The excitement around the myriad of Enterprise Services delivered with CRM 7.0 has not abated. However, the difference between excitement and real concrete plans for SOA are two entirely different things.
In our ramp-up program we had a high percentage of customers tick off the "we will be using SOA" box, however a more moderate number have actually been able to share with us exactly what they plan on doing.
The intent of this blog is to help customers who are interested in SOA, but not sure what to do with it, consider one of the powerful scenario possibilities.
As I have mentioned in previous blogs, presentation, and papers, there are essentially two major sub categories of scenarios for SOA.
1. System Integration - This is where two systems talk directly to each other with Enterprise Services and there is no user interface in between (can be internal or with external partners).
2. Composite Applications - This is where a user interface allows a user to communicate with the backend application directly through Enterprise Services.
Today I want to shed some light on composite applications. A composite can take many forms, but the golden rule is that it must have a user interface. This user interface is usually created to serve a special niche interface that is not available in our core CRM application. This could be a special reduced or tailored UI for sporadic, geographically diverse, or external users. It could also be used to incorporate data and functionality from multiple applications in a single UI.
Composite applications can of course be programmed in any way that a User Interface can be programmed. However today we will look at an application from SAP CRM called Visual Composer that is built to help people "model" composite applications. Modeling essentially means programming without actually writing code.
My intent is to quickly show you the capabilities of modeling a composite application to get your creative juices flowing. Once you have fully absorbed that you now have the ability to create user interfaces on the fly, I hope it will kick off a brainstorming session at your company, eventually producing many scenarios where a composite application can bring about a quick and meaningful ROI.
I hope you enjoy the video! You can acces the full screen version using the link below:
https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/50c02221-adfa-2b10-009f-e402c9eec7
