SAP new logo – 2015 and beyond

Last week during SAP TechEd && d-code event in Las Vegas SAP has started to roll its new logo quietly.  The logo started to be appearing on Oct 21 on SAP home page. Afterwards official SAP twitter account (some of other SAP’s twitter accounts also), linkedin and profile and youtube followed.

The logo it-self is major change comparing to previous one. At first SAP completely abandoned blue as color and shape of the former logo. On color side now it is orange but they called it gold. Personally gold is fine with me. I think blue was also better but as gold implies warmness I think it is good move. On the logo shape I’m not that enthusiastic. For me the shape that was something which made SAP unique. When I look back how SAP logo evolved over the time the shape was there for most of company history. As in the new logo an A letter is shaped into some kind of smiley I believe the smiley can be a kind of differentiator for new logo.

So what message SAP delivers with the new logo? It is all about simplicity as announced on this year SAP’s annual SapphireNow conference. See more on SAP simplicity here:

discover.sap.com/runsimple or sap.com/runsimple

There is one more thing. The new logo is there but there is no any SAP official statement about its lunch. This may seem to be strange. And it was until recently. In discussion thread on SCN finally and SAP employee (Costanza Tedesco - SVP SAP Brand Experience) made statement which seems to be the only one related to the new logo. Basically she shares that currently it was soft launch just in North America and larger lunch will occur in Jan 2015. She also suggests that new gold color was picked because the gold was here for quite a long time – just remember how layout and colors of all SAP presentations...

This is the new SAP Logo 2015 and beyond:

This is its predecessor 2011 – 2014 ????:

- update 23/09/2015 - 
SAP's official logo is not the gold color one. Change of the logo to the gold color in Q4 2014 was a "test phase" and it turned out that SAP decided to keep the blue logo.

How to patch SAP Support Package Manager

There is this well-known error message which make me crazy almost every time I want to patch SAP system. It is about SAP Support Package Manager tools (SAINT or SPAM) which need to be upgraded prior the real upgrade of some component that I wanted to patch originally. The message goes like this for example:

SAPKB74005 requires at least version 0051 of the Support Package Manager

Message no. TN194

OK SAP. What else I can do? Just to patch the SAP Support Package Manager. So how do I do that? First of all the patch needs to be obtained from SMP.  It can be found at support.sap.com/software/patches/support-packages.html Basically it is SAR file. Then login as DDIC user into your 000 client. Run Tcode SPAM. Go via menu Support packages ->Load Packages ->From Front End.

Choose decompress. System will announce that “File 'sapkd74054.sar' successfully transferred, decompressed, and then deleted Message no. TN713. After that go to menu Support packages again and choose Import SPAM/SAINT item. The system will notify you about upcoming import of the patch:

This pop-up needs just to be confirmed. SPAM update icon will turn to red as signaling – ongoing update of the tool. The patch import phase will go through all its stages like main import, execution of reports after put, etc. After same time the patching will be finished with following pop-up:

Restart SPAM and read the current information ('i' button)

Message no. TN189

The message mean nothing else just the Support Package Manager was successfully patched.

Solution Manager or SolMan is important part of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). It supports SAP systems in trough entire lifecycle like: Business Blueprint creation, configuration, template management, test management, production operation/monitoring, Change Control Management, IT Service Management, documentation, SAP Engagement and Service Delivery, upgrade management, custom code management etc.

One important thing is here also which was introduced by SolMam. This affects SAP basis ground work which is patching of the systems – implementing Support Packages (SP) / Support Packages Stacks (SPS). SP/SPS package delivery requires approval as of April 2nd, 2007. There is a precise message like that: [Package of this category delivered after April 2nd, 2007 will require approval]. This practically means that you are not able to download any SP from SMP directly via SAP Download Manager. Simply such downloads are disabled. In the Download Basket of Download Manager there is additional tab called "Approval List". All packages that require approval are initially display here. Only once they are approved the respective package is moved to the Download list tab. After that it can be downloaded.

The only way how to get an approval to download it is via SolMan.

Normally we would do the confirmation of files for download via SolMan’s Maintenance Optimizer. In its Change Management section – in Maintenance Optimizer tool.

However there is also different way of how to achieve that. Alternatively you can run ABAP report /TMWFLOW/RMOBASKETAPPROVAL or function module /TMWFLOW/MO_UI_BASKET_AUTHORIZ to do kind of manual approval. User is used the one which is associated in SolMan with user on SMP. While running one for those two ABAPs you get list of objects in the Download Manager. You just simple click on the object which you wish to approve and that’s it!

