Desktop Office Integration - Architecture

The SAP integration technology allows you to integrate OLE-compatible desktop applications such as Microsoft Office, Lotus SmartSuite, or Visio into the SAP system.

Communication and data transfer work as follows:

Communication between the SAP GUI (presentation server) and the SAP application server was extended in Release 4.0. This made it possible to include ActiveX controls in SAP GUI ( Control Framework ).

Desktop Office Integration uses this interface for special controls (SAP Document Container Control and SAP Data Provider) that are the communication channel between the SAP system and the Desktop Office Application.

The SAP Document Container Control uses methods and attributes to communicate with a desktop application using the OLE2 interface.

The SAP Data Provider is a container and converter for data in different formats. Data that you import into an application is converted into a readable format based on the Internet standard MIME. The SAP Data Provider buffers document data that is administered in the SAP system. It also buffers SAP data, which can be inserted into documents using R/3 links.

Both controls have an interface to the SAP system. The interface to the SAP Data Provider is implemented using function modules. ABAP classes and interfaces for Desktop Office Integration provide the interface to the SAP Document Container Control.