SAP Central Process Scheduling (CPS) - Job's in error with no logs

See SCN blog: http://scn.sap.com/people/jamie.neilan/blog/2013/07/01/sap-cps--1-silly-way-to-create-an-abtuse-error

SAP CPS Licensing short blog

New short SAP CPS blog on licensing - see http://scn.sap.com/people/jamie.neilan/blog/2013/06/12/sap-cps--license-conundrums

SAP SCN Blogging running in parallel

Just a quick first 2013 post to mention that I am now utilising SAP SCN blogging in order to be more closely tied into the SAP professional community - I will post more general thoughts on here and link together for any few who may stumble across my blogs.

http://scn.sap.com/people/jamie.neilan/blog 

Moving from SM36/37 to an external job scheduler

Recently I'm pre-occupied by using external job schedulers to control SAP batch jobs in a IT landscape with multiple SAP systems.

My current thoughts turn to security between business functions and to a new way of managing jobs.

First Security - by introducing a central point of control you also introduce a new aspect to Security. If all your jobs are controlled from a central system then you need to be able to group and secure them so that you comply with industry rules for segregation of roles. In many tools this is possible but it can get complicated - keeping an eye on how to architect this for best fine-control and trying to keep as much logical simplicity implicit in the design is a real thinker...... Have you come across the same?

Secondly job management.... with integration with SAP Solution Manager you can start using "Job Documentation" in SolMan - this is a great way to control job management, but now you have the possibility of jobs starting in QA and being controlled in promotion through to Production. This is a massive paradigm shift from the old ways, where unless you built a method for control externally, essentially many people just manage jobs independantly in every system. Is this new overhead entirely worthwhile? Is the cost of administration worth the reduced cost in identifiying the nature of a job? In the end it probably is in most medium to large businesses, but it's something that's hard to quantify.


Expect more ruminations in this areas.....

eMail management pain - attachments solutions

In my life as an IT and technology lover there is surely one problem that dogs me through my professional life. EMAIL! It's bad enough getting 3 billion of the little sods a day, but then you want to send or receive one that's over a megabyte or two -- oooohh no - way too big. In this age of terabyte hard drives in personal home computers and gigabtyes of storage on handheld devices, still a megabyte or two is enough to make some email systems implode violently. I had considered that there should be auto-zip functionality out there built into email programs, but recently "The Cloud" has begun to provide the solution. Instead of an attachment being replicated to numerous recipients and forwarded on to others etc. - until it exists in thousands of places; now "The Cloud" is where your attachments reside and people just link to them - downloading their own copy only if they want to. Microsoft Hotmail has the Sky Drive and I've just seen a YouTube clip of "Box" for Outlook. Surely there are more of these solutions on the way. I'm here to say - hoorah! If you haven't started using such a solution please do. We can only hope that someone somewhere hosts a few servers for the awful FW emails that replicate images millions of times around the world - instead we can all link to centrally held data (and then if the server gets lost.... well wouldn't that be a shame!)

See this link for Box: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdyFzNQXMfc&feature=related
See here for SkyDrive: https://skydrive.live.com/

HP Cloud Services News

Hewlett-Packard announce new Cloud Services - a noteworthy story in this interesting space. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/041012-hp-cloud-258109.html?page=1

SAP HANA for BW - Progress

Interesting article on the progress of SAP HANA as a platform for SAP BW.
This technology always looked certain to catch fire and become a massive new area for the industry and so far these expectations are on track.
https://www.experiencesaphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2012/04/11/bw-powered-by-sap-hana-is-now-generally-available