GWPAM renamed into SAP Gateway for Microsoft, short GWM

‘SAP NetWeaver Gateway Productivity Accelerator voor Microsoft’, that is a mouthful. This long name arose in several variations of how the product is actually being called in the market and press, resulting in confusion and making it difficult to find product information. SAP product management has acknowledged this drawback effect, and they now have a more catchy product name assigned: SAP Gateway for Microsoft, abbreviated as GWM.

Other GWM news besides this name change is the availability of GWM Service Pack 02. Key parts of SP2 are alignment with Visual Studio 2012 [modern UI] look and feel, support for Microsoft Office 2013, support of SAP Fiori services consumption, and a project template for building your own Excel Add-In. Earlier versions of GWM already include the capability to link an Excel sheet to a Gateway REST/OData service for (mass) data management. This feature is aimed for business people who arrange their own (master)data management via Excel. The new Excel Add-in template is designed specifically for the developer, to build your own innovative solutions with Excel UI platform.

See also: SAP CodeTalk: GWPAM Update / Interview with Holger Bruchelt

Corrupt SharePoint account breaks Duet Enterprise workflow publishing

One of our Duet Enterprise customers where I had a.o. configured the workflow capability, requested my support as workflow tasks where no longer published from SAP workflow backend into SharePoint. I performed cause analysis in the combined SAP + SharePoint landscape, starting with inspecting the logs – SAP backend, SAP Gateway and SharePoint systems. The SAP Gateway log contained a recurring error log “logical port not found for routing url”.

I checked in SIMGH on the Gateway system, and found a valid routing url that referred to ‘LOGICALPORTFORWORKFLOW’; and in SOAMANAGER an active logical port with this name. But when I tried to ping the /IWTNG/CO_TASKFLOW_WEB_SERVICE consumer proxy, http error 405 was returned. The actual cause of the malfunctioning Workflow publishing from Gateway into SharePoint was the SharePoint service account that Gateway uses to authenticate against the Duet Enterprise webservice '/_vti_bin/OBAWorkflowService.asmx' on the SharePoint server. It had somehow become corrupted, and lacked the authorization to access the WSDL document of the Duet Enterprise service. After recreating/resetting the new service, account workflow publishing is working fine again.

Note: the logged message ‘No logical port found’ can be misleading; in the ABAP code it is the generic catch of whatever problem is encountered upon trying to propagate SAP task notifications from SAP Gateway to SharePoint.