Well, I had to move back into the world of Basis again. SAP sent out a message a couple months ago basically saying you have to implement a bunch of OSS notes, or move your system up to a certain support pack level. Well, needless to say, I’m way behind on support pack for my systems anyways. This is partly intentional and partly just a lack of time. The intentional part helps keep me accessible no matter what version of SAP support packs my potential customers have. Well, since I have to contractually do this, it was a good opportunity to update my systems. This posts talks about my challenges of getting support packs for my SAP system.
Well, support packs, in theory, are very easy to implement. Transaction SPAM does everything for you. Well, the challenge for me came in to get the actual support packs to implement. As it turns out, anything after a certain date can only be acquired using Solution Manager (there’s a way around this that I found). Now my problem is that I have a solution manager system, but it’s not really connected to anything. I’ve used SOLMAN purely to get the access codes for system installation. Now I know that SAP keeps hyping up SOLMAN, but to be honest for my purposes it has no value add. So I went through and started to manually download all of the support packs I needed.
Even the download was tougher than I expected. I dug around service.sap.com until I finally found the support “stack” table of contents to find out what packages are required. Initially, I did it the hard way of downloading the packs I thought I needed, tried to implement, and found out it had more pre-requisites. Well, I finally found everything I needed, but in my SAP Download manager, it showed everything under needing approval.
Well, I can only guess that if I had a fully functioning SOLMAN, I could do this, but instead, I went out and posted an OSS message to approve the packs. Be sure to set the area as: SV-SMG-MAI-APR As it turns out, SAP will quickly approve these and let you just download them (Thank goodness for that…). I did make a very brief effort to get the SOLMAN component working to allow me to do it from there, but I had no success, and no time to investigate it.
Anyway, I wanted to pass along these little tidbits. My EHP4 system is still running after 36 hours, so who knows how long it will take to finish, but it’s rolling =) Thanks for reading.
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,
Mike