SAP GUI for Windows: Updated lifecycle information

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Community,

I would like to take the opportunity to announce several important updates regarding the lifecycle of SAP GUI for Windows.

1. SAP GUI for Windows 7.40 will be out of support by 30th of June 2018 (less than 2 months left). If you are presently using this release, please upgrade to SAP GUI for Windows 7.50 as soon as possible.


2. SAP GUI for Windows 7.50 is in full support until 9th of April 2019 and afterwards will be in a restricted support mode until 31st of March 2020. We extended this phase by 6 months today due to the announcement listed under "3.". "Restricted support" means that we will be processing issues just like during mainstream support, but in the rare case that an issue cannot be fixed by us, because it is caused by an error in the C-Runtime belonging to Visual Studio 2013 (which is no longer fully supported by Microsoft after 9th of April 2019) we may respond by saying that an upgrade to release 7.60 is the only available solution.


3. SAP GUI for Windows 7.60 is planned to be delivered on 25th of February 2019 and will be supported until 12th of April 2022. Originally, we planned to ship the new release in September 2018, but we are facing substantial problems in our migration to Visual Studio 2017. Therefore, we had to postpone the shipment by 5 months.

For those interested in what SAP GUI for Windows 7.60 will bring, I have a list of our key topics here:

• Accessibility support for Belize theme


• High Contrast Black and High Contrast White options for Belize theme


• "Colors in System" for Belize Theme


• Further Belize theme improvements (SAP Logon, Options dialog,...)


• Input history in editable ALV


• Further improvements for SAP Screen Personas 3.0 support


• Clean-Up (removal of Enjoy theme, no support for saplogon.ini anymore)

Best regards,
Frank Krause
SAP GUI Team

[MattHarding]

Thanks Frank for the timely reminder (it surprised me).

I do have one concern though.

With the delay in 7.60 to a tentative February, it seems a little unrealistic to give Customers less than 2 months to upgrade from 7.50 which is out of support in April to a brand new, not proven release that is 7.60.

e.g. Packaging of SAPGUI is not a trivial exercise in many enterprises. The need to fully regression test SAPGUI and hence customers preferring to do this change with support packages which are done infrequently at specific times of the year. Many enterprises wanting to wait a patch level or 2 before implementing new functionality.

All of this makes a month a crazy ask hence if 7.50 support can be extended another 6 months to accommodate the Visual Studio 2017 issues; that would be great.

Cheers,

Matt

[raffi1]

Hi and thanks for the information.

What does the follwing mean in detail: no support for saplogon.ini anymore.

How does this work, starting with version 7.60?

thanks and best regards

Christian

[jude_bradley]

Hello Christian,

 

As far as I can see, this would mean that only xml files will be created/generated in SAPgui 7.60 and that Saplogon.ini files will no longer be read from.

[raffi1]

Hi Jude,

so it is only a change in the file format, the SAP logon is reading from?

best regards

[jude_bradley]

Yes, Christian.

In the older (620,640,710) gui, the connection configuration was read from the text-based ini files.

Now from 7.60, only the xml files will be read or interpreted.

 

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Christian,

with SAP GUI for Windows 7.40 we have introduced the "SAP UI Landscape" format as an optional format for storing the information on connections, shortcuts, message servers and so on in SAP Logon. When you were using SAP GUI and the SAP Business Client, SAP UI Landscape was already mandatory in 7.40 onwards.

With SAP GUI for Windows 7.50 we made SAP UI Landscape default. This means that since quite some years a replacement for the old saplogon.ini format is available. It works and has become mature. We offer automatic migration from the old world into the new world and there are also tools to support you. I recommend that you have a look at our "SAP UI Landscape Configuration Guide" which is delivered on the SAP GUI DVD (or here: https://www.sap.com/documents/2017/07/4af8660b-c97c-0010-82c7-eda71af511fa.html).

