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    shabarish.vijayakumar

    38 Posts

    After running around Oxford Street and visits to the VFS Global office in London last week, finally the Spanish embassy has granted me ESTADOS Schengen for 5 days. Madrid now awaits so does an immense amount of lectures, hands on and networking sessions.

     

    This will be the 5th SAP TechEd I will be going to and the excitement never ceases to exist. Each and every year we see the growing amount of attendees and it should be a testimonial to the adoption of SAP world wide, the growing number of SAP customer base and of course the sheer amount of workforce involved in implementing SAP solutions.

     

    One of the challenges consultants face is to convince their management on the needs of attending events like the TechEd. As a SAP mentor, I am thankful to SAP that by extending us invites to these events around the world, it makes the convincing much easier.

     

    Since sometime this year, it has been all about HANA. SAP is indeed all GAGA over HANA (and rightly so!). Though it might be a topic that might make the Analytic guys go weak in their knees, I think I will give it a pass. HANA is definitely massive so I have made sure that I am not completely left out. You will find me scribbling on my notepad, taking notes amongst my doodles during the lectures 'SAP Runs SAP: HANA/InMemory Solutions' & 'Deep Dive into the SAP In-Memory Technology, Strategy, and Roadmap'.

     

    But then HANA is not where my heart belongs. I am an Integration guy and I will spare no chance to be in bed with 'Business Process Management, Integration and Collaboration'.

     

    NW 7.3 / 7.31 releases and especially the Process Orchestration track is what I am interested in so in case you run into me in any of the lecture halls or at the Pods, please do say Hello or the 'Hola'! It's my first ever travel to the country of Spain and I will love to have the company of fellow consultants and Mentors when I plan to dine on 'Tapas' and yes indeed a glass of authentic 'Sangria' towards the evening.

     

    Apart from the usual business of TechEd, I intend to make the best of my time visiting customers and catch up with some of the best SAP Mentors in the Integration space today. http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/profile/Michal+Krawczyk

    Mike has promised me that he will help me build an adapter of my own in 15 minutes though he mentions 5 days is what it will really takes :) Well mate, a promise is a promise! I also see from the Agenda builder that Daniel is in town as well. Daniel, when you are not busy hosting your networking sessions, lets catch up over a coffee. I think its time I got myself some tips on documentation and other trick n treats!

    Apart from that there is the wider Mentor circle, a talent pool with immense experience to whom I can only look up to, try, learn and be inspired. Then there is always Aslan, Mr Finnern and the lady Pratt!

     

    Madrid, aquí vengo!


    PS: If anyone can trade his/her Hands On session or can sneak me into a Fully Booked Conference room for the 'SAP NetWeaver Process Integration: Integration Flows Deep Dive' session, I promise this will not be forgotten ever! It was too late by the time I started building the agenda that I realized it was a full  house, popular sell out!

     


    In majority of projects that implement SAP PI, developments that require custom adapter modules and java proxies are predominantly less in number. But there are projects in which the most of the developments are based on such custom codes. Also with the single stack concept gaining importance, these developments will gather more storm.

     

    How do you manage your Java code when it comes to SAP PI? 

     

    I assume most of us don't really bother. We get our coding done on NWDS, compile the code locally, export the Jar or EJB, load them into the server and Voila, we are done.

    But as the code base increases, managing this gets tricky. PI, out of the box doesn't provide you any help either. You can edit your code in ESR but only hope for it to compile on itself. If it could, it would have been wonderful, aint it?

    One of the recommended ways is to implement NWDI and have the code centrally maintained. But I personally haven't found it easy configuring NWDI and start hosting my code. Ignoramus? Mea Culpa! (Maybe SAP can indeed host a good how to guide to help us with this?)

    With Eclipse integration into ESR, I believe this will open a new dimension of possibilities. Imagine code management via the IDE integrated with a check in - check out version management feature.

