SAP XI and EDI standards; How long it should take for an EAI user to learn SAP XI

SAP XI and EDI standards; How long it should take for an EAI user to learn SAP XI

I have two years experience in EAI and I worked on Mercator. I don't know much about SAP XI, so my questions are:

1. Does SAP XI still use EDI standards (X12, EDIFACT) or is it more concentrated on using IDocs and other newly developed standards?

2. How much time will it take to learn SAP XI for the person who has good experience in EAI?

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Here are your answers:

1. SAP is a pure XML processing engine. All data is exchanged as XML documents and the mapping is then done in XI. For EDI, just as well as for IDocs, XI has adapters and converters ready. For EDI, SAP XI uses heavy third-party EDI mappings to comply with EDI standards like EDIFACT, AS/4000, AS2 and adapters for the transfer methods like oFTP or X.400; e.g., the SAP recommended Seeburger adapters will cater to all common standards and message formats.

2. It should take one or two days to learn SAP XI if you have worked with middleware and Java before.

This was first published in August 2006