** Update February 2017 **
SAP has finally rolled out support for email archiving for SAP Connect and ERMS emails. Please see SAP
Note 2197465 for full details!
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You can never have too much of a good thing! Well, except for emails. You can definitely have too much email in your inbox. As a general rule, I try to keep my inbox to just one page so that all my emails are visible without having to scroll. But I've seen colleagues with hundreds of unread emails!. And that's just for a single user. A company on the other hand might receive that many emails in a single day -- every day, every week, every year. And all of those emails get stored in the CRM system. For companies using SAP CRM to handle emails with ERMS and/or the Interaction Center, that could amount to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of emails. Obviously this can raise concerns about storage size and system performance. So what is a company to do?
The simplest solution of course would be to do use archiving. Unfortunately, things aren't always as simple as we would like them to be. For example, while we talk about "emails" in SAP CRM, what we are really dealing with in the system are not actual emails but rather CRM workflow items, SAP business objects, and an assortment of database tables. Technically, when an email passes through the SAPconnect interface into the SAP CRM system, the email is converted into a CRM Workflow item. Later, when that workflow item is selected by an agent from the Agent Inbox in the Interaction Center, the workflow item is completed and converted into an SAP business object.
To further complicate things, "emails" and the corresponding workflow items SAP business objects, attachments, and replies aren't stored in one place. Rather, various items are stored in various different tables such as: SOFM, SOOD, SOC3, SOFFCONT1, SOOS, SOST, SOES, SOFFLOIO, SOFFPHIO, SOFFPHFK, and so on!
There are of course options for going about archiving workflow items in CRM, for example. But to be honest, the workflow items aren't really what most customers need to be worried about in terms of storage size and performance. Similarly, there are also options for archiving text documents (type RAW & SCR) using the report RSSOAPUT. But text documents aren't of particular concern either. What companies should be most concerned about of course are email attachments -- which can be quite large.
Email attachments are stored using SAP Knowledge Provider (KPRO). The good news is that customer who concerned about excessive use of database storage for attachments have the option to use an external content management server specifically for email attachments! In the standard settings, the KPRO stores the SAPoffice data in the database table SOFFCONT1. You can also select an external content server or an archive system as somewhere to store the documents. The storage location is determined using the content repository 'SOFFDB'. You can check the storage location for the SAPoffice data in your system using Transaction 'OAC0'. See
SAP note 904711 for full details.
You may also want to check out
this thread on SCN for additional discussion.
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