    I hope this is what SAP is aspiring toward. In any case, I have already posted this on Idea place and will wait to see if anyone picks this up.

     

    Question:

    How do you manage your custom Java code? Do you use NWDI extensively for SAP PI projects? Or is there any other way you are achieving this in your SAP PI projects?

    As a kid, I was fascinated when I learned about Darwin and the Theory of Evolution. It is amazing considering the scale of time and the process of evolution that defines what the living world today is. Evolution was an Idea. So was Human rights, an idea, a concept that came to change the world. That is the power of a single idea. It can change the world.

     

    This is in continuation of the blog post Idea Place and a case for SAP PI. I am glad to let all community members know that SAP PI Idea session is now Live... Yooo Hooo !!

    We may not change the world, but we have a chance to improve and innovate SAP PI and the best part is, we have SAP closely monitoring and reviewing your suggestions.

     

    Please use this link and let your ideas roll - SAP PI Idea Place

    As you publish your ideas please do VOTE for ideas already submitted by other contributors, which you find useful and significant. More the VOTE, better the chance of the idea getting realized.

     

    A special thanks to Kuhan Milroy (manages Idea Place), Mariana Mihaylova (PI Session Manager), the Process Orchestration team and (how can I forget) our very own, Marilyn Pratt who I am sure needs no introduction, for bring this concept from an idea to reality :)

    Thank you All !!

     

    Buddha quoted, 'An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea'. Hope to see brilliant ideas come out as future features of SAP Process Integration. 

     

    For those who are new to Idea place:

     

    What is Idea place?

    Idea Place hosted by SAP is your public channel to participate in  innovation at SAP - a step changes towards influencing the future of SAP  products, solutions or services that are easier to use, lower your cost  or just make the products, solutions or services better. Idea Place  enables you to submit ideas, collaborate on and vote for ideas, and  connect you with the teams that build SAP products, solutions or  services.


    More about Idea Place: Click Here

     


    Almost a year ago, I posted a blog titled 'Contribute to better a Product? Do you have ideas for SAP PI?'. The objective was to get a dedicated page for Process Integration so that consultants, users and customers, if interested could post their thoughts and suggestions on improving the product.

     

    Currently Process Integration and the future is under review. The wait has exceeded a year now but the interest of many fellow community members in this area has not diminished. Recently we had Suggesting PI Improvements - Features Functionalities Behavior, open a wiki page for suggesting improvements to PI. I also met with a customer who said he has initiated a dialogue with SAP in suggesting improvements to the product. There are user groups who are focused on product improvements to PI but then it is a closed network and not all can discuss and contribute their ideas.

     

    We need a place for ideas and the question I have is 'Is Idea place the right place for this specific need?'. I hope someone managing Idea place can answer it. I personally believe that it is since it will be open enough for consultants, customers and other stakeholders. But if I am proven wrong, then the wiki page started by Prateek will need to be publicized more so as to bring it to the attention of contributors and get the ideas flowing.

     

    PI has matured over the years but there is still a lot that has to go into the product to make it an ideal fit for a multitude of requirements. The community is keen to contribute and I am sure SAP will be happy to listen.

    The Signs

    2008 - Advanced Adapter Engine and the local processing makes waves... for the first time, the message processing will bypass the ABAP stack

    2009 - EHP1 - The AAE gets more features

    2010 - Unleash 7.3. SAP mentions an optional Java only release of PI. Advanced Adapter Engine finds itself in a new breed... the Advanced Adapter Engine Extended aka AEX.

     

    Well we should have known it was coming.... the future... Death of the ABAP engine and the birth of Java only SAP PI releases.

     

    I think it is the inevitable as SAP moves to a Java only future and slowly coming out of the dual stack idea we have all come to live with. There has been strong messages at TechEds around the world about this. It might not be the immediate future but then there sure seems to be action happening in the labs which will be realized soon.

