Upgrade strategy

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Hi all

I'm currently working on an upgrade strategy for our BW 3.0 to NW04s upgrade. During this I have come across some questions which I would very much like some input on.

I'm currently working with three different scenarios. These include:

1) Technical upgrade with no application relevant migration

2) Technical upgrade with partial application migration (selected dataflows step-by-step)

3) Partial reimplementation on new installation

I would very much like your input on the following:

1) The aim with our upgrade strategy is to ensure as stable an upgrade process as possible. To meet this challenge the technical upgrade related to scenario 1 and 2 is done on a copy of the BW production string. The argument as such is that the original production system will continue to run until the new system are ready for cut-over. During cut-over a need for delta load of new data pushed into the old BW system after the system copy was made as well as reinitialization of delta for SAP sources, will obviously be required. Is this an logical approach which you can relate to ?

2) For scenario 3 the primary argument is that possible inconsistencies which are present in the old BW system can be eliminated during the migration process. The idea is to migrate the old system to the new platform through a combination of reactivation of BCT, transport of existing objects and partial manual configuration. The question is wether it is possible to do transports from a BW 3.0 system to a new NW04s system ?. I seem to recall something about a requirement which dictates that the source and target system needs to be the same version and on the same SP level for transports to work ?.

3) The second argument for scenario 3 is the fact that you are forced to consider unicode migration during upgrade. As far as I can tell unicode migration during BW 3.0 to NW04s are pretty complex - according to SAPNet, SAP recommends that this is done as a pilot project together with SAP. With scenario 3 you can avoid the unicode migration process but is this actually realistic ?. Is it really truth that the unicode migration for BW 3.0 to NW04s requires specialist from SAP to succeed.

4) If we decide not to unicode migrate during the technical upgrade (this can be decided correct ?) I guess that the consequence is that we won't be able to extract data from SAP/non-SAP unicode sources as well as SAP MDMP sources but are there any other consequences to take into consideration ?.

Hope to hear lots of opinions...

Regards

/Frank