More information:

service.sap.com/solman-mopz

List of available SAP IDES systems

Last update: 8.6.2018

I intend to maintain this blog post with most up-to-date information on available versions of SAP IDES system. Following are currently available Cross-Industry IDES Systems:

For general overview of IDES Systems see SAP note:

799639 - IDES - General Information about the usage of IDES systems

IDES ERP (anyDB) releases:

version	availability	SAP note
IDES ERP 6.0 incl. EHP8	appx. end of April 2018	2432361
IDES ERP 6.0 incl. EHP7	05.05.2014	2012989
IDES ERP 6.0 incl. EHP6	05.09.2012	1761605
IDES ERP 6.0 incl. EHP5	17.06.2011	1601314
IDES ERP 6.0 incl. EHP4	25.08.2009	1379040
IDES ERP 2005 ECC 6.0 SR3	25.08.2008	1244548
IDES ERP 2005 ECC 6.0 SR2	29.12.2006	1013391
IDES ERP 2005 ECC 6.0	04.07.2006	956921
IDES mySAP ERP ECC 5.0 SR1	24.2.2005	822208

IDES ERP (HANA DB) releases:

version	availability	SAP note
IDES ERP 6.0 incl. EHP8 on HANA	09.03.2018	2432302
IDES ERP 6.0 incl. EHP7 on HANA	06.04.2017	2171852
IDES S/4 HANA 1610	12.10.2017	2445594

IDES CRM releases:

version	availability	SAP note
IDES CRM 7.0 incl. EHP2	15.11.2012	1788279
IDES CRM 7.0 incl. EHP1	08.07.2011	1608163
IDES CRM 7.0	25.08.2009	1379041
IDES CRM 2007	13.02.2008	1141838
IDES CRM 5.0	26.01.2007	1013396
IDES mySAP CRM 4.0	05.03.2004	713632
IDES CRM 3.0	12.12.2001	459356

IDES SCM releases:

version	availability	SAP note
IDES SCM 5.1	20.08.2008	1243319
IDES SCM 5.0	31.01.2007	1013984

IDES SRM releases:

version	availability	SAP note
IDES SRM 5.0	29.12.2006	1013397

IDES BW/SEM releases:

version	availability	SAP note
IDES BW 7.0 /SEM 6.0	02.01.2007	1013702
IDES BW 3.5 / SEM 4.0	11.03.2005	827090

SAP API Management

In today’s world Application Programming Interface (API) plays very important role. This is given by nature of every business which is nowadays – digital business. Regardless if the business is between companies and customer (in its every form like customer, employees, etc.) or between companies there always some digital part of it. The API connects digital businesses. Whether it is business process, service, platform, technology solution or content at the end it needs to be able to communicate with other of these. So they must be capable of performing data exchange between them. Here comes a role of the APIs. All parties involved in the data exchange needs to have API. By this I mean that function which do the exchange are known to all the parties and they can use them to actually perform the exchange. Moreover in today’s economy driven by mobile devices (not to mention Internet of Things (IoT) or even Internet of Everything (IoE)). Companies data (e.g. web shop data) must be available in the form of software responses to queries from other software or applications. This is so true for companies ruining their ERP systems where SAP is big player in the field.

Historically it is not one of SAP strength (e.g. see here) when it comes to the API. Over the years SAP has tried to something about it but with not much success. There were, hmm well they still are there their own solutions which tried to kind of cover role of API. To name few of them them: SAP Enterprise Services (SOA), BAPIs, IDocs. The most famous are probably sets of remote execution functions called BAPI. However in today’s world it becomes clear that SAP has to be more aggressive API when it comes to their API approach.

To solve in larger scale SAP turned to APIgee. They both recently announced a partnership. In this term SAP will delivers the API management application based on OEM’s Apigee Edge digital acceleration platform. The SAP API Management application will be available as a cloud solution on HANA Cloud Platform (HEC) and also as an on-premise solution.

The SAP API Management application provides managing of exposed functions (e.g. services available over the web) of backend systems and it has following scope:

Security – controls access to exposed services

Compatibility – support of different platform and devices that consume services

Measurability – monitoring of services

SAP API Management consists of following parts that all provide infrastructure for the API management:

API Platform - creation, security, management, consuming or basically all operations within API

Analytics Services – analytics on top of API, to see trends in its e.g. usage

Developer Services - tools to manage the community of application developers

The importance of API is very significant with SAP offerings like SAP Gateway. The Gateway provides ODATA access to SAP data. As it is currently used at very large scale within SAP customers therefore was seen a clear need for API management tool. Technically having SAP API Management on top Gateway will call on predefined Gateway services, and expose those services in the cloud. Gateway’s service catalogs will be integrated with API Management. This means out-of-the-box integration with that catalog as API proxy will be defined then catalog can be browsed and finally there is a call up of service.

