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If you’ve ever wanted to get to SAP’s Service MarketPlace on the iPad, you’ll no doubt have been rather frustrated by the constant, repetitive requests for you to enter your user name and password. Whilst you may already have memorized your S-user ID, it’s unlikely you’ll take kindly to constant prompts to enter that and your password over and over again.

The same is true for a web browser on a desktop and the answer is simple: install the single sign-on certificate provided by SAP. You can find that on the Service MarketPlace by logging on and navigating to your profile. Download the certificate from there. It is likely that you’ll need to do this using Firefox on the Mac. Once downloaded and installed, restart the browser.

The default certificate needs to be exported for use by Safari, both on the Mac and iPad. The best way to do this is to use Firefox, navigate to Preferences. From there, select Advanced, then Encryption and click the View Certificates button.

Select the certificate, then click the Backup button. Enter a name and place to keep the exported certificate. Be sure to select PKCS12 as the format.

If you need to access SDN or Service MarketPlace using Safari, double-click the exported file and allow the content to be placed into your keychain. For use on the iPad, add the exported certificate file into a mail message and send it to an account you can access using your iPad. On the iPad, open the mail message.

Tap on the certificate embedded in the mail message. You will be prompted to install it.

Tap on Install and accept the message indicating the certificate’s status.

When prompted, enter the password for your S-user ID.

The profile should be installed now.

I recommend restarting Safari on the iPad and trying to log on to the Service MarketPlace again. You should find the convenience of the single sign on quite appealing.

In my move to make a Mac my permanent computing solution, I am busy investigating various solutions and applications I’ll need to be free of Windows. No native port of the SAPGUI exists for Mac OS X, making access to SAP systems potentially problematic. Instead, the Java version needs to be used and this has been updated by SAP about one month ago. The 720 release of the PlatinGUI for Mac OS X can be found on SAP‘s ftp server. In comparison to the Windows native software package requiring at least 500MB of storage space, the PlatinGUI package is exceptionally light, requiring only the download of a single 32MB file.

There are a few base requirements that need to be satisfied before attempting the installation. A Core 2 Duo processor and 1GB of RAM is required in the target machine. From a software perspective, either Mac OS X 10.5.7 or 10.6 has to be loaded and an updated Java SE. Below Mac OS X 10.5.7, Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 4 is required, whilst the Java SE 6 is already present in Mac OS X 10.6. The installation was rather uneventful, creating a program icon in the Applications folder. I find the creation of new connections to be simplest under the Advanced tab with the Expert mode enabled.

Create a direct connection to the SAP system using the connection string

conn=/H/<IP Address>/S/32<Port>

The Java GUI supports almost all functions provided by the native applications. There may be one or two complex, modern transactions that may be hamstrung, but in the technical area, everything I require works without a hitch.

No trouble getting to SAP from the Apple…

Another typical example of the carbon interface problem when dealing with computing tasks. In this case, I had completed an interface in SAP PI to accept SOAP messages from a third-party system. Everything worked rather well until I started sending some real test messages to ensure the whole process from message acceptance to table update using my custom function module works. Not a nice sight in WE02:

The error message? EDI: Partner profile inbound not available. This is a bit of a catch-all and generally indicates that there is something missing or wonky in the SLD. Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out the problem. Clearing the SLD cache, re-creating technical and business systems, ensuring all necessary entries had been made all over the show…nothing.

The long text to the error provided a clue and I had a look at the table that contains all inbound profile information, EDP21. And there it was: I’d entered LS for some reason in the SNDPFC (partner role) field. In WE20, I removed the offending entry and saved.

Then tried again.

Problem solved.

Project Muse has been spun off into a usable product and now goes by the name Netweaver Business Client. It’s an attractive alternative to the run-of-the-mill SAPGUI, though it will suit certain users more than others. To download, head on over to the SWDC section in the SAP Service Marketplace, then navigate to the Frontend Components section. The 15MB download is quick and easy to install, though an existing SAPGUI installation is a requirement on the Windows-only workstation if SAPGUI applications are to be executed within the client.

