Microsoft SAP Technical Community Update
Meet Microsoft at SAPPHIRE 2008
Dear Community Members,

The SAP SAPPHIRE/ASUG 2008 (May 5th - 7th, Orlando, FL) Conference is only two weeks away. This year we will have over 60 experts at SAP’s largest annual customer conference available to you. As a top sponsor, Microsoft will host meetings, presentations, and networking opportunities to educate our customers on how to maximize combined Microsoft and SAP investments.

We encourage you to request a one-on-one meeting at SAPPHIRE. Topics can range from, but are not limited to: Duet, MOSS integration with SAP, Microsoft BI strategies with SAP, Optimization of Windows and SQL Server for SAP, Office Business Applications for SAP or any topic that will advance your strategies for maximizing the value of SAP with Microsoft.

Please register today at https://www.ustechsregister.com/sapphire/main.aspx. We look forward to meeting you at SAPPHIRE.

Microsoft SAP Partner team
msftsap@mcrosoft.com

Microsoft Sessions at SAPPHIRE

Upcoming Webcasts
In this webcast, we talk about what will be delivered to SAP customers in Microsoft SQL Server 2008, including compression, minimal logging, parallelism improvements, and query- handling enhancements. Join us to learn how upgrading or migrating to SQL Server 2008 can result in multiple improvements for your SAP implementations.

New Benchmarks and White Papers Published
This latest benchmark demonstrates an increase of throughput of nearly a factor of three over the past four years with industry-standard hardware. With the demonstrated throughput by SQL Server 2008 x64 and Windows Server 2008 x64 running on industry-standard hardware is expected to cover scalability needs of at least 97 percent of all SAP deployments worldwide.
Migrating an SAP/ERP environment to Microsoft SQL Server can reduce unplanned downtime by over 20 percent, cut IT labor costs by nearly 25 percent, and cut ongoing software support costs up to 85 percent. Migration from competitive databases is made easy by tools, best practices, and certified SAP migration specialists. Payback is as short as nine months, with ongoing annual savings of 30 percent - 37 percent possible.
This Technical Reference Guide lays out the status quo of existing interoperability scenarios between SAP NetWeaver Portal and SharePoint technologies as of today. The paper was jointly developed by SAP and Microsoft and is a mature statement of do's and don'ts in the Portal Interoperability today. Solution scenarios describe the high-level overview where how- to guides let consultants and interested techies step through the implementation.
Enterprises looking for a way to consume SAP Enterprise Portal iViews using Microsoft Office SharePoint System 2007 can consider Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP). The goal of the WSRP technology is to facilitate the reusability of portlets across the boundaries of specific manufacturer implementations. This technology extends SAP Enterprise Portal functionality and data to SharePoint end users without the complexities or the expense of custom solutions.

Recent Webcasts Now Available On Demand
In this webcast, we discuss SAP and Microsoft portal interoperability. We cover how you can integrate Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the SAP NetWeaver Portal from front-end integration (iView, Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP), and URL linking) to integrate components and services across the portal (via Web services, the SAP Portal Development Kit for the Microsoft .NET Framework, and connectors). We explore approaches for interoperability based on search and the Business Data Catalog feature in SharePoint Server 2007. We also demonstrate the various types of solutions and describe how to approach portal integration.
Learn how to integrate Microsoft Office applications such as Microsoft Office InfoPath, Project, and Visio with SAP. We start with an overview of the key design principles and detail the guidelines and best practices for integrating these applications with SAP. We show you how to create front-end Web services to connect to SAP and how to consume these Web services to architect compelling solutions that dramatically improve the productivity of your users.
Learn how the Enterprise Application Services (EAS) team in the Microsoft Information Technology (IT) department utilizes the new database mirroring and online indexing features in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to dramatically increase the availability of SAP R/3 at Microsoft. We also discuss how, by using the 64-bit version of SQL Server 2005 with commodity 64-bit hardware, EAS was able to lower the total cost of ownership while increasing performance, scalability, and reliability in the SAP R/3 landscape.
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is the database that many organizations use to deploy SAP business applications. Attend this webcast to learn the best practices for setting up and operating SQL Server 2005 for secure, reliable, and scalable SAP deployments. Find out about architectures, 64-bit deployments, SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) configurations, database mirroring, and five of the most common configuration problems.

Office Business Application Resources
Get the practical guide to implementing the Microsoft Office system as an application-development platform. This book highlights the breadth of approaches developers can take for extending line-of-business information to information workers in the familiar, usable format of the Microsoft Office interface. These approaches -- Microsoft Office Business Application (OBA) patterns -- are based on real-world implementations in many cases. In other cases, they are built on Microsoft Office features that have a generalized solution based on input from customers and partners. This reference delivers the six key Microsoft Office Business Application patterns and provides professional developers with extensible examples and the architectural guidance needed for developing custom enterprise applications and extending business information to users.
The Office Business Application Starter Kit for SAP (OBA Starter Kit for SAP) showcases the power of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 in conjunction with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office system. (These tools are also known as Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition, or VSTO 2005 SE.) These development tools combined with the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 provide a compelling approach to integrating SAP enterprise processes into Microsoft Office system applications such as Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007.
OBA Central is a comprehensive Web site for Office Business Applications Solutions across industries, line-of-business applications, and business processes. Search through hundreds of ISV solutions that dramatically improve the productivity and experience of your end users.

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Microsoft SAP Technical Community Update
April 2008
In This Issue:
Microsoft Sessions at SAPPHIRE
Upcoming Webcasts
New Benchmarks and White Papers Published
Recent Webcasts Now Available On Demand
Office Business Application Resources
Received Microsoft SAP Technical Community Newsletter from a Friend?
Resources
Microsoft SAP Technical Alliance Team Blog
Microsoft to Host SAP Customer Advisory Board Meeting: May 22 in Berlin, Germany (after SAPPHIRE EMEA
EVENT)

If your company is interested in influencing the direction of future Microsoft and SAP interoperability and networking with other customers, please send us an e-mail message for nominations to the Microsoft SAP Customer Advisory Board.
SAP SAPPHIRE 2008
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