    The advantages with a single stack approach seem to be in plenty - Faster installation, better performance, lesser cost, reduced resource consumption, lesser hardware, faster restart and many more.

    So how different would it be if we didn't have the ABAP stack anymore?

     

    1. ABAP stack based adapter - None in the future. With 7.3, all the ABAP stack based adapters will move to Java stack. ex. HTTP_AAE and IDOC_AAE

    2. ccBPM - This is a huge impact on the future of PI. ccBPM is completely based on the ABAP stack and integrated into the SAP Business workflow engine. With the ABAP stack gone, ccBPM would soon cease to exist.

    From the brief conversations I had with SAP during the TechEd, ccBPM is being planned to be replaced with BPMN standard (Business Process Management Initiative). In short, the SAP BPM will find itself being plugged into PI where modeling can happen based on the BPMN standards.

    The problem that I can foresee here is the upgrades from a lower version of PI to the future PI. If SAP doesnt provide an upgrade path for moving ccBPM instances onto the BPMN based modeling, then there is going to be a lot of remodeling on existing interfaces developed in PI as part of any migration or upgrade.

    PS: Does this now mean we have to think twice about the usage of ccBPM in the near future?

    3. ABAP Mapping - We will see is the diminishing usage of ABAP mappings. It is time organizations looked at the mapping techniques being currently used in their PI implementation. Its better to discourage the use of ABAP mappings and encourage mappings to be developed more on the graphical or java model.

    PS: No more ABAP mapping ??? Well, I know this might offend a lot of ABAP mapping fans. I am a huge fan of ABAP but never was a fan of the ABAP mapping in PI... maybe I was never comfortable with ABAP mapping... my bad.. my incompetence ..

    4. What about all my ABAP stack configurations? - This is something interesting. This is where all the ABAP stack configuration might have to be moved to the Java stack. Or would there be a different way to configure interfaces now? What about my destinations, what about my ports and meta-data, no more SXMB_MONI for sure and how will I do my integration engine configurations? What happens to all the TCODEs I memorized?

    5. Tables and lookups - With the ABAP stack being moved, one thing that most of us would definitely miss is the use of custom ABAP tables that might have been introduced as part of interface designs to hold data (ex. for lookups). With no more ABAP, it will be required that PI (Java) DB been exposed so that developers can create custom tables and using JDBC lookup or calls handle data (will miss the PI ABAP RFC lookups). Another option would be to have a dedicated DB or use the ECC ABAP tables for storing such data.

    PS: Personally I believe PI should have its DB exposed so that custom activities can be carried out. Why depend on another system for our data, isnt it?

     

    Well, what else do you think? How do you envision the future? What will you miss if there was no ABAP stack?

    Next Generation Process Integration - This was a session that found a lot of eager faces in Berlin, anxiously waiting for the future to unravel, the future of SAP PI as we know it as of today.

    A huge thumbs up to SAP in organizing this session. I am sure all of us who attended was benefited by the insights and those lovely screenshots of PI from the future. 

    The take away for me has been the following;

    1. The future is Java - Eventually we will see the ABAP stack disappear. So with that in mind, give away with your ABAP mappings. Try to model all your mappings on the graphical editor, XSLT or Java only. If one thing SAP has made clear this year is, then its the Java only future of PI.

    2. Eclipse based Editors - SAP will look towards bring the ESR and ID into NWDS based perspective. I dont think the message here is that SAP will give away with the current Swing based ESR and ID but the step here is to provide additional ways to access the ESR and ID.

    3. Graphical modeling of end to end scenarios - With a concept that SAP currently calls Integration flows, there will be a single concept to work with the TCD life cycle. This will be a graphical representation of an interface process flow (kind of a mix of both the Integration scenario and Configuration scenario?. There would be provisions of templates and patterns. The objective is to reduce the total cost of development and simplify PI as of today.

