SAP Idea Place is the public channel to participate in innovation at SAP (in addition to the Customer Connect program, where some user groups and customer communities own private spaces on customer influence). By submitting new ideas or collaborating on existing ones in our Software Logistics Idea Space, everyone can influence the future of software logistics procedures and processes, as it offers a direct connection with the teams at SAP that are in charge of the software logistics procedures.
One good example for the power of SAP Idea Space is the dual-stack split support for systems based on SAP NetWeaver 7.3 – as this idea received a lot of votes, it helped us to bring this into the backlog of the responsible team and is now available since Software Logistics Toolset 1.0 SPS07.
In this document, I want to provide an overview of what SAP Idea Place has to offer for software logistics, how you can use this channel, and, finally, provide a short overview how you can stay updated, so that you always get the newest information about improvement ideas from our community.
Software Logistics Idea Space
You can access the Software Logistics Idea Space at: http://ideaplace.brightidea.com/softwarelogistics
On the start page, you already find a lot of information, such as the available categories (see below), a short list of available ideas, latest updates, top contributors, and some statistics. For a general introduction to SAP Idea Place, see this video.
To make handling in our space easier, we have introduced the following four categories in the Software Logistics Idea Space:
- Change control management – hosting idea for processes dealing with the transport of changes between SAP systems in your landscape with tools such as the Change and Transport System (CTS), Enhanced Change and Transport System (CTS+) and CM Services.
- Maintenance and upgrade management – hosting ideas for processes to update and upgrade your SAP systems, also considering minimized downtime requirements with tools such as the Software Update Manager (SUM), and ABAP and Java upgrade.
- Solution implementation – hosting ideas for processes to add new functions to your SAP system landscape, such as:
- Installation of new SAP systems and the homogeneous copy of existing SAP systems with software provisioning manager
- Installation of frontends with SAPSetup
- Automation of tasks, such as for initial setup and post-copy automation with the ABAP task manager and the stand-alone task manager for lifecycle management automation
- System transformation – hosting ideas for processes to adapt the setup of existing SAP systems with software provisioning manager, such as the split of an existing dual-stack system with the dual-stack split procedure, the renaming of an existing system with the system rename procedure, or the heterogeneous system copy/migration of an existing system to another operating system or database
For more information about the procedures covered by the categories above, see the Get Started with Software Logistics page (and the content referenced from there).
You can easily view ideas of one certain category by clicking on the corresponding category name in the left pane of the Software Logistics Idea Space entry page:
How You Can Use SAP Idea Place for Software Logistics
If you are using our software logistics procedures, maybe there was this task where you thought how neat/helpful/intuitive a different behavior of our tools would have been – or you are just missing this special feature that would make your daily work (and most probably also the work of other SAP customers, administrators, or consultants) that much easier.
With SAP Idea Place, you can easily bring this idea up to the community of software logistics users and to the responsible development teams at SAP as follows:
1. First, identify the right category for your idea – in most cases, you can directly derive this from the tool you are targeting this change for. For this, just see the corresponding description of the available categories above.
2. Then, browse through the already existing ideas in the relevant category:
- If there is no similar idea in place, just submit a new idea by pressing the Submit Idea button on the upper left corner of the Idea Space:
- If there is already a similar idea already in place, first check its status:
- If the idea has the status “Delivered” or “Already Offered”, see in the comments section for information with which release the change is made available and get the latest tool version (for example, from the Software Logistics Toolset page).
- If the idea has the status “Accepted”, see in the comments section if there is already information when the change is planned to be delivered. If there is no such information yet, just subscribe to the idea (as described below) to get an update as soon as this information is added.
Even if the idea is already accepted, you can still collaborate on it by adding a comment or by promoting it as outlined below – a higher
number of votes might raise the priority of the idea in the active backlog of the responsible development team. And bringing in your aspects will help the SAP developers to realize the idea the right way. - If the idea has the status “Archived”, the idea somehow did not fit – either, it was submitted in the wrong Idea Space or something else did not fit. Check the comments section for more information and – if you like – submit a new idea, reflecting the aspects given in the comments section.
- If the idea has any other status, start collaborating on it. That is, bring in your point of view or add further aspects by posting a comment (the comment field is available at the end of each idea), and – if you like the idea – promote it by clicking on the corresponding arrow to the left of the idea:
Even if the idea should already be declined by SAP (“Not Planned by SAP”), a lot of votes can bring the idea back on the plate of SAP development.
3. Finally, subscribe to the idea to stay updated, as outlined in the next session.
The ideas are regularly checked by SAP development and new ideas get reviewed accordingly. As you can image, the more votes an idea has, the more attention it will get. Especially ideas that would impose a lot of effort for SAP development to realize have much higher chances, if a lot of customers are requesting it (that is, if the number of supporting votes is high).
So, if there is a good idea you would like to have realized, consider to make some advertisement – for example, by sharing the link to an idea (for example, in SCN) or by mailing the direct link to the idea to colleagues and your network – for mailing, there is a button in the middle of the left pane:
Remark:
Our Software Logistics Idea Space is not intended for bug fixes. For issues or bugs, please continue to create support incidents, as this makes it easier for
our support experts to track down the root cause of an issue and will result in a much faster solution for your urgent issues.
How You Can Stay Updated
Getting updates in SAP Idea Place is easy – when you are on the page of an idea, just press the envelop icon in the upper right corner next to the idea title:
There, you can select, if you want to get notified only about changes for this single idea or for the whole category. As soon as something changes (that is, the status of the idea changes or somebody is posting a comment), you will get notified by email.
In addition to this subscription option, I plan to write blogs in the Software Logistics SCN space about the latest submitted ideas and all ideas with a high activity level in SAP Idea Place.
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