ChaRM Go-Live Part 2

Whew, we made it! The issue we ran around for hours on turned out to be a simple STMS setup problem. When we built our test landscape, we followed SAP’s documentation step by step. However, when we hooked our production Solution Manager up to the HCM landscape, we took it for granted that STMS had been set up the way ChaRM needed it to be.

Nope.

After a couple of hours of investigation (after our 8+ hours looking at it), SAP found that the clients were not identified in the transport routes. Once we blew away the existing STMS setup on our HCM domain controller and defined the transport routes using the Extended Transport Control button, everything worked like a charm. Pun intended, heh.

The only other issues we had to address were related to the automated e-mail notification. We had three different start conditions for this:

• Change Request Rejected (triggers e-mail to Developer)
• Urgent Correction To Be Tested (triggers e-mail to Tester)
• Normal Correction To Be Tested (triggers e-mail to Tester)

One of these wouldn’t kick off because the User Status operator was set to “=” instead of “[*]“. By the way, SAP says “=” will work but it does not. Use “[*]” (contains string) instead.

And then we were missing the configuration of SAPConnect in SCOT for some reason – had to wake up one of the Basis guys to do this. He had done it in our test system, so I’m not sure why he didn’t do in Production as well.

But now things are up and running, and we have left the site with daylight to spare for the past two days.

Although tonight I will stick around a bit longer – the customer wants to understand how to use ChaRM in implementation projects tomorrow. I can’t say I recommend it, but I’m going to put together some information so they can make an educated decision.

ChaRM Go-Live: Part 1

Today we’re going live with ChaRM on the HCM landscape at my customer in western Pennsylvania. We took off the holiday weekend, and started first thing in the morning – accompanied by my own homemade chocolate chip cookies and brownies (one of the perks of commuting by car to work).

The first issue we found is that the Change Administrator didn’t have access to create the CTS project in the development system. An issue that was easy enough to correct, but a Security consultant had activated CUA and then left. And then we couldn’t access CUA. Sigh. With a temporary rejiggering (shhhh, don’t tell anyone), we got that fixed.

Then we find out the QA system is down, so we’re getting all sorts of errors on the system landscape. Now that it’s back up, we had to regenerate the RFCs to it. But our maintenance project needed to be recreated.

Now it is 1:00 in the afternoon, and we are still not live. ChaRM is not recognizing our QA system as a target system for some reason. We have checked the setup of our maintenance project, STMS, the logical components, everything we can think of, but we finally had to submit it to SAP with a Very High priority. (And let the customer employee in Australia go to bed.) I’m hoping that this is just something small and trivial we missed and SAP will be able to point it out in 5 minutes. Very frustrating.