    4. Reduced TCO  - By enabling a better integration with Sol. Man and centralizing PI monitoring of multiple PI domains this is a major step towards reducing TCO. We can look forwards to see a much better alerting and a better control on the alert inbox. Message alerting will find investment and options to configure and optimize the alert framework, rules etc will find predominance. Enhancements to the User defined Message Search on the payload is also something worth looking forward to (sneak peak already in 7.3).

    5. System Centric Process Support - SAP claims to simplify the ccBPM. This will mean the introduction of BPMN as a standard. Once the ABAP stack ceases to exist, NW BPM will be plugged into PI for ccBPM scenarios. SAP will try to make available a lot more of integration process patterns readily available with PI. But the downside of this is that there is no easy migration of the existing BPEL based ccBPM to BPMN. 

     

    There were many more interesting tit bits. So if you want to know more, I strongly recommend the session, 'A Deep Dive into the Next Generation Process Integration' at other upcoming TechEds.

    This is an extension to my earlier blog TechEd Berlin 2010 & What's in store for PI? where I had promised to brief about the upcoming PI 7.3 and whats in store.

    Before I continue, let me tell you what I felt whenever PI 7.3 was being mentioned by the various speakers including Sindhu Gangadharan and Udo Platzer from the product development team focused on SAP PI. There was a clear and evident emphasis on the fact that SAP is continuously looking forward to invest in SAP PI as a strategic product in the Netweaver suite and that they will continue to upgrade PI in terms of SP, EHPs or even a new release itself.

    So that does sound music to ears or do we need more convincing? Well that will be  decided as the roadmap evolves. But there are signs, good signs I mean and as of now its been a positive verdict on PI from TechEd 2010.

     

    So now what is really new in PI? What the buzz around PI 7.3?

    In a nutshell, to summarize the three main pitch from SAP are the below;

    1. Centralized Monitoring
    2. Single Stack ESB
    3. Reduced TCO

     

    Centralized monitoring

    With 7.3 (and 7.11 SP06 partially), along with Solution Manager 7.1, monitoring in PI will take a new shape. SAP has worked hard to deliver a cool new good morning page, a single screen overview of your PI system that will inform system administrators to check the health of the system and interface flows.There is a cool new ping functionality for communication channels (eg. you can now ping a File adapter and it will give you a detailed report of the ping confirming the accessibility fo the directory, filename etc)

    There is a focus on incident management wherein you can have context sensitive operations that will help navigate to the issue, troubleshoot it, manage it and even escalate it via an incident ticket in Sol. Man and even raise a notification via email or SMS to users.

    You can even add multiple PI domains which means that from a single page you can monitor and analyze root causes for N number of Pi systems.

    Integration with external tools like Tivoli will now become much more easier.

    My verdict: Awesome!!! This has been missing for years and this is definitely a much awaited feature many customer will want to utilize.

     

    Single Stack ESB

    This is something new to the PI world. A single stack, Java only deployment option for PI. This will look towards utilizing the AAE (SAP calls it Advanced Adapter Engine Extended [AEX]. This is the initial step from SAP to move to a single stack based PI which means that we will see the ABAP stack disappear in the coming years. 

    The single stack deployment allows customers to leverage on a low energy footprint, reduced HW and minimal downtime during restarts.

    This also means that the adapters on the ABAP stack have now moved on to the Java stack (yes.... a Java based IDoc and HTTP adapter). 

    Eclipse now gets introduced to the ESR. So you will find NWDS-based editors for creating and editing service interface and data types. More details, refer this PI/XI: PI 7.3 - accessing PI with NWDS - teaser

    There is significant improvement to performance and high volume data transfer, context sensitive view in ESR, support for multi mapping in AAE, Pub Sub for JMS adapters etc.

    My verdict:  There are some exciting changes that has addressed most of the pain points. The ESR - Eclipse integration is in its adolescent stage. Unless we see capabilities for maintaining java mappings etc being featured, I wouldn't be that keen on it.

