“I’m a freshly graduated (read: inexperienced)
developer who’s been tasked with determining the feasibility of
integrating Magento with an SAP-based backend. No developer at our
company has any experience working with either SAP or Magento, so I was
hoping that the Stack Overflow community may be able to point me in the
right direction with my research. We’re a small company (four full-time
developers) and the timeline on this project would be tight, so I’m
trying to gather as much information as possible.”

Recognize any warning flags here?

HELLO!  ARE YOU KIDDING ME!

Who do these guys think they are to take on this project?  What’s worse, who is the i**t that hired them?

The sad part about this.  Is that this goes on everyday.  Go over to the SAP Developer Network and check out the conversations over there.  They aren’t much different than this one.

Our newbie developer goes on to express some of the integration requirements:

“The client has a tiered pricing structure, tax calculation logic,
promotional deals, and automatic freight determination all implemented
in an SAP ECC 6.0 system. They would like to migrate all their online
stores over to Magento while continuing to utilize all existing
functionality in SAP. The idea is to accomplish this by overriding
certain modules in Magento to place remote calls to SAP BAPIs.”

OK.  I must admit it.  At least this kid has the right architectural approach in mind.  He would be dead in the water if he tried to duplicate all of that SAP complexity in Magento.

Two points for you kid.

“I’ve investigated SAPRFC, which looks promising but relatively stale in
terms of update frequency. Do any developers have experience using
SAPRFC with SAP ECC 6.0 (with or without Magento integration)? If so,
what were your experiences, and what were the biggest risk factors
involved?”

Well kid, we’ve got over 13 years experience doing what you are about to fail doing.  My suggestion is that you keep two windows open on your PC.  One to read the Magento and SAP manuals and the other to update your resume.

Or…give us a call :-)

Unbelievable!

Sam

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