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Benefit from More Automation, Industry Coverage, and Predelivered Content

With the successful completion of its ramp-up on May 12, 2011, SAP NetWeaver Information Lifecycle Management 7.02 is now generally available to all SAP customers. 

Without exaggeration one can say that SAP NetWeaver ILM 7.02 is a huge leap forward compared to SAP ILM 7.01, the first release of SAP’s information lifecycle management solution. The new release comes with a long list of new features and enhancements that will considerably benefit you in managing your data volumes and retention times for both live and legacy systems. This makes us indeed very proud of being able to offer such great value to our customers!

So what can you expect from this brand new release? Simply a lot! 

The main focus in developing the new release was on further enhancing process automation, for instance, in system decommissioning; expanding the ILM coverage to include industry solutions SAP Utilities and SAP Oil & Gas; and providing additional predelivered content, such as queries for easier business warehouse reporting. But prior to all of that we ran an extensive roll-in project to collect feedback from customers and partners to ensure that the new capabilities are exactly what our users need.

Some Highlights

It’s not the goal of this blog to provide a full-blown list of all new or enhanced features. That is something you would rather expect to find in the product documentation. Instead I would prefer to single out some real highlights to give you a first impression of the new release.

Audit Areas

Using so-called “audit areas” ILM lets you categorize your data according to its retention reason to comply with regulatory requirements. Basically, audit areas are used to select the data for a particular audit purpose, e.g. tax or product liability. From a technical perspective, an audit area contains and covers all data types needed for that audit, including, for example, a list of necessary object types that are assigned to the audit area, and relevant structures, tables, and fields.

Audit areas help you automate the data selection process for reporting on legacy data, and eliminate the manual selection of archive files from the store. SAP predelivers the audit areas TAX and PRODUCT LIABILITY, which you can use as a template for defining your own specific audit areas in the customer name space. This can be performed using transaction ILMARA:

 

 

Automation for System Decommissioning

Using transaction ILM_TRANS_ADMIN you can now automate the process of transferring archive administration data and archive files from the legacy system to the ILM retention warehouse system. The new function also provides an automated process for converting the transferred files to apply retention rules and store those files in the storage system. The original files of the converted files can be deleted manually or automatically through this function.

 

Destruction of Archived Data

In the first release of SAP NetWeaver ILM destruction for database data was introduced. Using transaction ILM_DESTRUCTION you can now also destroy archived data (including attachments and print lists) residing in the storage system. It goes without saying that this process always performs in line with the defined ILM retention rules: only data whose expiration date has passed is eligible for destruction and can be added to the work list of objects to be destroyed.

 

Checksums

Using transaction ILMCHECK, you can now verify the completeness of the information in the retention warehouse against the original data transferred from the legacy system. In your checksum analysis you can compare data from the legacy system and the same data in the retention warehouse system to see whether the sums of specific data or ranges of data are identical.

In the screenshot below you can see the result of a checksum run:

 

 

Availability

SAP NetWeaver ILM 7.02 comes as a part of SAP NetWeaver 7.0 EhP2 and is included in the SAP ERP 6.0 EhP5 delivery. After installing SAP ERP EhP5 you only need to activate the relevant ILM business functions to start using it in a live system environment. To use it for system decommissioning, you need to set up a stand-alone retention warehouse system also based on SAP ERP EhP5.

More Information

  • Release Note: Includes a full list of new and enhanced features.
  • Documentation: Contains the “operating instructions” for using SAP NetWeaver ILM.
  • SAPinsider article: Describes the major features of the new release.
  • Installation Note: Provides information on using SAP NetWeaver ILM in the context of SAP ERP EhP5.

Stay Informed

  • SAP NetWeaver ILM on SDN
  • SAP NetWeaver ILM on Twitter