From his perspective, Dr. Bjarne Berg of Comerit thinks SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3 is a solid upgrade to invest in.

In a recent interview with me, Berg — an SAP NetWeaver BW expert and speaker at our recent BI 2012 conferences in Las Vegas and Milan, Italy — said the development time spent on version 7.3 should make companies confident in its value.

“It was tested extensively and spent two, three years in the development cycle,” he said. “I don't think there's any reason to hold back anymore.”

He also offered advice on what types of people to include on a 7.3 project team and whether there are any noted technical pitfalls associated with such an upgrade. For example, after a 7.3 upgrade, authorization objects and hierarchies may become inactive, so be ready to manually reassign them, he said.

For more about these 7.3 upgrade topics, listen to my podcast with Berg by clicking here. If you’d prefer to read about it, the transcript of our conversation is below.

Scott Wallask: I'm happy to once again be talking to Dr. Bjarne Berg of Comerit during this podcast, with our topic today being upgrades to SAP NetWeaver 7.3. Berg, thanks for being with us.

Bjarne Berg: Hi, you’re welcome.

Wallask: Here is a question that I've heard occasionally from readers. I think you might be a good person to answer this. Who at a minimum should be on the project team for a 7.3 upgrade?

Berg: I need to have a regression tester to test it from a front?end perspective. When we do upgrades, I need a Basis person fully dedicated from the client perspective who has the access to the system itself, and then I usually have a Basis person from my team.

So the team typically is a business analyst from the client side, a project manager who's basically typically from my side, the consulting side, and then a Basis person from the consulting and the client side who is really, thoroughly experienced with doing upgrades in the past. This is not an area where you start off or you basically start experimenting.

I've done a couple of rescue missions where people have taken it upon themselves and start upgrading and get halfway through, and at the end of it they forgot to do a lot of prep steps, like putting objects into the T library, and now you have nothing. You basically hosted the whole system, and we've got to go back and restore it before we can fix it again.

So there's a lot of pre?steps that are in this new [application specific upgrade] interface, which is different than what we had in the past. And when you're not familiar with this, it's very easy to make a mistake.

Wallask: And have you heard of any specific technical pitfalls? I know you were just kind of almost mentioning some right then earlier, but any specific technical pitfalls that folks should be aware of with this upgrade?

Berg: There are authorization objects and hierarchies, which tend to become inactive. We have to manually reassign those — that you have to be aware of. Also, if you do mass migration of queries, you might want to migrate to the 7.0 queries unless you've already done it. If you didn't do the security migration, then all your passwords now become case sensitive.

So, we had one client who basically had not thought about it, and they couldn't log in on Monday. And everybody thought there was something wrong with security, but the original password actually had some caps letter that [previously] was not case sensitive, so nobody could log on in the morning.

So there is a lot of small stuff. Some of the InfoSets have a tendency to become basically deactivated, and SAP gives you a program where you can run the program and just mass?activate all the InfoSets immediately. So, those are kind of the big gotchas when it comes to the actual upgrade itself.

Wallask: And beyond what we've already talked about today, do you have any other words of advice in general about upgrading to 7.3?

Berg: Yes. 7.3 has really become a stable, really, really stable release. It was tested extensively and spent two, three years in the development cycle. I don't think there's any reason to hold back anymore. A lot of the people have problems with write reporting, and data activation that takes forever, and data loads that are timing out [in previous versions].

This is truly the tool that stops that for people who have these complaints about getting data in, managing the data, monitoring the databases from the DBA admin cockpit, and also cutting down on development cycles. Most of the project spends 40, 50 percent on the data movement side. This now becomes a GUI interface. It's much, much faster to develop. So I strongly recommend people, if you have been fighting on the back end and butting your heads for a while, this is a great time to do the upgrade.

Wallask: OK, Berg, I want to thank you for your time today.

Berg: Thank you, I appreciate it.

Scott Wallask

Scott Wallask was the managing editor for the BI, BusinessObjects, and HANA content of SAPexperts. He has covered SAP for WIS since May 2010, with a focus on SAP NetWeaver BW, HANA, BusinessObjects, customer relationship management, supply chain management, and human resources. He has spent 19 years as a writer and editor, including stints as a reporter at several newspapers in the Boston area. For 12 years starting in 1998, he created in-depth content about fire safety and OSHA regulations in hospitals while working at HCPro, a healthcare publishing company. In 2005, he won a first place award for best instructional reporting from the Specialized Information Publishers Association for his series on fire protection efforts in nursing homes. He graduated magna cum laude from Northeastern University in 1994 with a BA degree in print journalism.

You may contact the author at editor@biexpertonline.com.

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