I have had my basis hat on a lot lately, so I might as well cover another piece of the basis puzzle. For anyone like me, you don’t have a lot of time to figure out exactly how to upgrade the system, but you want the stability (at least usually) that comes with an updated system. For me, I was trying to upgrade my system to a point that my BSP application would be supported on the Mozilla Firefox browser. I’ll talk more about this at a later time (I’m still collecting details on that portion). Needless to say, I read an OSS message that said, get to support 19, and I was at 12. So today I thought I’d talk about applying SAP support packs.
Step 1. Figure out the components you’ll need to update, and what your current version is. If you go to system->status, and look at the detailed levels, you’ll see things like BASIS, ABAP, etc… based on the OSS message, you’ll what you need to update. Find the component, and then find the SAP naming convention. For example the BASIS stuff is KB700<XX>. This is important because it’s an easy shortcut to download exactly what you need.
Step 2. go to service.sap.com and head to the software area: and select the Search for Software Downloads. Take the naming convention from above and one by one, find the pieces you need. If you need a lot, it’s probably faster to go to the support section. Me, was only doing 6 files.
Step 3. Once everything is downloaded, log into SAP (your dev system/client) and go to transaction SPAM. Select the import and one by one, import each of the files you downloaded. Don’t apply the packs one by one… it’s a long enough process, so do the whole group at once.
Step 4. Once all the pieces have been imported, press the truck to start a new “installation”. you’ll have the options to select the area you want to update, for example BASIS. It will show you all the new imports and will lump them into a package. From here, just keep hitting OK. Give yourself plenty of time to be without the system. This could easily take several hours based on the power of your system.
*** Note: you might have to upgrade your SAINT as well. If this happens, you’ll get a message that support pack XXX must have SAINT version YY. Simply repeat step 2 & 3 for the SAINT update. There is another menu option to update the SAINT. run this, and wait for it to finish. It typically takes a while, and sometimes even shortdumps. If this happens, you can generally jsut log back in and restart the process. It will pick up where you left off and finish up the install. Then you can go back to step 4.
Step 5. Run SGEN. I’ll typically pick the software component to update, but feel free to select what works best for you. Short story, this will help compile the thousands of program that need it, and hopefully save you quite a bit of time for every transaction you visit for the first time.
If all goes well, your system is running better than ever after the update…
Good luck,
Mike