SAP NetWeaver 7.5 is the new foundation of SAP's on-premise offerings such as SAP Business Suite and the on-premise edition of SAP S/4HANA. Besides this, it provides new capabilities for the various SAP NetWeaver products such as SAP Gateway, SAP Business Warehouse, SAP Process Orchestration, etc. If you like to get an overview of the new release take a look at the What’s Coming Next with SAP NetWeaver 7.5 article. In the meantime, the new release 7.5 Support Package Stack 00 has been shipped, actually during this year's SAP TechEd conference held in Las Vegas, just in time to roll out the latest features to the audience. In this blog, I would like to share with you new features highlights of SAP Process Orchestration. By the way, some of the new features have been also added to the latest SP of release 7.31, i.e., 7.31 SP17, which has been released today (6th of Nov. 2015). I have marked those features in the text below accordingly.
SAP JVM 8 support
SAP NetWeaver Application Server Java and hence SAP Process Orchestration runs on SAP JVM 8, a certified Java Virtual Machine and Java Development Kit for Java 8 leveraging from new features and enhancements that come with the Java 8 edition. Some of the new features are highlighted in the release notes at SAP JVM 8 - What's New in SAP NetWeaver 7.5 (Release Notes) - SAP Library. How can SAP Process Orchestration benefit from the latest Java technology?
- Java mappings in PI and BPM can use new Java 8 features
- Support for new driver versions for JMS and JDBC which require latest Java version
- Compatibility with 3rd party libraries and adapters which require latest Java version
SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio available for Eclipse 4.4 (Luna)
The SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio which is based on the Eclipse platform supports Eclipse 4.4 (Luna) version. This way you can run all SAP Process Orchestration plug-ins in the same Eclipse instance together with other SAP development tools for Eclipse such as SAP HANA Cloud Integration Tools, SAP HANA Tools, SAP HANA Cloud Platform Tools, etc.
Dual stack option discontinued
SAP NetWeaver has discontinued dual-stack deployments as of release 7.4 with the exception of SAP Process Integration (SAP PI), see SAP NetWeaver Discontinues Dual Stack. With 7.5, there is no exception anymore, the dual-stack option for SAP Process Integration is not supported anymore. It has been replaced by a sort of dual usage type, i.e., it behaves like a PI dual-stack but both stacks the AS ABAP and the AS Java run on separate system IDs, see release notes at Dual-Stack Option Changed to Dual Usage Type (Changed) - What's New in SAP NetWeaver 7.5 (Release No....
What does this mean for existing SAP PI dual-stack installations in terms of an upgrade to 7.5? After upgrading to SAP PI 7.5, you have to split the dual-stack system before you can use it productively. The dual-stack split procedure of the Software Provisioning Manager now supports the split of PI, see Overview - Dual-Stack Split Procedure of Software Provisioning Manager 1.0. As a result, the end points of the stacks will change, so it is recommended to place a SAP Web Dispatcher, reverse proxy or any other load balancer in your landscape to shield your backend systems from this change. Note, that the upgrade option has been supported from release 7.5 SP1 onwards. For more information about how to perform the split, refer to SAP note 2190371.
If you like to install a fresh SAP Process Integration supporting the dual usage type, you first need to perform an installation of ‘Application Server ABAP for SAP Process Integration’, followed by performing an installation of ‘Application Server Java for SAP Process Integration’, both running on separate system IDs. Here, the AS Java uses the User Management Engine (UME) of the AS ABAP. However, for a fresh installation we strongly recommend to rather go for an SAP Process Orchestration installation which is SAP's strategic on-premise integration platform.
Access BPM lifecycle events with Push API
The SAP BPM API enables you to customize and enhance the way you use business processes and execute tasks. Sometimes it might be required to get insights into the execution of business processes and tasks. This could be the case if you for instance plan to send out notifications via SMS once a new task gets created. To support such scenarios, the API has been enhanced to provide access to lifecycle events of business processes and tasks. Applications can now register for such events and get notified once a certain event occurs, e.g., a process is completed or a task gets created. SAP BPM uses the Java Message Service (JMS) to publish lifecycle events and thus enables a decoupled exchange of data without directly connecting applications. There are two ways to consume BPM-related events through JMS: via a Message Driven Bean (MDB) or via a JMS API available in the Java Public API. Learn more about this on help.sap.com (This feature is also available in 7.31 SP17).
