Product Description

Application Link Enabling (ALE) is SAP’s proprietary technology that enables data communications between two or more SAP R/3 systems and/or SAP R/3 legacy systems. ALE and EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) technologies are the best fit for this type of communication. With ALE, EDI, & IDoc Technologies for SAP, 2nd Edition, you will acquire powerful skills that are valuable to your employers, clients, or management. A natural follow-up to the original version, ALE, EDI, & IDoc Technologies for SAP (0761519033), this book covers the technical changes of the 4.6 version of SAP R/3. The topics covered in this book will be instrumental to functional and technical staff who are on new SAP implementations, are adding new EDI messages or interfaces to existing implementations, or who are upgrading from version 3.x to 4.x. It is aimed at experienced SAP professionals who are either new to ALE/EDI/IDoc technology or who need a reference for a specific procedure or task. ItemID: 0761534318

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #821279 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-01
• Released on: 2001-07-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 764 pages

About the Author
Arvind Nagpal is the Director of eBusines Services at Rapidigm. He has implemented ALE and EDI for several Fortune 500 companies. He is also a highly respected instructor for SAP cross-application technologies. His in-depth knowledge has aided many global companies in successfully implementing complex distributed SAP systems.

John Pitlak has been involved with EDI development and implementation for ten years. As a consultant to the EPA he participated in some of the early federal government EDI initiatives. John has served as a SAP R/3 consultant and has assisted numerous Fortune 500 clients in implementing EDI, ALE, and IDoc technologies.

Customer Reviews

I've read both the Arvind Nagpal and Rajeev Kasturi books
I've read both the Arvind Nagpal and Rajeev Kasturi books, and I conclude that the Nagpal book is much better for me, a person who has been doing SAP EDI for several years.

I do not know either of these authors. I do not have anything to do with the publishers. I bet this is more than many of the reviewers here can say!

I know that sheer bulk is not what we are buying here, but let's do some numbers to examine one aspect of the comparison. The Kasturi book starts with 388 pages. Well over 100 pages in the back are tables out of SAP that we can print any time we want (or save a tree and just pull up a screen). Since I've worked with SAP EDI for a few years, I didn't expect a lot of things to be new to me in the first 3 or 4 chapters, but man, there was nothing even moderatly interesting to me in the early part of the book. That left about 150 pages in the middle that, I'll admit, I only skimmed. But the per-page cost of those few possibly valuable pages is quite high! There was a strong ALE / example flavor to the book. As if someone wrote about a few of their favorite implementations.

Now, the Nagpal book starts with quite a few more pages (786). There is NOT a huge section of this book dedicated to stuff I could print out of or look up in SAP. Yes, some of this stuff is 'light' too. And again, I'll admit to skimming a lot of it that I didn't have a pressing need to know right now. And yes, there are quite a few print-screens in the book (but I LIKE print-screens). The bottom line is that I, a person who's been using SAP-EDI quite a while, found the Nagpal title MORE INTERESTING, INFORMATIVE, and found it had MORE INFORMATION than the Kasturi book.

--Dale--

A great book, well organized and full of useful information!
Thank you for an excellent book! I think it would be safe to say that this book has saved my company more than $30K in consulting costs already. I expect the savings to increase because his recommendations will allow us to implement a system with the proper controls in place to avoid costly errors. I have found Mr. Nagpal's book an invaluable reference to assist me in connecting our SAP 4.0B system to our major Canadian retailer customers.

I think SAP or the EAI vendors should give this book out with every licence! It's like a patient (and affordable!) SAP EDI consultant walking you through every step of the way.

I own both books and this one is by far the most useful. We did a customer master file load using ALE techniques and some program names were covered in the other book but Mr. Nagpal's book is the one I refer to daily.

If you have to do EDI with SAP then don't hesitate to buy this book.

Only 95% complete
We're using version 3.1H (pretty old) and the samples in this book were lacking key information. It's better than nothing (much better) but getting the examples to work was very challanging. It also lacks some key information such as how to map EDI loops into IDOC structure definitions. It's worth the money, but only because there's no competition.