The simple things in life...

[former_member185970]

Often it is the simple things in life that bring you most happiness and joy.

That's why we have worked hard over the past two SAP NetWeaver releases or Enhancement Packages (which are for technology effectively minor releases in the terminology of the rest of the world as we do not support switchable functionality like the SAP Business Suite) to simplify the parallel code lines and version numbers of SAP NetWeaver.

And since the most simple approach is a single code line, we've simply gone for that one.

So while in the past, we had two parallel development code lines of our NetWeaver platform, one underlying the SAP Business Suite as "stable core" applications infrastructure, e.g. the Application Server ABAP, labeled version 7.0x (e.g. 7.00, 7.01, 7.02, you got it), and a separate one for our "faster innovation cycle" standalone SAP NetWeaver "hubs" like SAP NetWeaver Portal or SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration, labeled version 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 7.31 respectively. Confused? Don't worry! You are not alone. And there's more: For our on-demand Business ByDesign solution we had started to build a multi-tenant, HANA-optimized version of our Application Server ABAP, internally labeled 8.0x. In parallel. Again a separate code line.

"I'm confused... No, wait... Maybe I'm not…" [Unknown]

Now, luckily, we got the message from our customers (and we even got confused internally from time to time) and simplified things again: with SAP NetWeaver 7.03(underlying SAP Business Suite 7 Enhancement Package 6) and SAP NetWeaver 7.31 hubs, we have a single, identical ABAP application server again! We merged the two 7.0x and 7.x code lines. And with SAP NetWeaver 7.4 -- the next backward compatible Enhancement Package or minor release version of this combined 7.0x/7.x code line, you will even get major improvements ported back from our on-demand operations optimized ABAP server version. Plus, to complete the picture, you will get optimized support for SAP Hana with it as well. All in one single code line, that we will continue to evolve in a backward compatible manner. And in sync with the SAP Business Suite release cycle.

Our release numbers will reflect this simplicity in the future: 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, ...Got it?  Actually, just in case you haven't recognized it yet: it says 7.x all the time. Emphasis being on 7. So SAP NetWeaver will remain backward compatible.

Simple enough?