     

    Reduced TCO

    There has been major enhancements and efforts to reduce TCO for customers by SAP. The fault handling has been improved drastically. The buzz words here is Stability, Performance and SLA. 

    There are features like message blacklisting that will help enable automatic control on problematic messages that can cause system downtime. Advanced garbage collection and improved JVM instability detections. 

    There are now CTC templates provided by SAP which should simplify system installation and configuration. OOM handling and safe restart are other features. 

    SAP has also invested in queue handling (EOIO messages) , optimizing cache refresh.

    A new protocol XI 3.1 has been introduced to increase performance.

    An error queue feature stands out in the latest enhancements which will ensure that a message (EO) that goes to an error in a queue will not affect the other messages in the same queue. The error message will be automatically moved to n error queue so that other messages can continue to be processed.

    There is also queue balancing that will ensure that messages will be distributed automatically to various queues which are free in terms of resources. 

    SAP looks to guarantee a Near Zero Down Time with the AEX.

    My Verdict: The Reduced TCO was something that brought out a smile on my face. This I believe is one of the best features from a SAP PI 7.3 perspective which will enable PI to be a much more stabler product than it is today in a productive environment.

     

    Well there are many more feature apart from the above in 7.3 but what I have mentioned here are what stood out and gained my attention. (Not to forget the 'User defined Message Payload Search' feature which is now productive from 7.3)

    So what do you think about PI 7.3? Is it a story worth buying into?

    So it's TechEd Berlin and it's been great till now. Its day 3 today and most of us here do seem to be missing the last night's rock solid concert featuring Lifehouse.

    I had an agenda at hand before I had hit this city and I am glad that its been a delightful experience till now. I finally caught up with some of the Mentor Wolfpack and spend a good amount of time discussing some of the roadmaps and features that were to come in the future of SAP Netweaver.  

    If I was to summarize TechEd 2010 Berlin from my prespective for the anxious customers, vendors and consultants then in one line it would be that we all need to be ready to embrace change. When I mention change, change is always a positive thing. Change here is betterment, fulfilling a lot of customer needs along with the intention of providing a nicer user experience.

    This TechEd is about the launch of the Netweaver 7.3 suite of products and that means towards the end of this year we will find SAP PI 7.3 in the markets. There are a lot of new features being added which most of us have been waiting for (Thank you SAP for listening...)  

    There was also a session with the emphasis on what the future roadmap is in the space of Process Integration and how there will be some major changes to the product from what we have at our hands today.

    In short, SAP has tried hard to make one point clear - Netweaver is here to stay and SAP will continue to strongly invest in SAP PI. (A statement that is reassuring to a lot of us out there and maybe also the ideal way to respond to reports that have been undermining SAP PI as a strategic product?) 

    I will soon post more about PI 7.3 and about the future of PI (PI 8.0????) in detail soon.

    Until then its 'Tchau' from me !!!

    So here is SAP TechEd again.. and this time I finally have found some time to be there. (Unfortunately last time was held up with my project)

     

    First of all I want to thank SAP for the invitation that covers the admission fee. Such gestures deeply influence the hearts of us SAP Mentor Initiative, prompting us to contribute more and better the community. I believe this is an awesome manner in which SAP nurtures their contributors. Thanks !!!

    A special note of gratitude to my project for allowing me a break just after a week of the system going live. We are in the initial weeks of Post Implementation support and I am sure it wouldn't have been an easy decision to grant me those 3 days off. Last but not the least a big thanks to my organization who have taken steps to encourage its employees and offering them opportunities to be at event like these.

     

    This time, TechEd is going to be special for different reasons. I have been to TechEd Bangalore a couple of times and have enjoyed the whole experience but this is the first time I would be attending the event in Berlin. The venue offers me a great chance to meet fellow mentors and top contributors in this geography who might have not got a chance to visit the great Indian subcontinent.

