Workflow integration with external DMS system

Question

Hi,
What integration/control transfer possibilities exist between SAP Workflow and an external document management system (e.g. Hummingbird)? Would some sort of interface be necessary for the integration and what would the level of effort be more or less?
This is quite urgent and I would greatly appreciate your input.
Regards
Liza-Marie

Answer 1

Hi Liza-Marie,
you can work at different levels:
1) Integration of documents use in the SAP workflow can be stored in external DMS and linked to SAP transactions through SAP Archivelink; you'll probably need a Hummingbird interface certified archivelink
2) If you want to integrate your SAP workflow with the workflow of the DMS (if any), you can practice as follows:
a) From you DMS, you can raise events in the SAP system on which your SAP workflow would react (to start or resume) by making use of standard RFCs such as SWE_EVENT_CREATE; eventually you can expose it as web service, which will simplify the call
b) From SAP worfklow, you can send mails, call external system commands (more rarely used) or call web services that would allow you external DMS to be triggered on
Details on all these techniques would be too huge to be described in a post, but this gives you an overview on how SAP Workflow can interact with external solutions.
In summary to your question:
1) Interface required YES - ARCHIVELINK CERTIFIED in case you want to store documents in external DSM that need to be connected to your SAP transactions
2) Level of effort is depending on your scenario
Rgds,
Karim