3rd Party Output

[Former Member]

Hi All,

Has anyone used any 3rd party output tools ?

The company I'm working for are considering implementing APS AutoForms to handle all their documents.

As far as I understand, to get the ouput to work on a 4.6c system you have to maintain the ABAP, maintain the SAPScript (to produce an RDI Stream) and maintain the 3rd party forms.

Can anyone tell me if this is true ?

Doesn't this increase the development effort when changing form layouts and if so, do the benefits of the 3rd party tool outweigh the development effort.

Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks

James

[Former Member]

Hi All,

Has anyone used any 3rd party output tools ?

The company I'm working for are considering implementing APS AutoForms to handle all their documents.

As far as I understand, to get the ouput to work on a 4.6c system you have to maintain the ABAP, maintain the SAPScript (to produce an RDI Stream) and maintain the 3rd party forms.

Can anyone tell me if this is true ?

Doesn't this increase the development effort when changing form layouts and if so, do the benefits of the 3rd party tool outweigh the development effort.

Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks

James

[thomas_jung]

Are you planning an upgrade to NetWeaver 04 any time soon? If so you probably want to have a look at the new Interactive Forms tool (with Adobe Technology). It is a new alternative to Sapscript and Smartforms that is integrated into the SAP environment. You will find lots of documentation on the tool in SDN.

[Former Member]

Thanks for the reply.

They're not looking to upgrade anywhere in the near future which is why they are looking at 3rp party tools.

[Former Member]

James,

We are currently in the process of converting all our Jetform forms to Smartforms. We were on 3.1H when we decided to go with JetForm product, currently owned by Adobe. This product came in real handy back then especially with all the customizing we had to do on the forms. One big drawback was the inability to have print preview functionality. You are right about the maintenance involved using a 3rd party tool. Everytime you make a change, you have to change both the script and the 3rd party form.

After upgrading to 4.6C, we realized that smartforms was the way to go, especially with the ease it provides in creating the forms. We are still facing a few issues though. 3rd party tools give you lot of features when it comes to fonts. We are unable to upload OCR/MICR fonts to smartforms whereas the other products let you upload softfonts into the form and use them as needed. AP check printing was another issue where we had to upload a custom font into the form which basically triggers the signature on the card, residing on the printer. Hopefully someone can shed some light on this.

It all boils down to, how creative your forms are, what customizing you need to do and so on. I am not against 3rd party tools but if everything can be done using sapscript or smartforms then that would be the way to go.

Hope that helps.

[Former Member]

Thanks very much, really helps.

[Former Member]

We have always used SAPSCRIPT forms for all of our FORMS in SAP. I am currently working on replacing how we add the signatures and print the MICR line on our checks. We currently have an external SIMM/DIMM card that is security password protected that contains the Signatures and the MICR FONT. We would physically pull that card from the printers on weekends and reinstall it at the start of the week. The card is in an external device attached to the printer. We are going away from that to including the Signatures in SAP as a Graphic and putting an Authorization check around them so that only people who are authorized will produce the signatures. SAP has a Note about this. it is 154823.

For the MICR line we have purchased a FONT card for our printer that will reside permeably in the printer like a memory card. We then added code into the SAPSCRIPT forms to print-control and print the output in the MICR FONT.

It took us a while to figure this all out put it is possible.