Approving Service Pack 4

My current project has me working with IDM 7.2 and GRC 10.0 which has kept me quite busy lately. However, I did want to take a little bit of time to discuss NetWeaver IDM 7.2 SP4, which we need to install into our project environments. I do plan to talk about GRC at some point in the future, but as we’re still deploying, I want to capture the whole experience of the integration of these new versions before I start writing. As far as SP4 was concerned, I volunteered to do a quick upgrade in my personal Sandbox environment, which went very smoothly.  So I shut down my dispatchers, uninstalled SP3, ran the mxmc_update script, installed SP4, regenerated and started my dispatchers.  Now I could get on to my test cases and our reasons for doing the upgrade:

1. We needed the use of the %FIELD% operation for linking pull-down tabs as I have previously discussed. This was inadvertently broken in SP3.
2. Approvals.  Approvals are greatly improved in SP4, almost reaching the level of ease that we had back in IDM 7.0 / MIC 8.  The only thing making it somewhat more complex is the addition of some really cool multi-step approvals and escalations.

I was able to validate the first test case easily enough, but I was having some trouble with the second case. It seems that I could not get the approvals to work the way I should. After some thought and discussion, we decided it was time to go back to software troubleshooting 101, RTFM. When you look at the database install / upgrade document it pretty clearly says:

Enabling the 7.2 approval mechanism on an Identity Center database

To enable the 7.2 approval mechanism:

1. Stop any running dispatchers.

2. Open a command prompt and navigate to the directory containing the Identity Center script files.

3. Run the script mxmc-enable-72-approvals.cmd. You are prompted for the password for mxmc_oper.

4. Start the dispatchers.

It would have been nice if this information was also included in the Approvals tutorial, which as new functionality I looked at as opposed to the install/upgrade for a Service Pack, but when all else fails, read the docs, they’re there for a reason.