In my previous blog, we have seen crucial points you should factor before going for upgrade/migration of your existing SAP Solution Manager 7.1. Now let us go through some of the Functional aspects you must consider before hitting that upgrade button.
There is a total overhaul to the concept of Solution, Projects & Landscapes in 7.2 in terms of System, Process & Version. Gone are the days, where you end up creating blank solutions just to activate EWA for some system. SAP suggests and tried to formulate a concept where 1 Customer = 1 Solution in 7.2.
Putting the ‘Solution’ in Solution Manager
In 7.2, the Solution will be the sum of a company’s systems and processes. In 7.1, you have bunch of Logical Components inside a Solution; in 7.2 the Logical Component concept has been completely revamped. It will be now easier to handle due to the removal of the product assignment for a Logical Component.
Consider a situation, you have ERP System in your IT landscape with DEV, QAS & PRD instances in BAU stream & DEV, QAS instances in Project stream. Then in 7.2, track of 3 ERP System from BAU would form one Logical Component called Production and remaining 2 ERP instances of Project track would form 'Development' logical component. The collection of Production + Development logical components would now be called a ‘Logical Component Group’ titled 'ERP'.
This is a significant shift from 7.1 where technically, collection of Logical Components is called a Solution. In 7.2 technically Solution will be collection of all the ‘Logical Component Groups’ of your organization with each Logical Component Group having its own logical components.
That explains the ‘System’ part in the statement “The Solution will be the sum of a company’ssystems and processes.” How about the ‘Processes’ part of the above statement? In 7.2, all your Business Process Documentation is done inside a ‘Solution’. So, no more SOLAR01 or SOLAR02 projects as container for your Business Process Hierarchy. Hence no more Check Out/In procedure between Project & Solution for maintaining Business Process Documentation.
Solution alone would act as a container for versions of solution documentation, one of which will be the production version. The Production Branch represents the productive version of the entire solution documentation. The Maintenance Branch represents the editable version of the productive solution documentation. Hence, every Solution in 7.2 will have a ‘Production’ branch and a ‘Maintenance’ branch.
So how all these going to affect my upgrade to 7.2? Since the entire concept of Solution Documentation is changed in 7.2, to be able to work with existing content in the new environment, the existing documentation content needs to be migrated to new architecture. This process is called “content activation”. This activity ensures all your business process documentations are retained and are compatible with the newer layout of 7.2.
After the successful upgrade and content activation procedure, the existing Business Process Documentation would be transferred to new Solution structure and will look like below
This content activation is a one time activity and cannot be reversed. The key take away for the customer is ‘Plan Ahead and Plan Carefully’ so as to limit the content during the upgrade and reduce the effort required by choosing only relevant Projects and Business Process Documentation for activation.