SharePoint - Inbound Storage
Link Enterprise has a process to query the SharePoint Online system looking for documents to link to SAP. These are called ‘inbound rules’ and are only available with ECM Server.
ECM Server is a communication specification based on SAP’s RFC socket protocol called JCo (Java Connector). The ECM server unlocks remote function calls and Link Enterprise provides an API within SAP to leverage this technology, allowing enhanced functionality over standard Content Server.
Documents to link are determined by a metadata flag that is set to True and some optional filters to help specify a sub-set of documents to process. In addition to this metadata flag, additional business information in metadata is required to identify the object in SAP to link to. This additional metadata is based on the business process/SAP Object to be identified.
The following is a high level overview of the inbound process:
- The documents and any configured metadata (columns) are returned
- Link Enterprise calls an SAP RFC and sends the list of documents and their metadata
- SAP finds the corresponding object for each document and creates an archive link entry for it
- SAP returns a success and additionally, any configured metadata to update SharePoint with
- Link Enterprise updates the documents in SharePoint with SAP required metadata along with any configured custom metadata
Custom metadata can be set in SharePoint as columns in content types. Custom metadata is any values from SAP beyond those required by Link Enterprise and SAP for linking.
During the inbound linking process, once the SAP Object is found and the document linked, custom metadata can be pushed back to SharePoint columns on the document.
Custom metadata is most valuable when there is the desire to:
- Allow end-users to access SAP-linked documents directly in the SharePoint interface, especially through search
- Enables Microsoft Search
- Enables access to Search Refiners in SharePoint
- Trigger a Power Automate workflow
- Allow other Business Systems to access/link to documents stored by SAP (i.e. SalesForce)
- Link to an existing SAP object
- Trigger an SAP workflow with container values
- Trigger custom ABAP code
Pros:
- Can enable metadata based searching and search result filtering for users accessing content within SharePoint
- Enables the ability to do inbound rules when using ECM connectivity
Cons:
- Requires additional transaction time and SharePoint Graph API calls.
- Please see the section ‘Application Throttling’ in the following Microsoft information page: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/general-development/how-to-avoid-getting-throttled-or-blocked-in-sharepoint-online