SAP Solution Manager 7.2 - Change Request Management session at SAP TechED Barcelona 2017

[TomCenens]

Being back from SAP TechED Barcelona 2017, I can hardly remember the last time that I was so inspired by attending a SAP event. Not that the event itself was so different this year compared to last year but it was a special edition for me.

The SAP Mentors celebrate their 10th anniversary, SAP Community has always been close to my heart and I'm happy to see changes are on the way to hopefully bring back the community to it's rightful place, among the best communities in Information Technology. It's hard to explain how great the SAP Mentor and the SAP Community are and how much they inspire me to thrive and take action. It's really a privilege to be part of what I call my extended family.

As a SAP Mentor, we are allowed to present at SAP TechED to share knowledge, to discuss with attendees also, to be able to provide feedback to SAP on their products and services. Besides this, we have meetings with product management and executives of SAP to discuss the current state and future of SAP, we help in hands-on sessions, we had a booth this year also to explain attendees what the SAP Mentor program is about and many of us were also involved in the live interviews that are hosted at SAP TechED.

My main area of focus in recent years is SAP Solution Manager. With SAP Solution Manager 7.2 being introduced earlier on this year, a lot of customers have been looking into SAP Solution Manager 7.2. Some are already there and are using it, others are still in progress of getting started and have started to take the necessary steps to upgrade their existing environment.

Since then, I've been involved in Change Request Management implementations, up till one week before SAP TechED really so it was an obvious choice for me to talk about Change Request Management in SAP Solution Manager 7.2. The next question was then: "What will I talk about?" and since I figured I would have a mixture of customers and partners in the audience with a mixture of using SAP Solution Manager 7.1 and SAP Solution Manager 7.2 I decided to also bring a mixture in terms of content. That appeared to be true when I started asking who is on what version and some other quick questions before I started talking about the subject itself.

Some pointers in terms of upgrading your existing environment to SAP Solution Manager 7.2 (focused on CHARM aspects), some pointers of what is new in CHARM in SAP Solution Manager 7.2 (deleted one slide where I thought it was something new but apparently it was already available in SAP Solution Manager 7.1), some tips / tricks or things I've come across in terms of issues and how to resolve them and in the end a number of new features (in SP5 / SP6). The session was only 30 minutes long so I didn't really have the time to go into all kinds of details because so much has been made available by now that I could hardly cover everything.

I've shared my slide deck on my LinkedIn profile, as promised at SAP TechED. Yes, I admit, I was a bit late in terms of getting it onto the official content placeholder. However, by sharing here, I can also share with an even larger audience.

I made a few adjustments, like changing the background of what used to be a mother elephant and a baby elephant after someone hinted me that with the screenshots and text in front of the elephant, it looked like a set of hairy balls on the slide. That wasn't really what I was aiming for.

I hope attendees enjoyed being at my session. I might have scared off the SAP employees by one slide stating "errors out of nowhere" but I do want to emphasize that SAP Support has been wonderful in terms of supporting me and my colleagues during our implementations earlier this year. Yes, especially in the early versions, there were bugs but in general SAP Support helped us out "fast and furious" style in terms of getting those issues resolved so it's definitely not meant to be a crusade against SAP.

My session was planned in really late on the second day (last call really) before the celebration night so I believe I ended up with a room of die-hards. Thanks for that! Appreciated.