ITS ESS in Ecc 6.0

[Former Member]

Dear all,

We are upgrading our 4.7 enterprise to ecc 6.0.

We are presently using ESS with Externel ITS 620.

After upgrade, in ecc 6.0 is it possible to use ess with external irs 7.0.

Kindly suggest at the earliest.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

yes it is fairly possible to upgrade from 4.7 to ECC 6.0 and still use External ITS with EP 7.0

You need to select the right business pack for ESS.

For more information please visit the link:

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/contentportfolio

Regards

Atul Shrivastava

[ChrisSolomon]

@Suresh

That's kinda the problem with WDJ's....you need some fairly good Java folks to begin with....then they need to get an SAP-centric understanding of Webdynpros....along with the developers, your BASIS folks will have to come up to speed with NWDI and get that landscape in place and working (which is a BIG hurdle in most cases I have seen). Soooooo that just gets you up and set to BEGIN. haha Then the real work actually begin. The real fun is for developers who have to debug back and then into the SAP box(ECC)....it can be quite a hunt!....and still, at the end of the day, the "work" all happens back in the SAP box so some level of ABAP knowledge is still needed (either by a WDJ developer doing all the work, or coordination between the Java folks and ABAP folks). BUT it does work very well if you have the resources for it. (we actually have a nice mix on my client now....they support previously developed WDJ's as well as some customized ESS standard WDJs, but then they also have developed many custom ABAP Webdynpros (WDAs). Now, personally, coming from several previous years (since 3.0d) of ABAP, WDA was soooo easy to pick up and is easy to put together some nice apps. I would suggest going through the 6 basic WDA tutorials on this site and you would have a great start. Past that, it's much like any other OO language.....learning the objects/classes and what methods are available and how to use them, etc.....that's the same for WDJ, WDA and any other new model/language for someone....it just comes with practice and study. Hope this helps.

[suresh_datti]

Thank you very much for your valuable inputs.

~Suresh

[Former Member]

Firstly, apologies to the original poster - we seem to have hijacked your thread.

I tend to agree Chris, that is the official line from SAP but there are other things afoot that indicate WDA development will continue to grow.

If you look at Enhancement Pack 2 for ECC6, all the new travel screens for ESS have been built in WDA. The HR Administrator business package delivered in Enhancement Package 1 completely replaced the WDJ version with WDA.

The doco for the new HR Admin BP in ERP2005.1 actually says: "Caution - If you implement Enhancement Package 2005.1, you must use the new business package. Using the old business package version in the technology Web Dynpro for Java together with Enhancement Package 2005.1 is not supported."

So in this case, not only has the WDJ package been "upgraded", it's been taken out the back and shot

Personally, I don't see us even installing NWDI here in case anyone is tempted to try and use it. As you have said previously, developing ESS apps in WDA is easy enough.

The only concern I have remaining is that MSS is a whole different story. At the moment I don't think you can build a WDA app that works happily with the WDJ Employee Search etc. That last hurdle should be overcome when SAP release SP12 next year, going by note 1112733 (currently only released in German).

[Former Member]

Forgot to mention a tip someone gave me about developing WDA apps for ESS (not that I am a developer!).

They suggested running an RFC trace in ST05 and watching the functions that are called in the standard WDJ ESS transactions and just nicking those to build your WDA apps. There are heaps of standard XSS functions in ECC.

Cheers,

JD

[ChrisSolomon]

@John

Wow! Thanks for the great thread link! But....I still am not convinced. I heard a lot of buzz about the overall shift to ABAP Webdynpro at TechEd this year. Same kinda thing happened with BSP years back. Long before now, I heard it was "dead" and SAP was no longer doing internal BSP development as they had shifted to Java and later Java WD, but outwardly, it was still hip-hip-hooray for BSPs. haha And just recently, they finally come out and say that they won't be doing/supporting new BSP development going forward. I mean, I get it, they have to do that.....but it's kind of like SAP documentation....you have to read between the lines and figure it out on your own at times. haha In any event and until/if the "conversion" ever happens, ABAP webdynpros are pretty straight forward and you can build your own to repalce your custom IAC's as we said.

[suresh_datti]

@Christopher: We are kind of in the same boat too.. heavily customized ITS based ESS on our 47.. upgrade to ERP1.0 scheduled to start early '08.. from what I understand, the delivered WDJ services wouldn't meet our reqt & have to be customized.. Would it be wiser to go in for a WDA from scratch as against changing the WDJs? needless to say, our in-house WDJ expertise is bare minimal..

~Suresh

[Former Member]

dear team, Thank you for the valuable feedback

[ChrisSolomon]

@John

We ended up either (a) keeping quite a few of the custom IACs for reasons like yours or (b) converting them to ABAP Webdynpros...which was surprisingly very easy (and pretty darned cool!). At the point they are at, they might just wait till the coming full Java-to-ABAP webdynpro conversion of ESS services is ready....although, even with the Java webdynpros....on a EP7 environment, you can do LOTS of customization without any code (ie. iView personalization). Soooo there are many options, I suppose. haha

[Former Member]

Chris,

You might be waiting a while for the conversion of ESS to WDA, according to this thread .

[Former Member]

According to SAP it's not supported or even possible.

Note 197756 states:

"SAP ITS 6.20 can NOT be used for connecting SAP Systems based on SAP Web Application Server 7.00. Attempts to log on to such a system with an ITS 6.20 will be rejected (see note 905135 for more information)."

Regards,

John

[ChrisSolomon]

True enough , John D. But I read it more to be they would move off onto the ECC6/0's server ITS versus still keeping the other 6.2 box for 4.7c. Internal ITS on a ECC6.0 box is very doable. My current client kept their "old" 4.6c ITS services that they migrated to their ECC6.0 system up and running on the new server's integrated ITS until they had gone live on the first phase of the upgrade. Then the second phase was to move to the portal and the newer ESS services to replace ITS.

[Former Member]

Hi Chris,

Maybe I misinterpreted the original post, but I thought they were just upgrading 4.7 to ECC6 and wanted to know if their standalone ITS would still work.

Sounds like my customer is heading down a similar path to yours, only they already have an EP7 portal running ESS/MSS into a backend 4.6c system, and upgrading to ECC6.

A significant investment in custom IAC's has us looking at the integrated ITS for the initial cutover. In some cases they will try and keep the old ITS functions purely because they don't like the inflexibity of the new Java Webdynpro equivalents (e.g. CATW vs Record Working Time).

Not sure how/if some of the old standard ESS functions will work though, as they never existed as ITS services in the first place (e.g. PZ11_PDF).

Regards,

John

[ChrisSolomon]

BUT you should also look at just using the integratedd ITS for the services that it is possible with. Check in t-code SICF for set-up. It is very straightforward and will keep you from having to maintain an external ITS landscape. Only a very few services absolutely require an external ITS.