Tools for enabling SAP screens on a BlackBerry

Tools for enabling SAP screens on a BlackBerry

Can you suggest any tools/methodologies that a client of ours can use to enable certain SAP screens on a BlackBerry?

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There are various approaches to enabling SAP on BlackBerry. There are a few vendors in this space (3i, the company I work for, being one of them). There are basically two approaches. There is the web browser approach and there are solutions which require a Java client installed on the device and some sort of Middleware product to communicate with the SAP system. 3i chose against this approach because of the cost and complexity that this introduced to the solution. Ultimately, the simplest approach is to use SAP's Web Application Server to serve up HTML pages.

The 3i solution, Mobile Workplace, does this but it also enables off-line functionality using the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. The Mobile Workplace solution is also very simply to roll out. By using the WAS from SAP's Netweaver stack, it leverages powerful features provided by SAP. Best of all, it does this without introducing any new servers or installing anything on the device itself.

You can read more about 3i's Mobile Workplace at http://www.themobileworkplace.com.

This was first published in May 2008