The CRM Mobile Laptop installer has undergone significant changes in the last release. These changes are based on feeback gathered from customers and several implementation and upgrade projects. These are some of the changes you can expect:
The look of the installer has been changed to match the installers of all other SAP products. This is useful for administrators who are used to working with SAPInst. The installer now has just 4 steps in which user input is required before the installation can begin. The user is provided a guided procedure view to proceed and get a idea of the steps remaining at anytime during the installation.
The installer has a list of common installation combinations and preselects mandatory components for each of these combinations. The 3 main combinations present are the Mobile Repository Server, Mobile Development Workstation and the Mobile Client.
The products and components of the solution are now displays hierarchially so the user can easily figure out the correct combinations. Each item also has associated info about it visibile in the installer.
The installer now displays the languages available for the solution based on the SQL codepage selected. This makes it possible to figure out which codepage to select for the end user based on the requirements rather than the other way around.
The prerequisite checks have been moved further down in the installation workflow and now the checks are run based for the combination of items selected in the previous steps only. This was requested by multiple customers as the earlier installer ran all checks for any combination right at the starting of the installer. This led customers to use workarounds to bypass the prerequisite checks and lead to errors further down in the implementation cycle.
The results of the checks are displayed in a user friendly dialog with clear markings for which ones succeeded.
The status of the actual installation is now displayed in a more useful way clearly showing which component is being installed, which ones completed successfully and which ones had errors. The installer log is visible with a click of a button on the next screen for easy problem resolution.
Apart from the above changes, a critical change brought in the installation process is the automatic execution of the post-installation MUP. This MUP contains all mandatory fixes required for the release/SP being installed. After this step, the machine should be up and running with all the relevant fixes released by SAP for the release being installed.
Along with this, you can easily add your own MUPs to be executed automatically after the installation. This is very useful since most customer installations are completed by applying their own changes to the standard client setup.
The guides for installation and upgrade have been given a thorough revamp and now include a workflow based help approach in which the details for each step of the process is documented along with various possible combinations.
We hope that these changes make it easier to install/upgrade the Mobile Laptop solution in your landscape and get it up and running much quicker than before. The new installer is available from 5.0SP15, 6.0SP06, 7.0SP04 and will be available in all the subsequent releases.
