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New 2012 Spring Version of Best-Built Applications Guidelines Published!

As our readers know, we update our Best-Built Applications Guidelines (BBA) book multiple times a year. This time it took us a bit longer to produce the new BBA 2.4 version, but we also got a quite big chunk of new content, which should interest you.

The main new part is a revision of our Enterprise Information Management (EIM) chapter 6.  EIM is a very vibrant topic area which sees a lot of new product releases. It is a good example why we need to revise BBA frequently and why you should always (re)-download a fresh copy when starting new projects.

The 2^nd major change is that we promoted the old chapter 8 “Application Development” to be our new chapter 2 and we moved chapter 2 into the Appendix. Our long time followers might remember that we started BBA quite small in 2009. At that time most chapters were yet to be written and we wanted to give a quick outlook on what’s to come. Therefore, we introduced the old chapter 2 with a list of all guidelines to come without much reasoning why we think those guidelines were important. In the meantime our book grew to now 8 chapters and the old chapter 2 became an odd relic. We always thought that “Application Development” would be a natural starter since our target audiences are SAP customer and partner development groups, so we did this change.

You might wonder what happens to the mobile and Gateway chapters, which we covered as short previews in our version 2.3 BBA edition. Well, we moved them to the end of chapter 4 for now. Chapter 4, currently titled “Process Orchestration and Integration Guidelines for Best-Built Applications”, is the next in line in our revision pipeline. You might have seen that BBA describes extensively in the “Application Lifecycle Management” chapter 3 how you can make custom changes to SAP Business Suite coding if you really have no other way to get your custom features implemented. We describe how you can safeguard such modifications and manage future change management conflicts … but I’d feel very strongly that another, better and more modern way to extend SAP Business Suite Applications should be chosen and that is what chapter 4 is and will be about.

There have been a few minor adjustments and bug fixes throughout the book, I can’t mention them all here. There is just this one particular guideline, which might interest you too:

EIM-DB-1. SAP recommends making applications agnostic concerning the underlying database and operating system wherever possible, with the exception of applications that use the SAP HANA platform.

Can you spot the quite impactful change we did on this guideline compared to earlier BBA releases? IMHO a dedicated chapter about Hana should become a part of BBA sometime in future, too.