Future 7.2

An important aspect for planning the release change is that the official standard support for Solution Manager 7.1 ends on December 31, 2017.

Customers still using SAP Solution Manager 7.1 after this date will continue to receive support from SAP, in line with their principle of "support never ends".

However, companies may have to pay for this as part of customer-specific support or wait longer for error corrections.

Especially in the certified environment, where SAP Solution Manager scenarios and processes are also audited, auditors take a critical view of the use of software that is no longer supported in standard support.

S/4 Hana as a driver

For many customers, the upcoming S/4 projects in the company create a lot of pressure.

They need to plan ahead and decide exactly which initial and subsequent steps are right for them.

For example, SAP Activate Content, the best practices for S/4 implementation along the SAP Activate methodology, is only available for SolMan 7.2.

This content is not provided for Solution Manager 7.1. Implementing a SolMan 7.2 is therefore the first important step for customers dealing with the topic of S/4 Hana.

It is not only Activate Content that is relevant for S/4 Hana customers: When looking at the SAP S/4 Hana Roadmap, which SAP provides to its customers for the creation of an individual roadmap, there are topics that will only be available with the required scope of functions with Release 7.2.

All terminals

In line with the coupling to S/4 Hana, SolMan 7.2 also supports the new user interface technology Fiori.

Customers can provide intuitive user interfaces, starting from the SolMan Fiori apps provided, as well as ITSM cloud solutions, which have recently been positioned against SolMan and have been used by some customers because of their ease of use.

Thanks to the use of HTML5, SolMan apps can be used on all devices that support HTML5, which applies to popular mobile devices and smartphones.

Custom code

Custom Code Management (CCM) or Custom Code Lifecycle Management (CCLM) already existed in earlier versions of Solution Manager, but have so far only been used by a manageable number of customers.

The conversion to Hana and S/4 Hana means that all coding that is not available in the SAP standard must be reviewed and revised with regard to Hana.

Customers who have been using SAP for a long time may have accumulated a lot of in-house coding over the years.

It is assumed that up to 65 percent of this coding is hardly or not at all used or is now available in the SAP standard (source: SAP SE).

It does not make sense to adapt this coding. Custom code management offers itself to identify and remove the unused coding and only then to adapt the self-developed components.

Solution Documentation

SAP has revised the topic Solution Documentation (process and solution documentation) most intensively and now supports several functions that have been requested by customers for a long time.

For example, SAP Solution Manager 7.2 removes the long-criticized restriction to a process hierarchy with only three levels and now makes up to 99 levels possible.

In addition, an integrated editor for mapping processes according to BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) is provided free of charge within the support, so that process documentation can be carried out within Solution Manager without having to connect an additional external editor.

This function is particularly interesting for customers who are planning S/4 projects.

As part of the change to S/4, the future processes are documented - in SAP Solution Manager this can be done based on content from SAP within the established technology without having to purchase additional licenses.

The close integration of solution documentation and ITSM scenarios makes it possible to integrate documentation into change management in the future in order to keep documentation up to date at all times.

The greatest added value can be generated in the context of test management for S/4 projects if test management is built up based on the new solution documentation.

To enable these enhancements to the solution documentation, the entire technical basis of the solution documentation was converted, resulting in the need for some significant adjustments to all scenarios that access its content and functions.

Content Activation

The step in which the existing Solution Documentation is migrated to the new base is called Content Activation.

It is a critical point in the upgrade for customers with productive use of Solution Documentation in Solution Manager 7.1, especially if the technical basis of Solution Documentation has been expanded.

Here, before the upgrade, it must be analyzed exactly which adjustments were made in the modeling and how these behave during the activation or which measures must be taken to successfully complete the activation within the upgrade.

Customers for whom a test run in the Cloud Appliance Library (CAL) is not possible due to compliance regulations must perform these tests in a specially installed system.

It must be taken into account that the activation cannot be done step by step, but only once per system.

The new test suite

Of the Solution Manager scenarios, the topic of test management is most intensively linked to solution documentation.

This is where the biggest dependencies arise, so that Test Management was also not part of the official Solution Manager 7.2 ramp-up and was only available with General Availability (SP 3) in August .

Above all, the new possibilities offered by test management catch the eye. Here, an existing solution, which was often only used together with other test management solutions, has been expanded in such a way that all the requirements for a professional and fully comprehensive test management tool are now fulfilled - including the option for automatic testing.

Against this background, SAP TAO as well as SAP Solution Manager Adapter for HP ALM have also been removed from the SAP price list. They are now only maintained for customers who have the solution in use.

Upgrade: Planning and roadmap

From a technical point of view, in Solution Manager Upgrade, an instance in which both server components are present together must be separated into Abap and Java Server.

Many customers are toying with the idea of implementing SolMan 7.2 with the Hana database, which is available license-free for Solution Manager, in order to gain initial experience.

Especially if Hana is an option, this is not a simple technical NetWeaver upgrade.

The changes in the solution documentation already described and the resulting challenges for the dependent scenarios make the SolMan upgrade a challenging project from a technical point of view.

Release upgrade options

First: Upgrade existing Solution Manager installations.

Applies primarily to customers who use Solution Manager for technical scenarios or scenarios that have few dependencies on Solution Documentation.

Second: New installation of Solution Manager 7.2 with subsequent migration of documents and records in Solution Manager 7.1.

This option provides the possibility to get rid of unneeded intermediate versions stored in the Solution Manager database during migration.

Third: Complete reimplementation of the SolMan 7.2 system and rebuilding of the documentation and scenarios.

This option is particularly interesting for customers who are concretely considering the change to S/4 Hana. These customers can directly use the new release for the new landscape and create the documentation anew for the S/4 environment.

There is a fairly large gray area between the first two options: Issues such as audited IT processes, complex additional developments, but also plans for merging several Solution Manager installations within a company can tip the scales and must be evaluated individually.