Sunday, April 15, 2012

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.

4 comments:

schuess said...

Hi Matt
Thanks for your hint. I would also not have read a well known (at least I thought so) Install Guide to the last page.
You talk about an
"Approval tutorial" for the new functionality. Where can one get this?

schuess said...

Found it - and SAP also provides the information you would have needed in advance on one single (!) webpage: http://scn.sap.com/community/netweaver-idm
Hence it's not only RTFM, but also "read everything completely" :)
One never stops to learn.

Anonymous said...

Hi Matt,

Excellent post again!

I think the same functionality can also be achieved by checking the "Enhanced Approval UI" in the IC Options tab.

Regards,
Ridouan

Matt Pollicove said...

Ridouan,

This only enables it within IDM. You must run the script first to create the necessary database objects before that option will work.

Cheers,
Matt