The main aim of the Business Client is to enhance productivity and make interaction with backend systems a lot easier and prettier. The unified interface for a wide variety of business applications comprises the Shell and the Canvas, basically the wrapper and the content for all applications.

All standard applications run in the Canvas including,

• Web Dynpro for ABAP
• Web Dynpro for Java SAPGUI applications
• BI reports
• Flex content
• Adobe Forms

Web Dynpro applications should be a lot faster running inside the client due to the use of XML. PowerLists provide quicker access to difficult-to-remember SAP transaction codes. SAP‘s FAQ may answer a number of other questions you may have. Find it here.

Better information is finally available that details how SAP is planning to integrate its disparate business intelligence portfolio. Having purchased BusinessObjects more than a year ago, there was a fair bit of trepidation and uncertainty in the SAP customer base. No clear path for the future solution environment regarding SAP BI was communicated, other than a rather generic and cryptic statement to indicate that further information would be made available at a later date.

That’s fair enough. The SAP product suite has grown by leaps and bounds and the addition of an entire product portfolio doesn’t help. The good news is that the strategic direction SAP has chosen makes sense: it basically consists of selecting the best of breed products from the entire portfolio, arranging solution components where they make sense and cutting sub-standard products out entirely.

The existing SAP business intelligence portfolio is billed as a complete stack, whilst the BusinessObjects product set is deemed to be open and agnostic to underlying technologies.

A single platform consisting of SAP and BusinessObjects products is to provide full access to critical information for anyone in the enterprise, from the executive to the general business person. Of course, business requirements are diverse in an enterprise.

As I mentioned above, SAP has taken the decision to integrate the BusinessObjects product range with their existing BI stack. That obviously means that certain products will no longer be maintained and will be phased out.

Here’s my opinion: SAP is excellent when it comes to providing a very robust, stable and fully-featured backend infrastructure. Unfortunately, the guys in Walldorf don’t share the same acumen with their countrymen scarcely 100km down the road at Porsche. Traditionally, anything that SAP has produced that interacts directly with the end user is rather shocking. Hardly user-friendly, generally ugly and certainly not easy to modify. The Enterprise Portal is a prime example. Sure, it’s possibly to meld it into something that reflects the look and feel a company may wish to provide its customer base and end users. But its hard work and not always easily achievable. Even the SAPGUI has only become a bit better looking since the German product made it big in the US some years ago…

With that in mind, it’s a relief to see that common sense has prevailed and that the strengths in each product suite are being exploited. Granted, BusinessObjects don’t really have much to compete in the backend space, but their user interface is nothing short of spectacular.

The speed and flexibility with which one can build interactive dashboards with Xcelsius is quite astounding. The SAP Business Explorer (BEx) is best not mentioned in comparison. The raw power and flexibility of the core business warehouse backend is the existing SAP BI system, providing cubes and other data structures together with rock-solid ETL tools.

Report Designer gives way to Crystal Reports. Web App Designer gives way to Xcelsius. BEx gives way to Pioneer. Pioneer is a new product that will provide for easier and more advanced analysis on OLAP data sources. Pioneer will replace the existing Voyager product and will provide backward compatability to legacy query views and BEx workbooks.

The strategy makes sense to me, and should provide existing SAP BI customers with a means of finally providing their end users with something they must have been yearning for for years: a pretty, easy to use front end.

And of course easy access to the data they really need to do their job. How could I have forgotten about that…

Yesterday, I attended the SAP World Tour 2009 at Gallagher Estate in Midrand. The proceedings of the day included various tracks, each focussing on a different aspect of the Netweaver product suite. SOA and Enterprise Services are the current marketing angles SAP is attempting to employ to get companies to spend more money.

The low-down is this: excluding SAP staff, an estimated 450 customers and partners attended yesterday’s event. Considering what it costs to send 450 individuals to such an event, the quality of information provided was abysmal. I speak only for the sessions I attended, of course. To be fair, SAP is forced to provide information at a level of a common denominator. That means presentations need to target hard-core technical people as well as those with a passing interest in a certain topic. Maybe that’s the problem with my evaluation, but I struggled to find any value in anything I saw. What’s most frustrating and annoying is the fact that that SAP still presents its products as those requiring only a few clicks with a mouse to get going.

