You Can Do It (Even in ECC)

For the last few years, the vibe in the less cutting-edgy part of SAP world has been an odd mix of FOMO and despair. You don’t have access to the latest “Cloud with 25% more AI” products, so might as well crawl under the blankets and take a nap till 2027.

Well, time to wake the f*k up. Do you know that your rusty but trusty ECC system can serve as a back-end to many exciting applications? How? Simple: OData services.

SAP Gateway (aka the best thing since sliced bread in SAP) was first introduced with SAP NetWeaver 7.02 in 2011. Yes, 2011, you read that right. Unless your ECC system is older than that (condolences), start reading the older blog posts about SEGW transaction, like this one from Andre Fischer. And when you create your first OData service, what can you do with it? Pretty much anything!

Would your customer service kill for a simple website for customers or vendors to check on their orders and invoices? Take your OData service with information from ECC and slap a front-end of choice on top of it. Assistant bot? You got it. Everyone and their brother (Microsoft, UiPath) offers some bot platform these days. Grab the one you like and connect to your OData service. Boom, magic! And did you know you could use SAP BTP with ECC? Yes.

Sure, OData development is quite different in S/4HANA. But there is no reason to just sit and wait. If anything, learning code-based approach first is beneficial because it helps you understand what exactly happens with each request. And you will appreciate the convenience of CDS views even more. Right now though, just go ahead and do it. Because you can. JP

This story was previously published in the Boring Enterprise Nerdletter #69. Subscribe now to get new stories in your Inbox!