Application Lifecycle Management is now well established on SDN as the primary content source and basis for discussion around managing the life-cycle of your SAP solutions. We recently added a left hand navigation for ALM to emphasize the importance of the topic and to simplify and accelerate the access to all SDN resources. With the new navigation in mind it became clear that we had to revisit all the pages dealing with the technical enablement stuff.
In my last blog (see
ALM - What's in it for me?) I already outlined the necessity to think about Application Lifecycle Management not only from a perspective which the ITIL standard suggests but to focus on the actual processes that represent the major activities that are performed in a typical ALM scenario or phase. These ALM processes correspond to things you have done during day to day operations but a clear framework helps to identify the tools, standards, best practices and resources. As a consequence the ALM processes now form the basis for navigation. Each process when selected on the left hand navigation launches a topic page describing the process in detail (SDN does not like long menu names meaning we had to shorten some of the process names). For example if you select the process “Solution Implementation” you find all information you need to configure your solution both on the technical and business process level before you actually go-live and operate the solution. The associated phases from the ITIL model are “Requirements, Design and Build”.
The fact that the phases are not used for navigation any longer does not mean they went out of scope. The phases are still there. But you will not likely implement a phase. You will more likely implement a process that is bound to a particular phase, or even more realistically that spans multiple phases like in the case of “Solution Implementation”. Other processes such as “Technical Operations” or “Upgrade and Update Management” are bound to the “Operations” and “Optimizations” phase, but in either case process steps have to be carried out to collect requirements and plan the subsequent steps accordingly which is obviously the case when doing an upgrade.
We added a lot of content for the process pages. Some of the previous content being still valid was recycled, but you will find additional overviews, a couple of new demos and information on related documentation, best practices and process standards. The topmost navigation entry “Landscape Design and Infrastructure” points to resources on solution landscape recommendations, helpful resources on virtualization and adaptive topics and platform topics (databases and operating systems).
I promise that we will keep this structure stable as far as possible. In addition we will migrate the relevant content from the old NetWeaver life-cycle management pages step by step. This will allow us to ramp down the old navigation soon. We kept it for this time to smoothen the transition, though.
Now please explore the new structure, we definitely appreciate your feedback on the new ALM on SDN appearance.
