Solution Manager – Document Maintenance – Deleting Unused Documents
Solution Manager is wonderful tool and offers several good features over other existing tools for document management.
Solution Manager is heavily used for storing documents in any SAP Implementation Project now a days. A Project is created in Solution Manager in the beginining & all standard processes or custom processes are added / mapped for this Project.
SOLAR01 is the standard transaction code for maintaining the business processes used in any project and also all the documents pertaining to this project are stored in Solar01 only.
It happens many time end user don’t know or by mistake delete the documents using “-” icon and not using the Delete button. This actually don’t remove the document from Solution Manager but just remove the link from the project structure.
Let us see with an example
In the below sample screenshot a Project is shown with a document stored under Project Documentation tab in Solar01 transaction for a concerned Process.
Now consider a case where a user who wants to delete the Document uses the Minus button or “-” instead of Delete button then he gets a pop up like below
Now user presses Yes button and assumes the document is gone but reality is this is just DE LINKED from the structure and still exists in the Solution Manager System.
To remove these obsolete documents one can use the below report (SOLMAN_UNUSED_DOCUMENTS). Goto SE38 and execute the below Report.
Now press execute button and this will take you to another screen where it ask user information you can provide a “*” if you want to check all the documents irrelevant of any respective user.
Press execute button this will display a list of all documents existing in Solution Manager System but unused or de-linked from the Projects. Huge amount of unused document might lead to a performance issue too.
Coming back to our example here we get the document removed earlier as below
Thus now we choose and delete these unused documents permanently by choose the one’s from the list and clicking delete button.
Please note if we have a specific requirement for a project to have more filtered criteria for removing documents in bulk etc we can customize the above report as per the scenario.
Hello Prakhar
Useful information in this blog post. The blog post would benefit from having some sectioning in place (headers).
I would suggest whoever uses this report to check if the documents are in use yes or no before just deleting them even if they are reported unused or de-linked.
Useful report: sure, definitely
Caution needed: yes, please check what you delete
I would also recommend connecting an external warehouse and not storing documents in the internal database of the Solution Manager. It is a good way to avoid the performance issues you mention
Kind regards
Tom
Hi Tom
Thanks for checking this out.
This report is more powerful than shown here.
I give you an example
Doc A uploaded for Business Process 1
Doc A uploaded for Business Process 2 ( Doc A is uploaded again not linked to the existing one eventhout it is same)
if some1 removes the doc A instead of deletion from Business Process 1 and we execute this report and we can delete the doc A only if this is duplicate copy of Doc A itself & not linked
if there is a link we can't delete it and this document will not be listed in report as it is being used as a link.
I hope I have clarified ur doubt
Thanks
Prakhar
Hello Prakhar
Thanks for your reply. I don't have doubts though. I have seen a consultant upload documents for our Solution manager 7.1 implementation project and afterwards I ran this report and those documents were listed as well and I simply didn't want to clean them up 🙂 .
I'm not saying it's not a useful report, it is. I'm just saying check before deleting 🙂 .
Kind regards
Tom
Hi Prakhar,
It is a very good information and thanks for publishing it.
Thanks,
Selvan