    I might also get a chance to catch up with Mike in Berlin. We wrote a SAP PI/XI: New Book: The Essentials on SAP NetWeaver Process Integration - A SAP Mentor 2010 Series together which got published 3 months back but the irony is that we have never met each other in person. So Mike, see ya soon.

    Apart from these I am looking forward for the sessions primarily on SAP PI and in the area of Business Process Management, Integration, and Collaboration (PMC).

    If you recognize me, please do stop to say a Hi. You will find me in the conference rooms or near the demo pods or trying my Hands on in one of the Hands On Sessions. 

     

    Looking forward to TechEd Berlin. I am excited, are you?

    SAP recently launched a concept called 'Idea Place'. The whole idea is very simple. The objective is in the betterment of products by feedbacks (or ideas in this case) from users and developers.

     

    Do you have any ideas in the space of Process Integration? Do you want to see more features (feasible ones I assume) that can better SAP PI?

     

    Well If you do want to drive a change maybe you can vote a request for an idea. I have made a suggestion for a new topic 'Process  Integration and the future'. Do log on to ideaplace and vote if you are interested.

     

    Vote HERE

    <body><p> </p><p>1. I don't want any namespace reference in my payload</p><p>2. My message type has the namespace as <XYZ>  but my target system is expecting it to be <ABC></p><p>3. I need to have additional namespaces in my payload</p><p>4. How can I handle XML prefixes in my message?</p><p>5. I want to remove some specific namespaces from my payload </p><p> </p><p>The above are some of the general questions/requirements that a XI/PI developer stumbles upon when dealing with namespaces. This blog is intended to be a quick reference to deal with such requirements.</p><p> </p><p>NO Namespace at all

     

     

     

    The easiest trick here is to remove the namespace reference from the message type itself. You can refer the blog

    How to remove namespaces in Mapping - XI

    to help you with this

     

     

     

     

    A different namespace instead of the one in MT?

     

     

    Taking the approach just discussed above, instead of removing the namespace, go ahead and edit the namespace to what is expected by the target payload.

     

    Original MT:

     

     

    image

     

     

    Modified MT:

     

     

    image

     

     

    Result:

     

     

    !https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/weblogs/images/37298/name_3_may2010.JPG|height=161|alt=image|width=346|src=https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/weblogs/images/37298/name_3_may2010.JPG|border=0!</body>

    "Karmanye Vadhikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana, Ma Karma Phala Hetur Bhurmatey Sangostva Akarmani" - Do your duty and be detached from its outcome, do not be driven by the end product, enjoy the process of getting there. (The Bhagavad Gita)

     

    As a consultant, What is expected of you? Where you able to deliver the expected?

    I guess if we know what is expected of us and we deliver as expected, then there is no debate that appreciation of this achievement is only a farce since there is nothing special attributed to the achievement. But if there were significant deliverables, tangible  or intangible, it is then when you have done something beyond the expectation.

    The problem with most of us today is the desperate need to be appreciated.

    I have personally been in that phase of my professional life (esp. to the start of the career) when I was obsessed with getting my work to be in the limelight. There was a need driven towards being recognized. It was desperate times and when I look back at it now, it was because that was the only way to grow. The secret was 'To be Recognized, you need to highlight'.

    But to that secret there are two tangents. You could either bluff to an audience to whom what you said was new (typical sales with ciphered jargon)  or present to an audience who understands and hence appreciates. I am sure we know numerous examples from our very own lives who you can associate with these tangents.

    Anyway, ignoring the negatives; it is true that today success is part Soft skills and part Core skills. You need to maintain you soft skills along with your technical skills to emerge as a good consultant. To make the right people aware about your (significant) achievements  in the 'right manner and at the right time' is an attribute to success. 

     

    "The World's Number-One Product is also you, and no  one can sell you better than yourself - when you know how." - How to Sell yourself (Joe Girard)

     

    Now let me present a scenario;

    There are two teams in a project. Team A has been right on track from the start. They have been apt on their design, they have spend efforts on QA of the code and unit tested it well. Team B on the other hand did miss some of the activities. 

