Watch This Space

My company, Enowa, has received a ramp-up copy of Solution Manager 7.1. Over the summer I’ll be blogging along with my colleagues on our experiences with the new product. Right now we’re trying to resolve a bug we uncovered on the SOLMAN_SETUP transaction, but once we’re up and running you will be able to hear about what we think are highlights (and not-so-great things) about 7.1.

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.

A week in the “flyover” states

This week I visited two utilities customers, one in southeastern Nebraska and one in southwestern Montana. It was a beautiful week, and these customers both have excellent working environments and a laid-back attitude – coupled with technical responsibility – that make them a joy to work with.

My first stop was mainly to introduce a technical consultant to the customer team. This consultant will be supporting them remotely as they update their SLD landscape, and then upgrade their Solution Manager environment from a two-tier SP12 landscape to three-tiers at SP19. This customer currently has all their Java stacks feeding the SLD on Solution Manager. This is not recommended because the SLDs need to keep pace with NetWeaver releases, and Solution Manager typically lags behind on the NW components. Therefore we are activating the local SLDs in the Java landscape and setting up a master SLD which will in turn feed Solution Manager. As it turns out, activating the local SLDs is a simple but extremely time-consuming process. After spending part of a morning, lunchtime, and part of an afternoon watching a progress bar, it was decided to continue these activities after the consultants (my colleague and I) left.

The second stop was to help the customer in Montana make a business case for moving their Solution Manager landscape from SP15 to SP19. There are functions in Enhancement Package 1 they would like to leverage; however, with a recent change in management, they now need to present a business case for the upgrade. (Originally billed by SAP as a support pack application, the implementation of EhP1 is now recognized as an upgrade. We can expect the move to EhP2 later this year to be recognized as an upgrade as well.)

I also recommended moving to a three-tier landscape for this customer as well, due to the fact that they use Change Request Management. The amount of configuration required for ChaRM elevates the risk of something going wrong during migration to production, so a QA environment for testing is highly recommended. We also discussed how they will test future ChaRM changes, since they rely on two different areas: software configuration and software logistics. Testing software logistics can be problematic since you do not want to impact the production environment. I will publish an article on our findings in a future update to Solution Manager Expert.

On a more personal note:

One of the highlights of my work as a consultant is to visit places I wouldn’t normally go. I flew into Billings, Montana, late Wednesday night, and followed my GPS to Helena early the next morning. My trusty GPS did not take me over I-90, as most people travel. It took me over state route 3 and US-12, with a dip south to avoid White Sulphur Springs. (I can’t imagine White Sulphur Springs is congested, but I will find out this weekend when I visit my brother there. He moved there last month.)

The drive was absolutely gorgeous. It took me over plateaus, through canyons, and even through two herds of cattle. Mothers and calves stared at me with their big, black eyes, and I laughed the whole way through them at roughly 2 mph.

What a great week!