Digital Syndrome...

[kry1]

I do apologize, I should have moderate myself and avoid posting that fully non-positive blog, but sorry I'm French and French do love complaining.

Perhaps it's also because I'm working on SAP software since too long, after 20 years I should stop rumbling about how better it was yesterday and move to another job.

Maybe it’s also because I can’t comfort myself since some crazy people at SAP decided to kill the SCN community and turn the site on which I spent most of my browsing time into an ugly proof of bad concepts.

One point I’m never disappointed about is the ability of Mr. SAP to stick with its motto: "Run Simple"

Tonight, I had a simple task to perform for one of my customer: importing few support packages for a C4C add-on on an ECC system.

Piece of cake, I thought this should only be a matter of minutes.

I first needed to download the patches, funny the structure of the download area for that package has changed... ok, I'm used to that little hide & seek game. After few minutes, I did find the new path (component was moved from «SAP CLOUD CUST ERP INTEGR » to « SAP HYBRIS C4C ERP INTEGR »).

Then I had to search for a S-User that did have the rights to download... incredible how many dummy S-Users accounts I have for that customer... but with the new Sluggish-Support-Launchpad it takes some time to find if something is wrong with the account's rights or if it is just the site that is unresponsive.

I finally get my patch files and try to import them, but bad luck these SPs do require a maintenance certificate and of course the certificate was expired on that system.

To be more precise 3 patches could be imported without a maintenance certificate and the last one (of course the one that was supposed to solve my customer’s bug) do need a valid certificate. I’ve never understand why SAP did create this maintenance certificate requirements that randomly hits when applying SPs. Mr. SAP are you really afraid that some customers could use pirate version of your software ?

Well, renewing a certificate is an easy task, only few more minutes to lose…But this was not that simple with the new bright-super-support-launchad! In fact I was not able to renew the certificate, I’ve tested all the possible options & paths, I did always get the same cryptic error message:Ok maybe a little OSS note search could help => https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/mynotes?tab=SearchToo bad, no result!

I needed to try without any keyword, hopefully I did know the appropriate component: XX-SER-LIKEY  (poor old components, not as fashioned as TAGS, but really far more efficient).

I did just filter on the component without any search term and:Ok, I’ll just need to go for a manual search in the result page… really a great enhancement in the User eXperience !      at least I did found an appropriate note:

1898812

4

How to renew a Maintenance Certificate or remove duplicates - SAP ONE Support Launchpad

I right click to open the note in a nice new window, Kaboom! the stupid “Terms of Use” popup strikes again !
I do accept, and then comes the “what’s new” popup, with it’s very well hidden button, please-leave-me-alone-next-time (that of course did not work)And then, the kiss of death: Fiori waiting circles for ever... and no way to get my note.I did close my Firefox browser (latest version: 50.0) , open it again, no ways. I do try with MS Edge… Bingo! at last I can read the note.
Too bad, nothing about the error I get, just the confirmation that I did follow the appropriate steps to renew the license.
Few months ago, I would have just directly jump on SCN to check if I was the first one getting that problem… but that good old time is gone… trying to find something on the new site is a problem by itself (even when searching through Google). I’m not going to lose time trying to discover which tag I should use to create a question (the keyword “licence” do not appear in the incredibly-user-friendly Excel Tag file). Even if there were an appropriate tag, there are so few SCN active users left I do not expect getting an answer.
Well, I’ll just have to open an incident and inform my customer that it's bug won't be solved because with SAP sometimes it Runs so Simple… that in fact nothing works!
I’m pretty sure people from support site are getting very busy since SAP has decided to blow away the SCN community.
Let’s go back to the title of my post, by 'Digital' I did not meant "Digital Enterprise" or any of these fashionable concepts. I was in fact thinking about DEC, Digital Equipment, a company that once almost ruled the IT market.
=> Ian Waring // Simplicity Sells  // http://www.ianwaring.com/2014/06/19/why-did-digital-equipment-corporation-fail/

[Jelena_Perfiljeva]

Great blog! I must have some French DNA mixed in. 🙂 In good old days on SCN this could be posted in the Support space but it did not migrate to a tag for unknown reason.

Also on the old SCN I could've @-mentioned someone from the Launchpad team so that they could look into this. But it's no longer the case either. So I can only say sorry you had to go through this and I wish your experience was an exception.

Especially enjoyed the message "Request renew Maintenance not possible 8" (why 8 and not 42? beats me). Thanks for the link, an interesting article.

[kry1]

Hello Jelena,

Thank you for your kind comment.
The funny thing is that I did never get a clear answer from support about what was wrong with my maintenance certificate request. I did try few days later, doing the same actions and it worked!

 

[rolf_paulsen]

Very nice blog! I feel your pain for weeks working on OSS, searching desperate for downloads switching from IE to Chrome when it hangs. Even the tags/keywords are carefully selected, I like them. But you should not apologize for telling the truth. There is enough whitewashed marketing out there, this is really refreshing!
Regards
Rolf

[Former Member]

Nice blog 🙂