    At one stage, suddenly it is observed that there has been some issues with the code from Team B. The matter is escalated, the management gets involved, there is a huge hue and cry, huge efforts are spend and finally the code is fixed.

    In the following days, Team B is hailed as a team that has shown commendable competence in fixing the issue. All the while Team A is never in the limelight and even some say for Team A their work was too easy, that's why there were never issues.

     

    Now think about it... give it a while. Is this a common scene today during the delivering of projects?

    The questions that come to my mind are;

    1. Why is it that a majority of human beings think that the objective was simple when there was a smooth delivery of the end product?

    2. Why is it that when there is a problem and it is resolved we forgot what actually caused the problem? 

     

    Maybe its the human psychology... we need to be reminded of what we do and what others do?Is it that its about sensations? A product that went through a smooth delivery in its life cycle ceases to be termed as a significant achievement? Is it because TeamA didnt highlight their achievement when it was in turn a significant one? Or is it that the management never took interest in understanding the significance?

    (maybe here is where the ideal manager can be of help?)

     

    "Catch someone doing something right." - Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson

     

    The case of the tangents?

    Positive tangent - Do your work and highlight the significance

    Negative tangent - Fool the crowd or get lucky when you do things wrong, you fix your mistakes and then you emerge a hero

     

    All this now makes me come back to the verse from the Gita. Should we do our duty and be detached from its outcome?  Is it ideal in the cut throat competitive world we live in?

    Well I think  maybe its beyond what you achieve as your duty. The truth is I dont know. But guess it's food for thought !!!

    This blog will look towards providing the reader an opportunity to explore a view point on Alert management in SAP PI.

     

    NOTE: The view point is personal and hence if the reader has a better suggestion, he/she is welcome to add their recommendations as comments to the blog for the benefit of other readers

     

    The major questions involved are below;

    1. What is the ideal way to manage alerts in SAP PI? How many alert category should be created?

    2. How many rules per category?

    3. What is the best way to manage the recipients? 

    4. Miscellaneous references around Alerts

     

    What is the ideal way to manage alerts in SAP PI? How many alert  categories should be created?

    One of the best ways I believe in managing alerts is to categorize the alerts based on the systems interacting in a particular scenario.The same thought can be extended to the systems interacting in a business process (Order 2 Cash, Emergency WO creation etc).

    The advantage we can leverage with this concept is that in terms of Application support perspective. Usually in case of app. support, the teams would be allocated specific systems or process areas. Thus instead of generic alerts, by categorizing the alerts per system, you can easily forward the alert to specific people looking into the support of a system or process.

    Example;

    Say there are 3 systems SystemA, SystemB and SAP ECC in an interface flow; then Alerts will be configured for SystemA and SystemB assuming that ECC can be either the sender or receiver system at any point in the message flow.

    So the categories will be based on the systems involved in the landscape. Also a category for capturing alerts from BPM can be defined.

     

    How many rules per category? 

    Now that the categories have been defined, creation of rules would be the next step.With per System categories, rules can be framed around the direction of the message flow (outbound and inbound. So per category, you can have rules that will capture any alerts when the message flow is outbound from the system and similarly inbound to the system.

    Note: Alerts in these cases can be with the option of No Restriction in terms of the AE, IE and BPE 

     

    What is the best way to manage the recipients?

    There are various ways in which you can assign a user to be a recipient of alerts but one of the best ways would be to use subscriptions (ALRTCATDEF -> Subscription Authorization). Simple Roles like SAP_XI_DISPLAY_USER_ABAP or SAP_XI_DISPLAY_USER_J2EE can be used so that any user created in PI (with that minimal role) can subscribe (or unsubscribe) to any alerts of their interest on their own.

