Half crazed (mostly on espresso) Basis Administrator working in the Denver area. I like fly fishing, Formula 1 racing, and watching movies. I am married and have an amazingly curious munchkin who makes me laugh many many times a day.

Good idea of the month - Turn old SAP systems into IDES boxes

For most mid sized companies, knowing what can be done with a SAP application is sometimes just as important as knowing what to do with it. Case in point is a company I used to work for that just went through a R/3 to ECC upgrade. The brought in all new systems and completed the project without any issues. But they still have the old SAP systems running on the old hardware.

My recommendation is to use those old systems for IDES systems. That not only provides them with a new system for testing, it brings in configuration data and applications that they can brainstorm with.

This company has a small staff who are overburdened. They want to start using more of the functionality within BI but don’t know where to start. Running the BI IDES system allows them to view the current setup of infocubes providing a starting point for setting up their own similar cubes.

On the ECC side, this company could also use some external functionality. With the IDES box, they can start looking at the BSP applications and see if any of these match their current needs. Even better, it provides useful data that could put to use in ABAP Webdynpro applications.

Sometimes it just takes seeing an example to get started with creating a new solution. That is what makes the IDES systems so useful.