ChaRM 7.1 Admin Change (SMAD) for non-productive systems

[raquel_pereiradacunha]

I would like to share some information related to Administration (or Administrative) Changes in SolMan 7.1.

I am currently working with ChaRM in SolMan 7.1, and one of the needs of this project is to be able to create an Admin change (standard transaction type SMAD) for a non-productive system. There are some changes that are not saved in transports and will take place in Dev, QAS or Pre-Prod of SAP Systems, and they will be registered in ChaRM, approved in the scope of a Request for Change etc.. In SolMan 7.0 it was possible to have Admin Changes created for all the systems in the landscape, not only production. If you ever tried to do it and was not allowed, please refer to SAP Note 943520.

What happens is that in SolMan 7.1 the system checks for any types of ChaRM changes, except SMCG, in the Request of Change scope or directly in the Change Document, if the Ibase component is a productive system. For your information this check is inside method SET_DEVICEID of class CL_AIC_CM_S_AICCMSCOPE_CN01. I thought of using SMCG but it's not prepared to be used for SAP as the other changes and the change flow is a little bit different and longer than necessary in my current case.

After discussing it with SAP, I found out that the  use of SMAD for non-productive systems (in fact the possibility to "choose iBases with dev/test, etc systems in SMCR scope and choose SMAD as transaction type" in SAP words, will be available only with SP06. Of course it did not make me quite happy as this was something possible in 7.0 and SP06 is not available yet, SAP just delivered SP05.

Until then, SAP recommends to work with the General Change SMCG, which is intended to be used for non-SAP, is not related to SAP systems, do not have Change actions such as Logon to System and Navigate to Task List. The good part if that the other missing actions related to transports are not relevant anyway.

As I have no other option, as it seems, I will have to follow the recommendation and use SMCG as the source of my Z Admin Change for non-prod, but I will need to have some extra effort to make it work the way we want. Not so big as I don't need to take care of transports creation/release/import, but not necessary if the new release had been delivered keeping the existing functionalities. We have to agree that SolMan 7.1 brings LOTS of benefits and new functionalities, and I am one of the most enthusiastic about it, as shown in my other blogs, but I am a little bit disappointed when I see things that worked well before and do not work anymore (after almost one year of the delivery of the new release and 5 SPs).

Please share your comments about it. Do you need to register changes to non-prod systems too? What do you think of using a General Change for that?