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I’m pretty excited.  I recently released my third e-book.  I decided to take a bit of a different approach to this book.  Rather than talking about configuration and how to set it up from a technical perspective, I focused more on data within the notification.  My other 2 books heavily discussed how to configure the notification, so for this book I wanted to focus more on what is available to add to the notification, as well as give my person recommendations.  If you happen to check it out, I’d love to hear you thoughts.

SAP Service Management: Using the Service Notification

I’m currently starting working on a book all about service contracts.  It will end up being more of the end to end service contract manual (including configuration), but obviously, everything I learn from the notification book will shape the new book.

Thanks for reading,

I recently had to reset one of my test systems.  The same test system was where my cloud connector was installed, so I needed to reinstall it.  Initially, the install went well, but for some reason, when I went to reinstall, it wasn’t working.  I’m not sure if it’s because the Hana Cloud Platform was already configured to use it.  But I found I needed to do the following.

1. Install Java SDK
2. Install the latest version of the cloud connector
3. Login:
   1. Administrator
   2. manage
4. Then, go to the access control tab and set up the system and services you want to be available.
5. go to the Principal Propagation and press refresh.

I believe in my case, step 5 was the key.  Anyway, hope this can help you out,

Thanks for reading,

It’s rather amazing, after all the time I’ve been using the BAPI: BAPI_SALESORDER_CHANGE, I just learned something new.  I was recently trying to do an update to a repair sales order to add lines automatically from a service quotation.  The problem I kept running into was that no matter what I tried, the update of a condition didn’t work. It just kept adding a second line (and to make things worse, it was ignored in lieu of the automatically determined condition).

this took some digging to figure out, but I finally found OSS Note: 593246

The note explains that the LOGIC_SWITCH-COND_HANDLE = ‘X’ parameter allows you to simplify the whole condition process.  By using this you no longer need to explicitly define something as insert or update (I or U).  Instead, you skip entering the entire CONDITIONS_INX table.  Instead, just enter in the basic fields of the condition that you need:

ORDER_CONDITIONS_IN-ITM_MUMBER = ‘000010’
ORDER_CONDITIONS_IN-COND_TYPE = ‘PR00′
ORDER_CONDITIONS_IN-COND_VALUE = ’10’
ORDER_CONDITIONS_IN-CURRENCY = ‘EUR’

the BAPI takes care of the rest.  I can’t believe I’ve never run into this before, but this one was worth capturing.

thanks for reading,

A while ago, I wrote an E-Course to demonstrate some simple things you could do today to help your service business become more efficient and more profitable.  I recently found that when I changed over my website I lost the links to this, so it had just been sitting idle (shame on me).  So I went through and checked the links and made sure it was still valid.  Well, like so much of service management, very little changes.  Including the easy things you can do today.  You don’t need to buy anything, you don’t need to make radical changes (you might need some business approvals to start new programs, but hey, they don’t really cost you anything).  For those reason, I hope you check out my E-course.

Service Management E-Course

As always, if you have any questions, just let me know.  Thanks for reading,

Well, in taking the OpenSAP class, I learned a new trick.  This may be old hat to you hardcore developers, but it was new for me.  This trick is especially helpful when testing from a REST client.  I personally use Postman, but it really doesn’t matter.  Simply add the following statement to the end of your service call:

?sap-ds-debug=true

Then execute the call, and you will get a much nicer look at exactly what is sent back from your request.  It gives you the opportunity to look at things while clicking on links to see what exactly is happening.  It even provides links to other entity sets you may be calling.  Just a little tip to make life easier for you.

Thanks for reading,

I recently talking with friend Jeff, and we started going down an interesting tangent.  We started talking about all of the mobility that SAP is driving to.  Between Fiori, Personas, UI5 etc, SAP is really trying to give it’s tired old look a face lift.  Far be it from to argue that SAP is ugly.  Then the recent news of the SAP/Apple partnership made me ask the question the whole concept.  I realize that we are living in a mobile world, and everything does things from their phones.  But how much of your enterprise business can really be done a mobile device?

Now, there is the obvious things like field service, mobile sales teams, and perhaps in some industries there is even a smart enough customer base to give your customers the possibility to create their own sales orders or service requests.  But for things like production, finance, HR, purchasing etc, how much work would ever be done mobile???  I would love to hear some feedback on this.  How mobile is a company willing to be?  and how much are they willing to invest in it?  I just personally see it in such a restricted place that you would ever need a mobile app on your iPhone to interact with SAP.

Now, I’m all about the cloud, and for my personal world of service, I’m all about mobility.  But in my humble opinion, why you would need anything more than a web application (FIORI) for most businesses in most areas.  And when you do, just make it a Hybrid application.  Then you get the best of both worlds without redesigning the wheel.  It’s true, if you do some native, you can make it look however you want.  And if the app is customer facing, I totally understand.  But how many things will be customer facing?  and how many of your customers will be downing a new mobile app to do business with you?  I personally find myself clearing out a lot of apps a week or two after I install them.  I realize it’s much easier to go on a browser with a real keyboard.  It’s novel, but for me, not practical.

What do you think?  I’m just out of touch on how important mobile is?  or this just a buzz word that SAP is trying too hard to capitalize on?

Thanks for reading,

Well, for those of you that don’t really care about the technical nuances of UI5, you’ll be happy to know that I can give it a rest for a bit after today.  Now, this took me way more time than it should have.  I kept looking for elegant solutions to solve this, and at the end of the day, I really should have just kept it simple (it’s ultimately what worked).  So, the issue with the valuehelprequest is that it doesn’t send back a text value, rather it sends back and object.  This object has Tokens and other pieces.  Well, since I”m using the storage method to save this to the browser so it can be saved for the user, storage can NOT write an object.  It pretty much has to be JSON text.  It initially took me some time to figure out why it stopped saving anything to my browser.  Once I finally figured out the cause, then I went into solution mode.

My first idea (that spent entirely too much time on) was to build a simple JSON model and assign that model to my storage object.  Well, I didn’t really think it through, since a JSON model is an object itself…  but I tried for a while with arrays, JSON, etc…  Needless to say, this approach did not work for me.  Finally, I decided to just convert it to a text string.  Even this took a little time, since I needed to figure out keys to use in order to be able to read it back without the possibility of random data screwing it up (and it could still happen… but it’s at least unlikely).

So, I chose to capture it in the following format:

Key%%%Text;;; Key%%%Text;;;  for as many search criteria as the user entered.

Then, when I come back, I can read the method I wrote about yesterday to get all the values I needed to create a filter or to re-write the values into the input fields.  I used a simple while loop to get it back:

iLen = val.length;
while (iLen > 0) {
iEnd = val.indexOf(“%%%”);
sKey = val.slice(0, iEnd);
val = val.slice(iEnd + 3, iLen);
iEnd = val.indexOf(“;;;”);
sText = val.slice(0, iEnd);
val = val.slice(iEnd + 3, iLen);
iLen = val.length;
// call my method from yesterday’s post
oTok = ProxProdSup.util.Formatter.getFilters(sKey, sText);
//  then either create tokens for the input field or create filters.

Thanks for reading,