What is new in SP7 of SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration 7.31

SP7 is already available and this blog outlines the most important enhancements for our customers running Business Process Management, Process Integration and Orchestration scenarios.

Thanks to Alexander Bundschuh and Christian Loos for this content.

Major news is the provisioning of Migration Tools

The Directory Content Migration Tool aims to reduce your configuration efforts for migrating from Dual-stack PI to Java-only PI or Process Orchestration. It provides the following capabilities:

Migration of classical PI scenarios to integrated configuration objects

• Supporting both Java-only and dual-stack target systems
• Source PI system as of XI 3.0 and later
• The tool runs in target system

Migration and mass change support for communication channels

• Migrate channels between systems and PI releases
• Support for mass channel changes: metadata version, adapter specific attributes, target adapter engine, module properties, etc.

Below are the steps:

You can access the migration tools from the Monitoring home page:

*click on the images to enlarge them

Migration of classical PI scenarios to integrated configurations

Source system selection is done from SLD or manually defined in the tool.

Source scenario(s) selection is realized by:

• Sender Agreement
• Configuration Scenario – all sender agreements in the scenario are used
• Receiver Determination (for IDoc and ABAP Proxy scenarios)

On the next step, automatic directory objects matching and migration checks are performed to determine if the selected scenario can be migrated:

At the Integration configuration preview and renaming step you could:

• Preview the integrated configuration and see how the required objects will look like
• Choose target adapter engine and metadata version for channels
• Apply renaming rules
  

Migration and mass change support for communication channels

Migration of channels is enabled. You can copy channels from a source system / release to target system / release

• Support for the non-transportable fields
• Migration of passwords is not supported

Mass channel change support for specific channel attributes

• Validate properties against target adapter metadata
• Update metadata version
• Change adapter engine for all selected channels
• Change set of common attributes
• Change values for already defined module properties

Here are some boundary conditions to note when using the Migration tool

Conversion of ABAP based adapter channels to Java channels

• Migration of attributes where possible
• Result channel is not fully configured

Renaming of directory objects

• Renaming of party, service, channel objects via reusable renaming rules
• Business system renaming according to SLD transport targets
• Support for content based routing constant replacement

Objects creation in a new change list per scenario

• Deletion of conflicting sender agreement on the target system

Scenarios for which migration is not supported

• No support for “Receiver Rule” objects in directory
• Scenarios with ABAP mappings cannot be migrated
• Scenarios with ccBPM could not be migrated

Read more in SAP documentation: Migrating Directory Content.

Integration Visibility

Shipped Integration Visibility core functionality

Integration Visibility is key innovation aiming to provide central, end-to-end integration visibility into the correct closure of business transactions with your business partners. This functionality will allow application users to capture business context and get involved into error resolution via object- and user specific views.

Integration Visibility Core provides the technical foundation that discovers message flows and enables consumer applications to subscribe and consume monitoring events for a selected set of discovered message flows. Currently the monitoring of the following runtimes is supported: SAP NetWeaver PI (AEX, ABAP Integration Server, Central AE, Decentral AEs) and SAP backend system layers ABAP Proxy and ALE.

Integration Visibility consumers correlate the monitoring events and display the instances of message flows leveraging the core capabilities. It is planned to ship consumers in SAP Solution Manager and SAP Operational Process Intelligence, see below.

For more details see SAP help portal: Integration Visibility, Terms and Concepts, Covered scope and Configuration.

Planned innovations from the Labs

[Please note: This is the current state of planning and may be changed by SAP at any time.]

