With lot of teams driving customer connect projects, the amount of development done for those are pretty high, and SAP has to release the changes in the lower releases either for legal reasons or to support customers in their current releases.
During the execution of these customer connect projects , along with the code changes , we create/modify lot of DDICs and associated documentations.
To ship the changes in notes is a pretty challenging effort as lot of analysis has to be done as to which object goes where and it has to be ensured that the new changes does not disrupt anything already existing. Usually in these cases the notes released are pretty high and also complex as they have lot of objects in them.
As everybody is aware, SCWB/SNOTE does not support downport of documentation, DDICs , Message classes, Messages, Table Contents.
As a result the developer writes manual steps for DDICs and messages in the note and documentation is released along with the support pack.
There is a lot of chance that the manual steps might not be complete / have some ambiguity and hence it might lead to problems during the implementation in the customer landscape.
UDO tool simplifies this process of downporting by generating a report which will be saved in the system in the normal deliverable package and be shipped in a note. This report when executed will take care of the DDICs and Documentation and creates and activates them in the target system.
The code changes as earlier goes in a separate note , as that does not have any manual activity.
Without the tool, the developer creates/ modifies the DDICs in the target system and then downports the code changes, as the coding might refer to the new/modified DDICs. So retaining the same logic, the note containing the generated report is a prerequisite to the note containing the coding changes.
So for a developer, this tool saves a lot of time as it avoids writing manual steps and takes care even the documentation and table contents and for the customer it saves a lot of effort as customer need not create/modify DDICs manually thereby avoiding the chance of manual mistakes.
Our team has used this tool and we have observed that the customers did not face any problems during implementation of those notes, and hence it saved significant effort for development team as well as customers.
Kindly use this tool and provide your valuable feedback in comments.
