FIM 2010 with SAP

I was at a customer that requested a FIM installation that would get data from SAP HR 6.0.

So, after the installations where completed, the first thing I tried was actually connecting to SAP.

To do this, you need the SAP .NET Connector 2.0 from SAP website (http://service.sap.com/connectors) and you need some files from the msi package. More on this here.

Now, what the article does not say is that you additionally need to configure how FIM will communicate with SAP.

If you get an error when trying to connect through the ERP MA Configuration Tool stating that it cannot communicate with SAP, you need to configure the services.

The way to do this is to add in the services file (under Windows\System32\drivers\etc) the following lines:

sapdp##  32##/tcp # SAP Dispatcher.       
sapgw##  33##/tcp # SAP Gateway.          
sapsp##  34##/tcp # 
sapms##  36##/tcp # SAP Message Server.   
sapdp##s 47##/tcp # SAP Secure Dispatcher 
sapgw##s 48##/tcp # SAP Secure Gateway 

where the ## is the system number your client has given their SAP system.

(Find the documentation for the above here). 

There are a couple of things you should try if even this fails:

• Run the ERP MA Configuration tool as Administrator.

• Instead of providing the name of the server in ASHOST, type in the IP.
  (Even though I added the entry in the hosts file, I still needed to give the IP.)

Now, I also had an issue when Discovery started. The progress bar would go all the way to the end, and then I would get a message stating:     

The functions or structures in your configuration do not match those in the discovery cache. Saving will produce an unusable ERP MA.

Click ‘Yes’ to rebuild definitions from discovery cache.

Click ‘No’ to cancel Saving.

When I clicked 'Yes' I would get an application exception stating that there was an error retrieving a referenced BAPI function from Discovery. After spending a couple of hours trying to figure it out, I logged out of the machine and went home. The next day, it worked! No idea why, so just try to log out and then back in.

Another issue I faced, once I had the MA set-up in the Sync Service Manager, after trying to do a full import, I kept getting an error stating a "stopped-extension-dll-exception". Looking in the Eventlog, I found out that a FileNotFoundException was thrown and it was looking for the .xml file in the Extenstions directory. So, I needed to set the MA Name to the .xml file exported by the ERP MA Configuration Tool. Once I did that, everything worked like a charm.