This is the closing blog in the SAP NetWeaver Administrator survey series. In the previous postings I promised to share the results of the survey feedback with participants and the SDN community.
First of all, let's start with some information on the participation. SDN members showed their willingness to provide valuable feedback to SAP and help us improve NWA. The total number of participants was 121 filled out surveys!! Well beyond my expectations! To sweeten the pot, I promised 10 SDN per filled out section, so 50 points for a completely filled out survey. So 121 participants earned 50 points each, these points were awarded in the June - July time frame.
The outcome of the survey was actively discussed with SAP Development resources over the past few months. A main part of the survey targeted our customer's view of functional gaps and improvements to be made in NWA. A lot of the feedback gaps are already included in the latest version of NWA. While the survey was being conducted SAP released the SAP Composition Environment (CE) which contains a newer, much improved version of NWA, and includes the administration and configuration functionality formerly handled by the Visual Administrator. If you have not looked at it yet, you can download an evaluation copy on SDN. Also included with CE is the improved SAP MMC, which provides a lot of the monitoring information requested by respondents in the survey.
The survey results showed clearly where NWA needed to improve; include more administration functions, improve performance (response time) of NWA, make the UI more intuitive, provide more performance monitoring options, improve security auditing, provide more roles, improve error handling, provide options to compare configurations, and improve documentation were frequently mentioned. A lot of these requests are already included in the latest release of NWA included with CE, those not included are being evaluated for inclusion.
Aside from feature improvement, another frequently mentioned area of feedback was the SAP strategy regarding monitoring, tool set consolidation and how NWA and Solution Manager co-exist. SAP is actively working on this, some news was discussed at SAP Teched. The expectation is that SAP will have a clear roadmap to address these topics soon.
In conclusion of this blog series I want to thank everyone who participated and gave feedback on NWA. The feedback was heard loud and clear as is evident with the improvements and additional features in the latest release of NWA and the SAP strategy discussions in progress.