With the exception of the SAPGUI, I have yet to see any product in the SAP stable that is simple and cheap to install. Then again, installation is not the tricky bit either: configuration of the exceptionally complex heterogenous environments is nothing short of a huge effort, resulting in a huge cost. Since individuals who attend the SAP World Tour are generally already well-versed with the SAP ecosystem, why not be a bit more truthful? Instead of showing off how easy it is to click and drag objects in the Composition Environment, why not show a true reflection of how much effort it eventually takes to get something to deliver true business value?

It’s all a marketing game, of course. But it leads to a collection of customers who get a rude shock when the software is installed and an extensive project plan has to be developed that includes many specialized resources all costing a lot of money to get the software to deliver very basic functionality. There’s no question that SAP delivers some fine backend software. It’s robust and has proven itself. But that’s not the argument.

To show presentations and disseminate information that makes the overall effort of implementation seem no effort at all is a bad long-term marketing strategy. Market your product, by any means, but stay within the boundaries of what is realistic. Implementing SAP has never been a point-and-click exercise. It’s unlikely to ever be that.

It’s been many years since I last ran an SAP upgrade. In the days of 2.2F, upgrades were a lot of fun, took many days and required a bit of thinking. A seven day upgrade was a challenge and made you feel like you’d accomplished something! Nowadays, it’s a question of swapping DVD‘s and answering questions posed by the guided procedure. Of course, that’s all good and on the whole, the PREPARE and SAPUP programs perform admirably. Except, I’ve had a heck of a time with the Java runtime to allow me to use the Upgrade Assistant. Not only with the upgrades I’ve had the pleasure of piloting in the past two weeks, mind you. The same nonsense occurs during the installation and maintenance of the portal. It’s a bad reflection on the much-hyped write-once, run anywhere model the Java virtual machine was supposed to provide.

My overall experience with Java has hardly been positive. Even worse is the odd mood and glaring inconsistencies the software seems to show: so, for example, I am able to deploy a JRE version 1.6 (not recommended by SAP) to run the Upgrade Assistant during an upgrade of a 4.6C Oracle system on Windows 2003 to 4.7. The Upgrade Assistant works happily and there are no glitches. I used that version simply because I had no access to anything else. That same JRE fails to make the Upgrade Assistant function on a 4.6C MaxDB system on Windows 2003 that is a candidate for an upgrade to ECC 6. But, the recommended versions in the version range 1.4.2 refuse to work, too. In the case of 1.4.2.13 the Upgrade Assistant starts but throws an error almost straight away:

SAP note 941595 provides a link to a URL on the Sun site where a much older Java version can be downloaded. Why can’t SAP provide a tried and tested Java runtime or SDK in the upgrade pack? It’s incredibly frustrating to install and uninstall Java runtime components to try and get a non-critical software component up and running. As a command line fan I’m very happy to simply run all my upgrades with mode SCROLL:

It recaptures that authentic SAP upgrade mood. Who the hell needs a GUI for an upgrade in any case?

I’ve recently experienced the trials and tribulations of installing and upgrading a piece of software I’ve known for many years. Starting life as DDB4, MaxDB under the MySQL banner has gone through many hands and developers, and even more names. Developed by the University of Berlin under sponsorship from Nixdorf Computers, it transformed into Supra, Entire-SQL, Adabas D and then SAP DB. The software has has been open-sourced for a while and has been under the knife many, many times. And that shows.

A recent installation of SAP 4.6C on Windows 2003 64-bit went rather awry. Strangely, SAP 4.6C installed without issue on the default database version of its day, SAP DB 7.2.05. Even better, the subsequent upgrade of the database software completed without issue to SAP DB 7.3.04. Since I intended upgrading to ECC 6.0, I hoped to get everything running in the SYSWOW64 shell, then transferring to 64-bit later on. Everything went well until I hit the upgrade to SAP DB 7.4.3. That failed spectacularly, many times. The reason for my upgrade path is the unfortunate legacy of an application passed from vendor to vendor and developer to developer. You can’t simpy upgrade to the latest, but have to follow a complicated upgrade path. I tried many things, but could not get the 7.4.3 software installed or upgraded. SAP technical support eventually indicated they could not support my upgrade path – try the 32-bit route, they suggested.