    Note: In case of email alerts to external parties or groups, a generic user ids can be created with the email id as a distribution list.

     

    Miscellaneous references around Alerts

    a. You can always move your alert configuration and rules to a different environment using normal ABAP transports. In case of alert rules, there are standard reports available which can help in the transport - PI/XI: Transporting alerts - quick tip

    b. Alert via Email? - Configuration for forwarding Alerts as Emails

    c. Alerts for Queues - SAP XI/PI: Alerts for Queue Errors

    d. Customizable Alerts? - You can use the function module 'SALERT_CREATE' to generate your own custom alerts.

    Some time back, an interesting article was released on SDN titled - How to Set Up the Communication between ABAP Back-end and SOAP Adapter using XI Protocol.

    From PI 7.1 EHP1, we have the XI protocol as part of the SOAP adapter and hence now it is possible to connect to the ABAP back-end using the AAE/Integrated Configuration.

     

    Note: IDoc  are not supported for AAE communication. In case of designing your scenarios, you would have to base it on ABAP proxies. Else, alternative would be to go for RFC calls.

     

    I have used the new feature in a couple of scenarios and following is my thoughts around it;

     

    Pros

    1. A well thought feature. Before EHP1, majority of scenarios except for communication with the ABAP back-end was left out. With the XI protocol, you can now use proxies to connect to ECC.

    2. Performance - AAE definitely gives you a good performance - I guess there is no doubt around that :)

     

    Cons

    1. Can only use proxies (IDocs are not supported. RFCs are supported by default)

    2. Additional settings - Sender ECC scenarios requires some additional configuration SXMSIF and SXMB_ADM. Hence during moving to different environments, these have to be configured separately in ECC (Does SAP provide a report to take these settings as a transport?)

    3. Potential issues in Synchronous scenarios - It was observed that while configuring sync scenarios with ECC as the sender system, while initiating parallel calls. Only one call was successful while others failed. I gather this might be a bug. (Did spend a lot of time around this troubleshooting but couldn't find an explanation)  - Find a thread discussion on this <SAP:Code area="PARSING">GENERAL</SAP:Code> - Error

     

    In summary, I think this is an excellent feature and guess SAP is providing this as a temporary option. Soon most of the adapters would be moved to the JAVA stack and these communications would be more easier. The SOAP adapter using XI protocol, the way it is being configured might be subjected to changes (you can find some hints around this in the article) .

    From a design front, try to stick with async scenarios but before that, do confirm if sync scenarios work fine for you (maybe it was after all some issue at my end that I ran into failures on the parallel calls)

     

    All in all, much appreciated feature that you can 'definitely' consider while designing scenarios which are SLA driven and heavily depend on performance and response times.

    The Trigger:

    A Gartner report that said "With NetWeaver PI's future unclear, don't use it for strategic projects"

    Who is Concerned:

    1. Customers who read the article

    2. Colleagues and Friends in the SAP PI space (What is our future? Is this all true?)

     

    On January 28, 2010 the SAP Mentors were invited to a session the objective of which was to clarify the roadmap of SAP PI. 

    The meeting was presided by Udo Paltzer, Solution Manager for NetWeaver Middleware. Joining him was Sanjay Chikarmane and Yvonne Waibel.The below is the summary of what was discussed;

    1. SOALogix acquisition does not impact SAP PI. It has been acquired to strengthen the integration of project and portfolio management (PPM) solutions.

    2. Committed to SAP PI and will remain invested for the development of PI

    3. Emergence of Business Aware Middleware and SAP PI is a core ingredient

    4. SAP PI 7.3 - The next release

     

    Further details are part of the article by Jon Reed - Clarifying the Future of NetWeaver PI

     

    Note: Posting this info on SDN since we have a very wide audience following the RSS feeds of the blogs here. Hope this information comes as a relief to many consultants who have been woring with XI/PI for long and also for those who have started their XI/PI journey :)

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