The idea behind SAP UI Landscape is having a common configuration for SAP GUI for Windows, SAP GUI for Java and SAP Business Client in a modern XML format (and no more ini files being spread all over the client).

The meaning of my statement "no support for saplogon.ini" means the following:

• SAP GUI for Windows 7.60 can still handle saplogon.ini for compatibility reasons (if there should be any external program still needing the old format)


• If there are issues with saplogon.ini we will not fix them.


• Installations of SAP GUI for Windows 7.60 must therefore use SAP UI Landscape configuration files.

Best regards,
Frank

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Matt,

the maintenance of SAP GUI for Windows 7.50 was extended in a restricted mode until end of March 2020 (see my statement above) while SAP GUI for Windows 7.60 will be shipped in February 2019.

Therefore you have more than one year for the packaging. We are aware that this is not trivial and this is exactly the reason why we always provide an overlap of at least one year.

Extending the full maintenance period is not possible, because we won't get corrections for the C++ Runtime from Microsoft after the end of mainstream support for Visual Studio 2013.

Best regards,
Frank

[pmuschick]

It would be great if SAP GUI 7.6 would support multiple displays with different scaling. I do have a very small laptop 13' screen with Full HD 1080p resolution scaled to 125% and a standard 24' screen scaled to 100%. SAP GUI messes up nearly every dialog with to small boxes for the content and creates scrollbars everywhere. In small dialogs like CG3Z/CG3Y it even cuts off the complete text.

There are notes about that - but this is really not working software if modern screen features are not support. I would rather want to skip working on themes than making the current GUI work.

[henrimuller]

What about the 64 bit version (We had like to stop suffering from the restriction forcing the use of the 32 bit MS Office to get the full interaction. MS Office 32 bit version is nowadays far behind the 64 bit version, further on, we get other software which can no more interact with MS Office 32 (and these softwares are not to be blamed)) ?

[henrimuller]

How often is a SAPGUI bug due to a Visual Studio 2013 bug ?

[henrimuller]

Version	Support from	Support to	Days of support	Days given to update
6.20	15.03.2002	31.12.2010	3213
6.40	15.06.2004	31.12.2010	2390	2390
7.10	15.02.2007	12.04.2011	1517	1415
7.20	15.04.2010	09.04.2013	1090	362
7.30	15.06.2012	15.07.2015	1125	298
7.40	15.10.2014	09.01.2018	1182	273
7.50	15.05.2017	09.04.2019	694	239
7.60	25.02.2019	12.04.2022	1142	43

As per https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_GUI  /  When the day in the month was not given, I used 15

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Henri,

what you are ignoring here are the periods of "restricted support". You probably did this intentionally, but I still consider this incorrect.

The real facts:

• 7.40: Supported in restricted support until 30th of June 2018


• 7.50: Days to update: 411


• 7.50: Supported in restricted support until 31st of March 2020


• 7.60: Days to update: 399

Best regards,
Frank

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Henri,

we won't be seeing a 64bit version of SAP GUI for Windows for a rather long time. We simply do not have the capacity for developing and maintaining this. Additionally the need for such a version is not as huge as your statement indicates, because one can use SAP Desktop Office Integration also with a 64bit Office (via surrogate approach). The real problem is the usage of BI (which would need a full 64bit SAP GUI). And for BI a successor product (Analysis for Office) that supports 64bit as far as I know is available.

Best regards,
Frank

[FrankKrauseGUI]

Hello Henri,

it happened twice in 15 years, but this does not mean it won't happen again.

Best regards,
Frank

[mirnia]

@ frank.krause

Please see url

https://answers.sap.com/questions/766118/sap-gui-76-build-1902768-patch-level-0.html

Some features in gui 7.6 build 1902768 patch level 0 in not work

Regards

Ali Mirnia

[former_member667083]

Bringing in XML when everyone knows that XML for human use is dead. That why the .ini file has been reborn in the form of JSON. Please bring in JSON support.