XMII and Barcoding Equipment

Question

I am an xMII novice and we have started to architect a manufacturing solution that will utilize xMII's capabilities integrated with a back end SAP R/3 (v. 4.6C) instance.  I have a few questions that I would like to pose to the group to assist us on our way.
1.  I would think that xMII should have no issues receiving information from barcode scanning devices (e.g. for shop floor confirmations), but have not heard of anyone using such devices directly interfaced with xMII.  Could someone confirm (hopefully from experience)?  Are there specific vendors who's devices are more readily interfaced with xMII than others?
2.  Provided that it is feasible to interface barcode scanning devices directly with xMII, what is the better mechanism for shop floor confirmation:
Scanner --> xMII --> R/3?
Scanner --> R/3 --> xMII?
Other?
I would think that either mechanism is sound, however I wanted to solicit some opinions to find out if there is a better way.
3.  Has anyone interfaced xMII with barcode printing devices, so that activities within xMII could generate barcoded labels?  Or is this process better facilitated out of R/3?  For example, production confirmation generating a barcoded label for the produced goods.
Thanks.
Dave

Answer 1

Hi David - Great set of questions.
xMII and Barcoding work well together, probably to some extent because there isn't a direct connection between them.  xMII runs in a web browser.  The scanning device is typically responsible for scanning the barcode and transforming the image into text.  It is also, usually, responsible for sending that text back to the computer it is connected to.  The computer then simply takes the passed text and inserts it wherever the cursor is.  So the if xMII is the active window and the cursor is in a position where you want the translated barcode to show up, it will.  If it doesn't the problem is either with the device or the computer.  On some models of scanners, you can even program it to simulate a keystroke before or after each scan.  So, for instance if you have a web page with one text field for the barcode and a submit button, you can have the scanner enter the text in the field AND hit the submit button in one scan.
For your #2 question, both scenarios would work.  If you are using a barcode device with a GUI on it like Windows CE or palm, you'll probably be interfacing between the barcode and R/3 with xMII so in that instance, send the barcode to an xMII page that does something in R/3.
Printing is a little tricky.  Because xMII lives in a web browser on the client, you'll have to rely on the browser's printing capabilities.  However, this is another method to printing barcodes.  There are barcode printing packages available; I'm mostly familiar with Seagull's BarTender software.  What you can do with this is use xMII to send a flat file containing the barcode label information (material, qty, etc) along with a printer name and user,etc to a windows directory that BarTender is "listening" to.  Once BarTender sees the file, it will parse it and print the label with the information in the file to the printer in the file.  It works really well.