A very long wait is over and finally a fantastic and new version of SAP Solution Manager is released with 7.2 SP03 as the official globally released version.
Yes, it is Solution Manager 7.2 SP03 which comes with a lot of new impressive features and enhancements/upgrades to existing functionalities.
First a BIG thanks to all the SAP developers for finally changing the SOLAR interface to this new UI where it looks more ravishing than earlier.
Infact, now a days it’s a common question coming to me that
whether should we upgrade to Solution Manager 7.2 or stick to Solution Manager 7.1 for now?
My feedback is still the same which I used to provide when Solution Manager 7.1 got released. It depends/varies from customer to customer and scale of Solution Manager usage for the particular case. However, general recommendation is always plan to go for new version as quickly as possible to get the advantages of new product/changes/enhancements etc.
Further, let us see some of our famous transactions and new changes/interface in the new version. I have taken these screenshots from Solution Manager 7.2 SP03 version.
Solman_workcenter famous transaction still exists in Solution Manager 7.2 but the workcenters are gone and replaced by attractive tile based page view
The concept is heavily changed and improved drastically because it is very easy now to control which tile can be displayed for any user as per requirement.
Solman_setup - backbone of our Solution Manager system. Yes it is further simplified as compared to 7.1 version
The Roadmap viewer
It is more easier to navigate to any available roadmap and infact accessing all the available accelerator/documents is more comfortable in the browser. e.g. SAP Activate methodology etc.
One of the most or heavily changed functionality is
Solution Documentation which is completely new in the Solution Manager 7.2 version. Ofcourse in case of existing project we do have Solar_project_Admin but it is in display mode only(incase of upgrades)
Incase of upgrade the content activation would leverage easily the entire documentation to the new solution documentation.
We are now gifted with 2 new transactions i.e. soladm and soldoc as the new transaction to access the new solution documentation directly or else we can use the tile dedicated to them.
Soldadm help us to quickly setup a new solution in Solution Manager 7.2 and Soldoc is more towards defining the processes.
Since, we are now capable of going up-to N level and not restricted to 3 level, I see it’s much easier now to meet many complex demands of mapping end to end scenario/process with new Solution Documentation interface. The new process diagram capability with BPMN 2.0 modelling is really fantastic and attractive.
Of course, there is a still lot to do and I hope to see it coming soon in newer SPs for Solution Manager 7.2.
I don’t want to stop writing as there are still many more interesting features but I must say it’s a much more better product as compared to previous version as it tries to address the issues of 7.1 version on one hand on the other it brings new features.