Mapping ALE functionality to Enterprise Services

Question

Hi SAP Gurus,
I am in an assignment to leverage Enterprise Services in the project and as part of it i need to understand how we can use Enterprise Services for the following requirements which are well supported by ALE/Idoc functionality.
1) Master Data Distribution - We have ALE Change Pointers mechanism to track the changes done to the master data (Customer/Material/Vendor) and we can process the changes and create the idocs for the same by EOD. Changes are tracked based on the field level and interface level(Message Type). How can we leverage this change pointer mechanism in Enterprise Services.
2) Best practice to trigger the Outbound enterprise services from ECC system.
3) There are various tools to monitor IDOCs in ECC, what all are the tolls/transactions for monitoring the Enterprise Service.
4) What is your view on IDOC V/s Enterprise Service
Regards,
Pras

Answer 1

Hi Prasanna,
These are two quite different technologies and framework here that your questions are about. One is SMD (Shared Master Data) tool which involves change pointers & IDocs and the other is an Enterprise Service for example an ABAP Proxy or a Web Service.
1. Why would a customer want to do that especially for standard master data applications like Customer Master, Vendor Master, Material Master etc? I mean I don't understand the benefit of it when all these standard applications already support SMD. If a customer really wants these same functionalities via an Enterprise Service then they basically have to develop more custom applications to support this - for e.g. a Z program which will essentially replace BD21 to process the change pointers (CP) per application i.e. call the associated ABAP Proxy which will then create/do not create IDocs, process the CP by applying business logic, generate XML for PI to distribute further, email/do not email business owner, change the status of the CP depending on the outcome of the processing, exception handling etc. etc. But this whole thing, in my view, is cumbersome and sort of unnecessary as most of these things could be achieved via the SMD tool (except creating the IDoc itself of course!)
The other way, to totally get rid of the CPs and process every change via ES - one would have to enhance all applications in question to call the ES (ABAP Proxy) at the time of master data change! There is no equivalent of BD64 in ES so I don't understand the purpose to be honest.
2. In my view, to trigger it as an Outbound Proxy or Client Proxy via Method call.
3. SXMB_MONI
4. Like I said in the beginning, its like comparing two different technologies - I guess in the end it comes down to the business requirement at hand. Both can be very efficient (or very inefficient if deployed incorrectly).
Cheers,
Sougata.