availabilities in more details: ABAP Cloud | SAP Blogs

Wander across the worlds of SAP and Microsoft – Journey of an ABAP’er

Based on the ABAP RAP Workshops by Andre Fischer we created a completely new workshop with the German Speaking SAP User group (DSAG) in Germany. Karl Kessler, Harish Bokkasam Andre Fischer  did all the ABAP coding and development which enabled us to build several new end-to-end scenarios. Bart Delanghe did the ABAP SDK for Azure configuration and Martin Pankraz and Bartosz Jarkowski were fundamental in create the content and testing everything.

Our scenario

The idea was to send events from the SAP System (once an order is placed in the RAP based Onlineshop) to Azure and trigger an integration in Microsoft Teams. At first it was just a simple notification, but then also actions could be taken: out of the order in the Onlineshop, a purchase requisition was created directly from Teams.

All of this was done in several steps: at first we used an Azure Logic Apps and the SAP ERP Connector to call an RFC — this was mainly to show the “classic” way of connecting to an SAP System.

Then we used the ABAP SDK for Azure to send the Order-event to Azure Event Grid. Now the Logic App is triggered automatically and we could see basic information about the ordered item in Teams. This was actually done in a very cool way: the ABAP SDK for Azure does not yet follow the new ABAP Cloud model, but thanks to the “wrapping feature” of classic ABAP code it was no problem to run this “legacy” code also in the new ABAP Cloud model!

(once the new SAP Event Mesh to Azure Event Grid integration is GA, we can also use this for an integration; keep watching the announcements from Karsten Strothmann on this :-))

Finally we added an additional action in the Logic App to call an OData service of the Onlineshop to retrieve additional information and create a purchase requisition directly in the SAP system from Teams.

As a next excercise we brought all the information from the Onlineshop in Excel — leveraging the Beauty of OData | SAP Blogs.

In the next quest we leveraged the Bot framework composer which allowed us to create a simple bot that would fetch the latest status of a specific order. This bot could be integrated in a website or even Teams.

Finally we looked at the integration in Microsoft 365. As an example we used Microsoft Word and created a taskpane directly in Word which would enable the user to fet the latest information of an order directly into the Word document.

The workshop was done in a hybrid way. We had 10 people onsite and 40 remote. All of the steps are documented in the repo here, MartinPankraz/ABAP-Developer-Day: Content supporting the DSAG ABAP Developer Day February 2023 (github.com).

How to get started

If you want to get started, you just need to follow the steps outlined in the prerequisites: ABAP-Developer-Day/PREREQUISITES.md at main · MartinPankraz/ABAP-Developer-Day (github.com)

The best way is probably to setup an S/4HANA 2022 Fully activated CAL system (Appliance Template Details – SAP Cloud Appliance Library), install / configure the required steps and then follow the journey!

If you want to get a glimps on what to expect, take a look at the scenario here:

Take a look and give it a try. Let us know if you have any questions!