Patent 7865606 was granted and assigned to SAP on January, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A framework for communicating between central message exchange server and one or more heterogeneous external data sources includes an adapter engine. The adapter engine includes an instantiation of one or more adapters. Each adapter is configured to connect, via messaging, an external data source operating using a native message format and the central message exchange server using an extensible markup language (XML) messaging format.