Last week I've Taking part in the Enhancement Pack 1 for SAP CRM 7.0 Ramp-Up - a journey begins. This week you read about the first glitches in our project.
Ramp Up experience
My first Ramp Up experience so far was good. The download was delivered at the promised date and the access to the Ramp-Up Knowledge transfer worked without any hassles. But during the last two weeks we faced some glitches during the installation on our development system.
Project Team Changes
The week started with at hit. The basis admin that should do the upgrade of our development system is going to move on to another company. For his last month at Siteco he needs now to hand over his work and could not work on the upgrade. But lucky enough our basis team suggested a basis consultant from Siemens IT Solutions and Services GmbH to me. He did already worked for us in the ERP 6.0 EhP 4 and in the just finished BW 7.0 upgrade. So I gave him a call and he was able to step in.
SMSY adjustments
On Friday we ran into a problem with the Solution Manager Maintenance Optimizer (MOPZ). It reported the error "Software Component Vector is empty for WEB". I've found that the Technical System WebDispatcher which we use as a filtering reverse proxy forCreate, run and analyze an E-Mail Campaign with a Survey (Part 1) was not correctly maintained. I had to enter the Software Component and then we where able to continue with the MOPZ.
But not far. In step 2.4 - Select OS/DB-Dependent Files of MOPZ we where presented with the error messages:
The Installation/Upgrade Package for Add-on FI-CA rel. 600 is not available
Message no.TN260
and
ABAP queue check failed
Message no.PPMS_STACK_CALC024
We where not able to solve this issue and raised an SAP Support Ticket (OSS Message). As I've raised it with high priority I got a reply already on Saturday from a support employee also contributing to the . He pointed me into the right direction and I found why also our ERP Systems where included in the MOPZ calculation. The same instance of the WebDispatcher causing the first problem was assigned to our CRM and ERP Production system. I can't blame anyone for that as I did the maintenance some month ago.
With that fixed I was able to download all the needed packages from the SAP Service Marketplace.
Ramp-Up Coach Introduction
On Monday we had our first meeting with our Ramp-Up Coach Christian Rau. He is the Co-Author of the SAP Press book Web Programming in ABAP with the SAP Web Application Server. First he explained his role as the interface between us and the Ramp-Up back-office and SAP Development. We agreed to send prepared support messages to him to be checked and perhaps improved to allow a quick solution.
Special tagging of support messages
Support messages have to be flagged with "Ramp-Up Project" and they get a special Prefix. But to be able to see the "Ramp-Up Project" flag, the maintained release of the system has to be maintained in the Service Marketplace (SMP) with the target release. In the days of SAP Solution Manager automatically updating the SMP System data I think that is a to hard restriction. When you start with the upgrade of the first system SolMan still reports the old version. I think binding it to the installation number should be enough.
Walking through our old CRM 5.0 PC-UI
After the general guidelines we got into our CRM 5.0 system and walked through our main processes of Opportunity- and Account Management. To get an impression of our needs check out the CRM WebClient UI wish list and my My SAP CRM improvement ideas on SAP Idea Place. Also not to forget our Marketing Management where we hopefully No support for letters in SAP CRM Campaign Management - SAP bring it back!.
Another glitch during the technical upgrade
Monday night I've got a mail from our basis consultant doing the technical upgrade. He told me that he had to raise a support message. The upgrade tool stopped in the PREPARE phase 'configuration'. The message was "WARNING: Your source system is secured by the SAPCryptolib". As suggested by the tool, we've provided the SAPcrypotlib file in the download directory. But it was not to be recognized.
It was already late at night when I've tweeted our problem. The next morning http://twitter.com/CBasisChristian Braukmüller already found a solution in a /thread/1867130 [original link is broken]. With the help of the SAP Notes 1302772 - Central Note - SAP Enhancement Package Installer 7.00 and 1375378 - Select the right version of an SAP security toolkit we where then able to continue with the upgrade. I've set the support message to request a close.
Last glitch - release restrictions for server side groupware integration
On Tuesday Christian Rau made me aware of Note 1455223 - Release Restriction Note CRM 7.0 EHP1. The bad news of this note is that the Groupware Connector for server based Groupware Integration with Microsoft Exchange is not available with CRM 7.0 EHP1. It is planned to resolve this limitation until end of Q1/2011. As we use the server side Groupware integration to synchronize Accounts to the contact folders of our sales reps that could be a show stopper. Let's hope that SAP can solve it faster.
