Various Java standards are emerging in the area of electronic mailing and scheduling. At the moment, the lack of an established standard necessitates the usage of vendor-specific tools or libraries for integrating a particular groupware application. For example, Microsoft Collaborative Data Object is required in order to connect to the Microsoft Exchange server, while Lotus Domino toolkit is required in order to connect to the Lotus Domino server.
The Groupware framework provides an abstraction of the groupware APIs across different vendors, thereby bringing in a standard for integration with SAP Enterprise Portal.
The Groupware framework provides an abstraction of different groupware applications and provides the necessary APIs for integration with SAP Enterprise Portal. Different groupware applications such as Microsoft Exchange Server or Lotus Domino Server can be integrated by implementing a set of APIs called transports.
The figure below depicts the Groupware architecture.
Connectivity to a groupware system is implemented and configured as a transport. The transport implements the necessary API for data extraction and submission to the groupware system in question by using the vendor-specific libraries.
SAP ships Microsoft Exchange and the Lotus Notes transport out-of-the-box. You need to develop and deploy new transports in order to integrate other groupware applications such as Novell Groupwise.
The credentials for the transports are maintained using systems. For more information, see Creating a System .
The Groupware framework allows the quick development and deployment of reliable, secure, scalable, and manageable transports. It is written entirely in Java programming language, which allows portability and multi-platform support.
The Groupware framework supports the functions listed below. However, the functions actually available depend on the transport deployed and its capabilities. For more information, see the Features section of the appropriate transport documentation.
Sending e-mails using SMTP servers
Saving sent e-mails on groupware servers that support IMAP
Sending e-mails in HTML format
Sending e-mails with attachments
Including signatures in e-mails sent
Refer to SAP Note 1299989 for configuration steps.
Changing the default value of the number of attachments
Refer to SAP Note 1265992 for configuration steps.
Increasing the height of the default e-mail editor
Refer to SAP Note 1239602 for configuration steps.
Specifying the number of users to whom you want to send e-mails
Refer to SAP Note 1291383 for configuration steps.
Scheduling
Creating non-recurring appointments
Sending non-recurring meeting requests
Reading appointments
Modifying appointments
Deleting appointments
Modifying current instance of recurring appointments
Deleting current instances of recurring appointments
Sending meeting requests with attachments
Scheduling online meetings
Groupware integration has been designed to allow employees of an organization to access groupware servers using the portal. However, it is not possible for external users such as business partners or customers to use groupware integration, as there is no possibility of accessing the groupware servers of one organization from the portal of another organization. This is due to security restrictions.
The following steps have to be carried out to enable Groupware.
Configuring E-Mail
Perform the following steps to enable the sending of e-mails from SAP Enterprise Portal.
Configuring the Calendar
Perform the following steps to enable calendar integration in SAP Enterprise Portal.
Configuring Native Web Clients
Perform the following steps to integrate native Web clients into SAPEnterprise Portal.
Microsoft Exchange Web Client Integration
Lotus Domino Web Client Integration