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I recently worked on putting together a demonstration for a prospective customer looking to migrate their existing bespoke e-Service web application to a SAP CRM based solution. During the implementation of the demonstration we identified an opportunity to innovate by re-using (instead of re-creating) elements of the existing solution and integrating them with CRM via the products ESOA capabilities. The approach we took allowed us to demonstrate a flexible and cost effective solution delivered in an agile fashion … so how did we do it?

By lifting up the covers and inspecting the layers of HTML and JavaScript within the existing web solution we were able to extract and re-use pretty much all of the User Interface code. So how did we take this bespoke UI and integrate it with the CRM product? The answer is through open standards based web services exposed via the CRM Enterprise Service Repository. Once the services were in place and using the AJAX technology as the ‘glue’ to marry them with the UI, we were able to package up the data captured in the bespoke web forms and pass it back to CRM to generate the relevant transactional and master data. The diagram below illustrates the architecture.

By utilising the pre-packaged web services available from the CRM Enterprise Service Repository we were able to configure the service layer with relative ease and in a timely fashion. The product takes care of data type mapping from web service to the underlying implementation and provides us with the appropriate WSDL (Web Service Description Language) file so that consuming applications understand how to construct requests, where to send them and how to interpret responses. The provision of the open standards based WSDL file gave us the ability to integrate the bespoke UI with the CRM backend, now all we needed was a way to construct and send the service calls … enter AJAX.

We leveraged the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology in order to execute web service requests in an asynchronous fashion from the User Interface. We simply introduced a thin layer of additional JavaScript that sat in the middle of the architecture, mediating the flow of data.

Interestingly, despite what the name may suggest, the AJAX technology is not limited to XML data and can be used with more compact and web friendly formats such as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). Furthermore, slick and responsive user experience and the existence of AJAX within an architecture is rarely a matter of coincidence owing to its asynchronous capability and the need for much fewer page refreshes. So, a flexible, extensible web architecture coupled with rich user experience guaranteed for minimal effort.

The exploitation of CRM Enterprise Services and contemporary web technologies enabled us to demonstrate tangible business benefit to the customer. We were able to re-use key components of the customer’s existing solution helping to realise a greater return on their original investment. All of the existing corporate branding was retained along with the look and feel that web site users were already familiar with. The high levels of re-use and ESOA exploitation meant that we could demonstrate reduced time to deployment compared with other, more heavy weight approaches. The use of ESOA in this instance realised a high level of architectural flexibility that could be leveraged in the future, leaving the door open for the out-of-the-box capability offered by CRM (i.e. the web UI) as the customer’s needs evolve.