The 32-bit installation of the same type as tried in the SYSWOW64 shell works flawlessly. But even here, there is a dangerous side effect that trapped me on the second system with a database sized just beyond a certain limit. To cater for a database restore, I ensured the target database was at least 120GB in size. Accidentally, my first successful installation ended up being in the region of 126.9GB. On the quality assurance system, I sized the database slightly larger: 129.3GB, to be precise. I don’t pick these numbers, but simply provide a MB size in case you were wondering…

Turns out anything beyond 128GB for a database segment or space is too large. But not for SAP DB versions 7.2.05 or 7.3.04. No: it’s too big for version 7.4.3 and causes the upgrade to fail yet again:

extracting: -rw-r–r–       443294 2004-08-24 20:46:41 runtime/jar/sapdbc.jar
checking unpacked archive… ok
installation of SAP DB Server finished successfully Tu, Aug 26, 2008 at 10:17:43

finding instance type…
starting release already known
migration strategy already known
running finalize check…
looking for domain user…
current database state is OFFLINE
checking parameters…
parameter check failed
cannot finish instance update for “SID”
current database state is OFFLINE
checking parameters…
parameter check failed
param_checkall
ERR
-24973,ERR_XPCHECK: param check failure/request
DATA_SIZE_0002  Constraint
17024000

On later versions, this error can be resolved by changing the value of a database parameter, thus:

dbmcli -d <DBSID> -u <dbm>,<dbm pass> param_directput VOLUMENO_BIT_COUNT 6

But of course, this parameter does not exist in 7.4.3. Thankfully I could simply restart the installation and select smaller dbspaces instead of backing up, resizing and then restoring.

It’s an important lesson for all user of open-source software: the cost of free software is not measured by it’s ease of acquisition, deployment or ability to customize its features. Instead, its real cost is often realized only when it may already be too late: it’s been deployed and the organization using it has become dependent on it.

This is an extreme case: the versions of SAP DB mentioned here have been out of maintenance for ages. Nonetheless, such software is still in active use, as my experience has taught me…

And don’t ever believe the hype that software featuring a higher version number will be better than an older one!

I’m busy with a business intelligence architecture for a customer. In the course of sitting down and finally getting down to writing something, I discovered the following subtle nuance I hadn’t previously considered:

Dashboards and scorecards are often confused to be one and the same. This is not entirely correct: scorecards chart progress toward objectives. The common perception of a scorecard is that it displays periodic snapshots of performance associated with an organization’s strategic objectives and plans. It measures business activity at a summary level against predefined targets to see if performance is within acceptable ranges. It displays key performance indicators that help executives communicate strategies and help users focus on the highest-priority tasks needed to execute plans. While a dashboard informs users what they are doing, a scorecard tells them how well they are doing. In other words, a dashboard is a performance monitoring system and a scorecard is a performance management system.

I don’t remember where I got it from, but it’s rather interesting…

SAP is starting to push the SOA bandwagon with a bit more vigour. For companies and individuals a bit more interested in the technicalities of Service Oriented Architecture, the new Enterprise SOA Starter Kit is a useful resource. Little more than a fancy slideshow with links to documents going into more specific detail, the Starter Kit is a 250MB download from the SAP Developer Network. You’ll need to be registered on the SDN, log on and then follow this link. The downloaded file is in RAR format, not ZIP. Get unrar here.

Remember to unpack with option x, like so: unrar x StarterKit.rar to maintain the necessary directory structure.

There’s certainly a lot of information contained in the pack, together with some interesting case studies. If you can deal with the product-specific slant (IBM and other vendors are no different), this should serve as a valuable starting point for generating a business case for a small SOA project. Remember, small and manageable is key. Also: you want to show a business benefit, not implement something for the sake of cool technology.

The idea is to take something like this

to something like this over a period of time.

Of course, theory and practice does not always blend seamlessly. Some disappointment is inevitable until this technology stack has had a chance to mature and prove itself.