Looking for some general feedback on working with SQL, SSIS and SAP

This is less of a specific question and more of a request for for some advice as to possibilities and directions. Here's the current situation. My company is using SAP for its purchasing, inventory, etc. This system is pretty much opaque to me - it's managed by another group within the company, and changes to it go through a complicated approval process. At the same time, the majority of our users, internal and external, are looking at this same data through a more accesible and more user friendly collection of web applications - done in classic ASP, up through ASP.NET 1.1 and 2 - and stored in an assortment of MS-SQL 2000 databases. Data is exchanged between SQL and SAP via DTS packages, some nightly, some run more frequently.

There's some issues here - data is never quite synchronized between the two sides, sometimes the same data must be updated twice, leading to possible data integrity issues, etc. Given that, we're going to be moving to SQL 2005 within the next year or so. From everything I've understood, within that context, there are vastly better ways of dealing with out situation than the way we're currently doing it.

So what I'm looking for is just a general impression of what can be done, with SSIS and SAP. Any approaches that might prove more fruitful, an y pitfalls to watch out for, that sort of thing.

How are you pulling data from SAP to SQL using DTS?

With SQL 2005, we have a preview version of the SAP .NET Data Provider for use within SSIS. You can check it out http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141761(SQL.90).aspx

SSIS will also be supported by the upcoming Biztalk R2 Adapter pack - which has adapters for SAP, Oracle & Siebel.

Go to https://connect.microsoft.com/ and look for this adapter pack - you can try out Beta2 around end-July.

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Currently we're not exactly pulling data. We're exporting data from SAP to a collection of flat files. Then we have a number of DTS packages that run - most nightly, one every 4 hours - and import the data into our database. Which seems damn clumsy.

Thanks for pointing me towards the .NET Data Provider, which I had a vague notion of, and to the Biztalk beta, which is something I hadn't heard of. I'll have plenty of things to research.