Message Flow Monitor in SAP Solution Manager is planned for shipment with SP10 of SAP Solution Manager 7.1. It will enable monitoring of information along the integration layers of a B2B or A2A message exchange, including processing within SAP NetWeaver Process Integration, Process Orchestration, SAP backend system layers (ABAP Proxy, ALE). This new functionality will allow:

• Targeting IT & application support and business power users
• Monitoring along integration layers of message exchange
• Showing relevant payload data in monitoring overview, such as EDI number, order number etc.
• Integration with other functionality of SAP Solution Manager such as incident and notification management

In future the following additional features are planned:

• Providing summarized information for most common B2B related issues, such as flows with highest error ratio, most overdue acknowledgements etc.
• Enabling to measure SLAs, such as E2E processing times, error ratio, volumes etc., especially in scenarios where trust in inter-company communication is vital for business success
• Integration with additional functionality of SAP Solution Manager such as alerting and reporting

Another key feature in the pipeline is integration with SAP Operational Process Intelligence planned for Q3 with its 1.1 release. It will enable:

• Visibility and decision-support tool targeting line of business users
• Provide real-time information about your operations and processes including message exchange

Defining custom actions for tasks
Now you have the ability to approve or reject tasks without opening the task UI

Custom task actions

• Define a number of custom actions for each task definition
• Provide translatable label texts
• Provide a description per action for more information (e.g. via tooltip)
• Actions can be sorted
• At runtime, the name of the triggered action is available in the output mapping of the human activity (path: “TaskAttributes/customAction”)
• Context mapping and process flow can be adapted depending on the custom action output

Read more in SAP documentation: Custom actions for tasks.

Custom attributes and custom actions available in your BPM inbox
The latest enhancements allow you to get context information and complete tasks directly from the inbox.

New „Stream“ view in the BPM inbox
This represents an alternative view to display tasks for occasional users.

Stream view features:

• User can switch between table and stream view
• See full description for each task
• Performance actions on tasks with one click
• Display context data for individual tasks

Read more about Authorization Concept for Substitution Rules in SAP documentation.

Link to BPM inbox from task notification email
This feature provides you with the option to choose between UWL, BPM inbox or your own worklist

Link in task notification email

• System-wide configuration parameter to specify which inbox is used
• Can be set either via BPM configuration wizard or manually

Here is how the manual set up works:

• Open the SAP NetWeaver Administrator in a browser using the path http://<host>:<httpport>/nwa, and log on with administrator rights
• Choose  Configuration Infrastructure Java System Properties
• Choose the Applications tab and select tc~bpem~base~ear
• To configure the link to your preferred task inbox in the e-mail notification, change the property notification.task.inbox:
  uwl > for the Universal Worklist (UWL)
  bpm_inbox > for the BPM Inbox
  custom > for a Custom Inbox (specified via notification.task.inbox.custom.url)

Read more in SAP documentation: Configuration of Task Inbox Link in Notifications.

Archiving of process instances in parallel jobs

This will help you reduce archiving time in cluster environments.

Parallel archiving works in the following way:

• Single archiving job can be split into multiple jobs running in parallel on different cluster nodes
• Overall time to archive is significantly reduced
• Fully leverage all available cluster nodes for archiving jobs
• Parallel archiving can be enabled via application parameters (default is off)
  • Java application: tc~bpem~arch~ear
  • Parameter: archiving.enableParallelArchiving
• Number of max parallel jobs can be configured
  • Parameter: archiving.maxNumberOfJobs [This should be equal or less to the number of available cluster nodes]

Read more in SAP documentation: Parallel archiving.

Support for additional event types has been enabled with SAP NetWeaver BPM as provider for SAP Operational Process Intelligence

SAP Operational Process Intelligence powered by SAP HANA provides end-to-end process visibility for business users, independent of where the process is running. Processes implemented with SAP NetWeaver BPM can be used in a Business Scenario in SAP Operational Process Intelligence.

The following diagram provides an architectural overview of the solution:

The list of supported event types for phase definition has now been extended with new events:

• Automated Activity started/completed
• Intermediate Message received (consumed)

Pre-requisites: SAP HANA, SAP Operational Process Intelligence 1.0. Read more about sapopint here.

Upcoming:

• The next SP8 is planned later on in Q2 and feature-wise it will correspond to SAP NetWeaver 7.40 SP03.
• SP2 of SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration Secure connectivity add-on 1.0 and B2B add-on 1.0 is planned for October and will offer many new features.

For a complete overview of enhancements with SP07, including different SAP NetWeaver components, please see the release notes on Help.SAP portal.

We strongly encourage you to upgrade to the latest SP to benefit from all new enhancements.