More text.

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.

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.

I had some great classes at TechEd this year. Highlights were:

• The CTS+ course taught by Karin Sudrow and Patrick Schmidt. The presentation materials were clear, and the exercises were extremely well thought-out and WORKED. (Those of you who have attended TechEd know that exercises do not always work in a high-volume demo environment.) Rave reviews and kudos to Karin and Patrick on this one.
• Marc Thier provided some interesting information about the new release of Solution Manager. SAP has decided to cancel the Enhancement Package 2 for Solution Manager, and instead re-architect the system based on CRM 7.0. (The current release is based on CRM 5.x.) I tweeted the most significant information coming out of Marc’s presentation on Tuesday, October 13 from @lbsanders.
• Janko Budzisch presented a course on the new technical monitoring and alerting infrastructure to be available with Solution Manager 7.1 at the end of next year. This will allow all monitoring and alerting for ABAP AND Java systems to be available in one place, a very nice development for system administrators.

John Krakowski and Marcel van den Top at the Schloßplatz in Höchst

It seemed like the audience was made up principally of consultants; however, there were some interesting customers as well.  People had a complete range of Solution Manager backgrounds, from one attendee with no experience at all to experienced contractors looking for detailed technical hacks.  I wish we could be all things to all people, but we have to shoot somewhere in the middle with these things.  Sigh….  But we came away feeling great about the content we delivered.  We were able to discuss and demo new Solution Manager content such as the Business Process Change Analyzer, the Custom Development Management Cockpit (Marcel did a great job with that one), and things you can now do with the workcenters.

I still experience some frustration with the inconsistent “look and feel” as you pass from the workcenters to the SAP GUI and back, and I hope that Solution Manager customers participate in their local user group Influence Councils to provide this feedback to SAP, since I know I’m not the only one who feels that way.  (In addition, my laptop has issues with going from workcenters to the SAP GUI – specifically, when I try to access a GUI window from the workcenter, the GUI window flashes, bleeps at me, and immediately closes.  I’m running Windows XP via VMWare Fusion on a MacBook Pro, and I think I have all GUI and browser settings correct, but if anyone has any thoughts, please let me know.)

Next stop:  Philadelphia, my home city, July 15-17.  Please join us!

After the conference was over, Marcel and I shared a cab to the airport.  He was to return to his customer in Paris, and I picked up a rental car at Hertz to drive to Switzerland.  I am spending two days in “retreat” on the Swiss Riviera, in Montreux.  The weather is spectacular – I could not have asked for better.  I arrived at 5:30 Wednesday afternoon.  The view from my hotel room is amazing:

(The hotel room itself leaves a bit to be desired for a “four-star” hotel, but they have free internet and movies – and did I mention the view?)

Montreux is in the northeast corner of Lake Geneva (Lac Léman here in Europe).  The sun is warm, the air is cool, and I am writing this from a bench along a walkway on the lakeshore.  It is a bit hazier today than when I took the picture yesterday, but since I’ve experienced many cold and rainy Junes in Europe, I cannot complain!

Tomorrow I will drive through the Swiss and French Alps to visit old friends in the Ardèche region of France.  I have not seen them in thirteen years, and I am looking forward to spending the next few days meeting children who were born since my last visit, drinking excellent cheap co-op Gamay, eating goat cheese, and probably thinking little about Solution Manager.

Lots of work planned for when I get back to the States, though, so stay tuned for updates.  And as always, please leave feedback under the Comments link.  A plus tard!

Some of the demos are pretty straightforward. However, the one on the Test Workbench functionality seemed to take forever! In my recorded demo, I try to show the basic functionality of Test Workbench – the parts that have been around for years – along with the new functionality available in the Solution Manager, enterprise edition, particularly as of SP18 (aka Enhancement Package 1). Highlights:

• Resequencing test cases within a test package
• Assigning individual test cases in a package to individual testers
• Applying dependencies to test case execution
• Workflow available in testing to notify downstream testers that they have test cases to execute

These are fabulous adds, which you realize if you have ever struggled with managing testing in a real-world environment with Solution Manager. They were not completely impossible before, but required many procedures, workarounds, and the flexibility of a Chinese acrobat to pull off adequately.

I still have a couple more demos to record this week before I can call myself ready for the conference. I will consider posting one or two of the demos here, so if you are interested in seeing these, please let me know what areas of Solution Manager are important to you by leaving a comment (link is next to the title of this entry). I recorded all my demos in SAP Tutor (licenses for the player are free with your SAP license), so make sure you install the player before trying to view any demos I post.

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!