In an SAP environment, how does one distribute master data, transaction data accross different systems. How can the benefits of decentralized system processing be availed in an SAP environment? The answer is Application Link Enabling ALE. ALE is a new concept in SAP and helps in distributing business processes. The ALE concept related to an enterprise structure with areas that have central tasks and areas with tasks which are decentralized. ALE distributes processes at the transaction level.

With ALE Application Link Enabling, distributed processing of SAP applications is possible. ALE is based on business controlled messaging with data storage on loosely coupled systems. To explain in simple terms, ALE integrates applications through a message exchange rather than a central database. This message data exchange happens through IDOC's Intermediate Documents used in Electronic Data Interchange EDI.

One thing to keep in mind is that EDI supports information exchange between SAP R/3 in different enterprises, whereas ALE supports data exchange within one enterprise.

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Remote Function Calls , BAPI , ABAP Workbench , ABAP Function Builder , ABAP Dictionary , ABAP Workbench Architecture