SRM 7 and Ariba Catalog Connectivity

[michael_wood2]

Hello,

My company is currently in the later stages of upgrade to SRM 7. We use Ariba as our catalog host. During our upgrade we are experiencing a multitude of catalog connectivity issues. We have made zero changes to the OCI configuration in our upgraded enviroment versus upgrade enviroments. We have made no group policy changes or global IE setting changes.

Has anyone experienced connectivity problems with SRM 7 and the Ariba catalog? I would greatly appreciate any experience you could share since we are struggling with determining root cause of issues.

Regards,

Michael Wood

Walt Disney Co.

[michael_wood2]

Unfortunately Ariba will not support a change. We have been told that their scripts consider iframes as a hack attempt which forces the cookies to be handled as a third party.

Our internal IT group which controls IE policy will not allow us to change the cookie handling settings to accept thrid party cookies or to add Ariba as a trusted site. Our connection to the Ariba catalog works just fine in our current production instance of SRM 3 with our default IE settings. The only difference seems to be the introduction of iframes in SRM 7.

We thought we were able to find a solution to this issue by displaying the Ariba catalog landing page within the Portal content area, however this caused adverse effects in other shopping cart functions. We had to revert this change back to original so that catalog landing page appears in seperate browser window.

We have been told by Ariba that SAP provided a solution to this same issue to Thomson Reuters but have been unable to verify this. We have had a high OSS message open for two weeks attempting to contact the SAP developer whose name we were given by Ariba.

We gather that we need to display the catalog landing page in a seperate browser window without iframes but we can not figure out how to accomplish this.

Any suggestions you may have would be greatly appreciated.

[jason_boggans]

Hi Michael,

I can find no evidence of any message generated by Thomson Reuters, but there are other similar messages, in all cases, the issue is resolved by:

Check iv_shop view and observe;

The Ariba catalog is overriding the

portal iframe poperties, and taking over. For your issue can you try

these:

- Open a portal window with scrollbars.

- Open a complete new external window with a catalog as content.

The associated iview is iv_shop view and for further information on the portal content issue check the also referenced thread [here|/thread/1082614 [original link is broken];

Regards,

Jason

[Former Member]

Dear Michael

Jason provided you the solution above. Did the solution work in your company? Or have you solved the problem in another way?

I ask this because we now face exactly the same problem as you did 2 years ago.

Kind regards

Daniel

[michael_wood2]

Hi Daniel,

Ariba not SAP provided with a solution to this issue.  Can you please send me an email at michael.wood@disney.com and I will provide you with the main Ariba contact that assisted us in resolving this issue. I do not want to post his contact details to this thread.

Regards,

Michael

[jason_boggans]

Dear Michael,

I know this issue has been around a while so it is probably no longer valid. But if it is:

Could you please expand on what the issue is with your connectivity to the Ariba catalog? i.e. are you able to punch out to the catalog but not retrieve any data to SRM Shopping Cart? Are you unable to access the catalog at all, if so, what happens when clicking the catalog link, nothing, page is launched but some error occurs?? Please let us know as much as possible about the detail of the problem.

Regards,

Jason

[michael_wood2]

Hi Jason,

Thank you for your reply.

The issue I describe still persists. Our users are unable to connect to the Ariba catalog.

In investigation we have found that cookie handling is the issue.

Due to prescence of iframe, Ariba code changes cookie from 1st to 3rd party. Since our default IE settings will not accept 3rd party cookies, the connection is never made....it is just an endless loop.

[jason_boggans]

Hi Michael,

Seems like the 3rd party cookie acceptance may have to change in your organization unless Ariba can help some more.

Regards,

jason