Thursday, November 12, 2009

SAP Best Practices for Business Intelligence


SAP is publishing its set of products, method, documentation and preconfiguration, to allow customers better and easily evaluate, implement, enhance and use its software. Usually Best Practices (BP) can be used in projects across all project phases. Basic information about BP can be found at address: help.sap.com/bestpractices. Moreover there is BP related to BW as well. You can find them structured under Cross-Industry Packages -> Business Intelligence down to the link provided above. There are two flavors of those BP:

•    SAP Best Practices for Business Intelligence (based on SAP BusinessObjects)
•    SAP Best Practices for Business Warehousing (based on SAP NetWeaver)


- update 18.3.2013 – as links were changed, here’s new ones:

In rest of my today’s post I focus only at BW part of this BP. Current the newest version is 3.70 published on March 2009. Two language versions are available: German apart of English. BP is comprised of four sections:

•    BW specific information – documents and accelerator for BW projects (BW overview, brochures, functions in details, BW projects plans, roles on BW projects, Sizing, Multi-Dimensional Modeling, archiving, authorizations, web reports enabling, translating BW objects, reporting user guide, …)

•    Business Blueprint – so called Solution Scope document provides overview of scenario-based business processes covered by BP.

•    Preconfigured Scenarios – for several areas like: Financials (Financial Accounting Analysis, Controlling Analysis, CO-PA Analysis, Cost Center Planning, Reporting Financials), CRM (Sales Analysis, Cross-Functional Analysis: Financial and Sales Data, Booking Billing Backlog Analysis, Sales Planning, Scheduling Agreements Analysis, CRM Analytics), SCM (Purchasing Analysis, Manufacturing Analysis, Inventory Analysis, Demand Planning Analysis, Resource and Operation Data Analysis), PLM (Project System - Controlling and Dates), Human Capital Management (Cross-Application Time Sheet, Time Management - Time and Labor, Personnel Development – Qualifications, Travel Management - Travel Expenses, …).

•    Demo & Evaluation - SAP Tutor Player files with some of above mentioned scenarios.

•    BW Accelerator – technical information plus building blocks about BW Accelerator Index and Server.


 
Usually BP comes with two DVDs: documentation and configuration. BW BP are shipped with documentation DVD; but no configuration DVD.

Monday, November 9, 2009

SAP Productivity Pak 4.0 (SPP 4.0)

The newest version of SAP Productivity Pak is released. The 4.0 version ahs following improvements:

  •   HP Quality Center Integration - Option to produce a manual test script for HP Quality Center 9.2 via the HP Quality Center Microsoft Excel Add-in  
  •   Enhanced Document Editing - Allow authors to produce high-quality procedure documents from SAP Productivity Pak by resizing and cropping screens, and by annotating screen images with callouts.
  •   Enhanced Course Experience - Allow authors to rapidly create rich eLearning courses with branching.
  •   User Management - Enhance the way SAP Productivity Pak adds and maintains users en masse.
  •   Easier Content Translation - Import/export SAP Productivity Pak course, screen titles, and template content to XLFF for translation
 
Notice that SAP is using a name of SPP for RWD software suite. For overview of RWD see here.

SAP Download Manager – how to get and install it

Last update 02-Oct-2020

Over the years below, links became obsolete. The SAP Download Manager can be found on new support.sap.com site under SAP Support Portal Home -> My Support -> Software Downloads -> Download Manager or it is possible to use direct link.

SAP Software packages are possible to be downloaded using tool Download Manager. SAP has changed the rules as of 2nd of April 2007. As of this data it is not possible to download its software directly via HTTP/FTP protocol from OSS. This is thick client tool running on MS Windows and some of UNIX/Linux operational systems. SAP claims that using Download Manager, the download process is more stable; download can be restarted in case of abortion; etc. Usage of SAP Download Manager applies to all SAP applications regardless of whether or not they are using the SAP Solution Manager.

Sometimes SAP OSS notes refer to this tool as Download Basket. Application itself is written in Java. Before you install it you need to prepare your computer to run Java applications via JAVA runtime environment. Following JAVA RE are supported: Java 2 Runtime Environment version 1.4.x and up (e.g. SUN's Java 2 Runtime Environment version 1.4), Java 2 Runtime Environment version 1.2 or Sun's Java 2 Runtime Environment version 1.3. SAP recommends to use Sun's Java 2 Runtime Environment version 1.4. Afterwards download tool via quick link /swdc SAP Software Distribution Center, Download.

After installation you have to enter your OSS credentials to enable the tool read you download basket with software packages that you market for download via browsing on OSS.

Links to SAP Shops

As already mentioned e.g. miniSAP can be ordered via SAP Shops. At article referred to miniSAP I provided links to different SAP shops with physical path at ITS servers. Since there is a load balancing in place and URL might therefore differ below find official link OSS quick links:

http://www.sap.com/company/shop

EMEA SAP Merchandise Shop   https://emea.ext.sapmerchandise.com

 

In additions there is an SDN’s shop as well. Located under SDN subpage and dedicate especially to SDN’s premium resources like: Virtual TechEd packages, SAP NW Development Packs, Learning on Demand etc. Moved to SAP Community Fan Shop.

Should not I mention SAP Press web bookstore with all the books published by SAP Press which is joint project of SAP with Galileo Press. They publishing SAP related book in German and in English language as well. Kindly note that English books should be ordered via sap-press.com while for German ones galileo-sap.de shall be used.

Last update: 05-SEP-2022