I was walking through my SAP Net notifications mails and two of these got my attention and those were News on SAP Support Offerings and SAP Maintenance Strategy https://websmp206.sap-ag.de/~sapidb/011000358700000623852006E End of Mainstream Maintenance for SAP BW 3.0B, SAP BW 3.1 Content Maintenance durations for releases of SAP BW are scheduled as follows: • SAP BW 3.0B, SAP BW 3.1 Content: End of mainstream maintenance on December 31, 2006, start of customer-specific maintenance on January 1, 2007 As these releases do not follow the 5-1-2 maintenance strategy, SAP does not offer extended maintenance. AND this one - General Release of NW2004s – https://websmp206.sap-ag.de/~form/handler?_APP=00200682500000001303&_EVENT=DISP_NEW&0020068250000000... There will be lot many of us, BI Consultants busy Upgrading SAP BW systems and moving on to SAP BW 3.50 (Netweaver04) or to NW2004s Business Intelligence. Upgrades are altogether different ballgame that other BI projects like end-to-end implementation, Enhancements, Support & Maintenance etc. To my belief BW upgrade is trickier business than other products (OLTP) products as SAP BI has got complicated “Information Supply Chain” Information Supply Chain – Dictionary definition of Supply Chain is -the network of retailers, distributors, transporters, storage facilities and suppliers that participate in the sale, delivery and production of a particular product. Then what is Information Supply Chain? Information Supply Chain is - the network of Source Systems with its Extractors, DataSources, extraction layers, transformation layers, loading layers, analytics, methods of distribution of this Analytics and ways of consumption of this information by end users. Information Supply chain which is followed by SAP BI will look like – 
It is an integrated Supply chain, impact on one of the components will flow through the whole chain and may impact the other components of chain. When upgrading the SAP BW, we need to ensure that whole Supply chain impacts are considered and all components work with each other in tandem. For example upgrading SAP BW may impact and may result in upgrading of BW relevant components at Upstream Supply Chain or at the same time upgrading of downstream components like Portal etc, this is what makes BW Upgrade much more complex than any other product’s upgrade. If we have got problem at hand then why not solve it collectively…Right now we have Six major category in SAP BI forum on SDN and to my belief “SAP BI Upgrade” has got the potential to be the Seventh one. Events (as I mentioned at very start of this weblog) fully support this cause. I throw it open this to you all ….Support it to Achieve it. 
What about adding one more i.e. BW Upgrade!!!
It is an integrated Supply chain, impact on one of the components will flow through the whole chain and may impact the other components of chain. When upgrading the SAP BW, we need to ensure that whole Supply chain impacts are considered and all components work with each other in tandem. For example upgrading SAP BW may impact and may result in upgrading of BW relevant components at Upstream Supply Chain or at the same time upgrading of downstream components like Portal etc, this is what makes BW Upgrade much more complex than any other product’s upgrade. If we have got problem at hand then why not solve it collectively…Right now we have Six major category in SAP BI forum on SDN and to my belief “SAP BI Upgrade” has got the potential to be the Seventh one. Events (as I mentioned at very start of this weblog) fully support this cause. I throw it open this to you all ….Support it to Achieve it. What about adding one more i.e. BW Upgrade!!!
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