SharePoint & SAP - getting started

I am beginning work on a contracts management site in SharePoint in the next few months.  Part of the requirements of this site is for contracts to be assigned to particular customers (amongst other things).  It would be very easy for me to implement a simple SharePoint list with a list of customers, but this would be boring, dull and intuitive, as the user would have to add a customer each time.  It would be easy just to grab the customer records from SAP, which we use for SAP-type things.

The team that administrate SAP have been using SAP Business Connector for some years, and (as is the norm, from what I understand) are reluctant to stop using this.  Part of the reason for this is that this team believe they would lose some control over SAP.  However, we have a steadily-growing BizTalk implementation, and to get SAP piped into BizTalk would be a massive selling point not only for future users of SharePoint, but for other applications also.

Here is some quick research that I did on the subject. I imagine there will be more.

Working with SAP Business Connector would seem to require the purchase of additional software such as ERPConnect Services by Theobald Software - http://www.theobald-software.com/en/products/erpconnectservices.htm .  Alternatively, if SAP Business Connector can expose XML, a custom development could be written in .NET, using SharePoint Business Connectivity Services (BCS), but this would require development time.

Working with BizTalk is extremely simple and well-documented - for example, there is a whole series of blog posts on this exact topic here: http://kentweare.blogspot.de/2009/10/sharetalk-integration-sharepointbiztalk.html which was the first site I found when carrying out a search on this.

Essentially, it is possible to communicate with any service or server to any other service or server - everything is possible.  Things just require time and money.  Using BizTalk introduces nothing but benefits, so it's just a case of convincing everyone to accept change.

Expect more posts on this subject as the project continues.  Even with the massive userbase of BizTalk and SharePoint, there does seem to be a bit of a gap when it comes to SAP (with the exception of the above link) and I'm sure I'll be finding things out.