New message cancelling job
So far, the following job types were supported: for archiving, deleting, restarting, and recovering messages. Cancelling erroneous messages was only supported as manual task. With the latest release and SP, a new job type has been introduced that allows you to scheduled a mass cancellation of messages which are in a non-final status, see Cancelling Job (New) - What's New in SAP NetWeaver 7.5 (Release Notes) - SAP Library (This feature is also available in 7.31 SP17).
New enhancements of the ESR in Eclipse perspective
As an integration developer for SAP Process Orchestration you mainly work within the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio as your common UI for maintaining your design time artifacts such as data types, mappings, service interfaces, etc. (ESR in Eclipse perspective), modeling business processes (Process Composer perspective), and configuring the routing rules, latter aka Integration Flows (Process Integration Designer perspective). Regarding the ESR in Eclipse perspective we are not yet fully function complete compared to the respective Java WebStart UI. So some tasks still need to be done within the Java WebStart UI, However, we constantly work on closing those functional gaps. In 7.5 SP00 we have addressed the following capabilities:
- Import external definitions, i.e., either WSDL or XSD, mass import supported.
- Copy ESR objects with the option to copy all dependent objects.
- Where-used list. The result list shows all objects with their respective object type that uses the selected object, and whether the object is directly used or indirectly referenced to.
New enhancements of the Process Integration Designer perspective (Integration Flows)
The following new features have been shipped which facilitates working with Integration Flows (Those features are also available in 7.31 SP17):
- Automatically deploy after import. Enable this feature by setting the property com.sap.aii.ibdir.core.transport.autoDeploy of service XPI Service: AII Config Service to true, see SAP note 2158617.
- Export from context menu. You can for instance choose export from a folder, then all underlying Integration Flows and related objects are preselected.
- Option to hide deleted objects in the export selection screen.
- Reload/refresh the assigned referenced channels. If you change a communication channel which is used within one or more Integration Flows in a way that it affects the agreement settings, upon activation of the channel the changes are now automatically reflected in the agreement tab of the Integration Flows without manual reload. If a peer developer does the change of the channel however, and this would affect an Integration Flow you are working on, then you can explicitly select the Refresh Referenced Channel button to update the channel attributes.
- Show deployment status of all Integration Flows, apply filter, and mass deploy or undeploy the selected Integration Flows.
- View history and restore older versions for all PI configuration objects.
Running cloud integration content on SAP Process Orchestration
For so called hybrid scenario, i.e., on-premise to cloud integration scenarios, SAP provides pre-packaged content covering different line of business areas and SAP cloud solutions such as SAP S/4 HANA, cloud edition, Ariba Network, SAP Cloud for Customer, SuccessFactors HCM Suite, SuccessFactors Employee Central, etc. As a good starting point to explore SAP's offering in this regard, I would recommend to go to the Hybrid Scenarios overview page on SAP Service Marketplace. Content that either run on SAP Process Integration / SAP Process Orchestration or SAP HANA Cloud Integration (HCI) can be accessed from SAP's Content Hub. There exists content that only runs on HCI such as SuccessFactors LMS Curricula with SAP HCM Qualification, Electronic Invoicing for Chile, Peru, Italy, Spain, etc. With 7.5 you can now deploy and run the cloud integration content also on SAP Process Orchestration benefiting from the investment that we do on HCI, see Cloud Integration Content in SAP PI (New) - What's New in SAP NetWeaver 7.5 (Release Notes) - SAP Li.... This new feature runs on any Adapter Engine of release 7.5, so you can also use it on a PI dual usage type, an Advanced Adapter Engine Extended, or a non-central Adapter Engine. However, be aware that the use of this feature requires a further license for accessing the design and configuration web ui on an HCI tenant which is currently under discussion.
If you like to know more about content re-use across the two platforms SAP Process Orchestration and SAP HANA Cloud Integration join the lecture session INT202 from my colleague Sindhu Gangadharan on this year's SAP TechEd conference.
For a complete overview of all new features, check out the release notes at Support Package Stack 00 - What's New in SAP NetWeaver 7.5 (Release Notes) - SAP Library.
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