Other vendors of API mngt software, basically competitors to APIgee:

SOA software

CA Technologies (Layer 7 Technologies)

Axway

3scale

Informatica

Tibco

Intel (Mashery)

IBM

WSO2

Mulesoft.com

More information:

Online docu

2051594 - SAP API Management - Release Note

SCN space: SAP API Mngt

SAP Gateway

Within term Gateway we need to be careful. SAP Basis people know this term as component of SAP NW ABAP and JAVA app servers which handles the SAP proprietary RFC protocol. The gateway is specified in RFC connections as hostname where program ID runs. It is e.g. used by outbound IDoc which are send form SAP system. Maybe you know Tcodes like SMGW where you can monitor the gateway.

On other hand we have here something which is called SAP NetWeaver Gateway (NW GW). What is "SAP NetWeaver Gateway" then? It is SAP NetWeaver ABAP AS based solution introduced in 2011 based on open standards (e.g. OData) which can be used to more easily connect non SAP applications to SAP applications and vice versa. The NW GW can be used to connect to SAP backend applications by using any programming language or model without the need for SAP knowledge. This is achieved by leveraging REST services and OData and ATOM protocols, according to SAP. Formerly the solution’s name was changed in 2014. The NetWeaver abbreviation was dropped and now it is called just SAP Gateway (GW).

We can say about the GW that it is ODATA for Enterprise. Basically what it does is nothing else just exposing the data residing in SAP application to outside world. Of course this was possible long time before GW was introduced. But what is advantage of GW is that instead of using SAP’s proprietary RFC functions (also known as BAPI) standard opens source technologies (OData) are used.

Let just introduce OData briefly by quoting Wikipedia: OData is data access protocol to provide standard CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) access to a data source via a website. It is similar to JDBC and ODBC although OData is not limited to SQL databases. It is kind of ODBC for web means data is accessible via URLs (e.g. http://:/sap/opu/sdata/iwfnd/RMTSAMPLEFLIGHT/$metadata?$format=xml). OData is designed to provide implementation of RESTful API for creating and consuming data APIs. Also it is multichannel means they can serve data to multiple apps from one logical model. OData is extensible so by using GW; SAP allows to supplement OData data types within information from ABAP data dictionary.

By using GW we can get SAP data to every environment, tool or device. GW supports developers to create apps that connect to SAP software.

How GW application looks like? There is a data abstraction part residing on GW server – service model (structure of OData). This is developed in OData Modeler- a plugin to Eclipse also part residing on GW server The service is implemented by binding to data sources (e.g. SAP ECC). There is a GW’s Service Builder to develop that. The service has its implementation and business logic. In order to consume OData there is external app e.g. created JAVA/PHP/JSE/iOS/Android/HTML5 e.g. in Eclipse.

From licensing point of view notice that external app is supposed to communicate with SAP backend (via GW) by using so called SAP Gateway User. Which is named user (SAP terminology, see more here) authorized to use licensed software from SAP.

To download and install trial version of SAP NetWeaver Gateway kindly follow my other blog: SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP 7.02 SP11 with Gateway SP04 Trial - Ready for SAP Gateway

More information:

Gateway Documentation

SCN community Gateway space

SAP Gateway - knowing all essentials and how to build apps in 5 min

Getting Started with SAP NetWeaver Gateway

Learn Gateway at your own pace

Installing and Configuring SAP NetWeaver Gateway 2.0

NW Gateway introduction to ODATA

Consuming SAP NetWeaver Gateway Services from HTML Applications using Java Script

Tutorial: Creating an OData service based on SAP Gateway, SOAP, JDBC and JPA data sources

Named users in SAP licensing

This is a term used within SAP terminology. It is popping up in many SAP documents. Also it may appear while you setting up some SAP’s functionalities. One of examples would be some installation of SAP solution checking license and demanding to acquire more named user licenses in case license limit has been exceeded.

Therefore I thought it will be good to know more about it. Basically it describes type of SAP license. A named user is a license of user (user should have a meaningful name, therefore they say “named” user) that is authorized for individual access to licensed SAP software. By software it is meant particular functionality of SAP. It is a mandatory for most of users (speaking here about regular business users not technical ones) to have this named users while accessing SAP functionality. So named users are e.g. employees with organization using SAP software. There is license price associated per named users.

Other posts on same topic:

Licensing of SAP software