Overview

SAP Gateway for Microsoft: Visual Studio Add-In is a developer tool in Visual Studio that provides a set of wizards to help you accelerate the development of application-level solutions that integrate data from SAP systems into Microsoft Office applications.

When installed, you can start the GWM Visual Studio Add-In wizards in the New Project window, under the Visual C# node in Microsoft Visual Studio, to guide you to quickly create GWM add-ins.

The following are the wizards available in the GWM Visual Studio Add-In:

Both GWM Outlook 2010 Add-In and GWM Outlook 2013 Add-In wizards create add-ins that contain generated code and resources for Microsoft Outlook items, such as, Contacts, Tasks, Appointments, and SAP Business Workflow scenarios, in Microsoft Outlook 2010 and 2013.

The resulting GWM Outlook add-in interacts with an OData service in SAP Gateway to retrieve data and business processes from your SAP systems into Microsoft Outlook for users.
GWM Excel 2010 Add-In and GWM Excel 2010 Add-In wizards create add-ins that generate code and resources for the Microsoft Excel application.

The resulting GWM Excel add-in interacts with an OData service in SAP Gateway to retrieve data and business processes from your SAP systems, into Microsoft Excel for users.

Note When you have Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 or 2012, only the GWM Outlook 2010 Add-In and GWM Excel 2010 Add-In wizards are available. When you have Microsoft Visual Studio 2013, GWM Outlook 2010 Add-In, and GWM Excel 2010 Add-In, as well as GWM Excel 2013 Add-In, and GWM Outlook 2013 Add-In wizards are available.

Each add-in that you create will contain the files and the generated code for your target application. You can either run the solution in the target application without modifying the code, or customize and extend the code to suit your needs.

In addition to creating add-ins for target solutions to be used in Microsoft Office applications, you can do the following:

Connect to SAP Gateway systems to search, and explore OData services, as well as to familiarize yourself with the definitions of the service you discover.
Add OData service references to any Visual C# project.
Create proxy and extension classes required for your target Microsoft Office application.
Include specific security, and log tracing features of GWM Visual Studio Add-In in any Visual C# project.

The tool aims to primarily help developers to generate code for Microsoft applications that can consume the OData services exposed by SAP Gateway, in an efficient manner.

Example

Using GWM Outlook Add-In wizard, you can create a GWM Outlook add-in template for the Microsoft Outlook item, Contacts, to retrieve all the contacts for a specific service from an SAP Gateway system.

Later, when Microsoft Outlook users install your GWM Outlook add-in, they can retrieve all the contacts for the specific service in the SAP system into Microsoft Outlook.

From Microsoft Outlook, they can edit, update, and delete the contents from the SAP system, and then save their changes to the SAP system.