Upgrade Process – A Quick Overview

Upgrade Process for SAP Business ByDesign/SAP Cloud for Customer/SAP Cloud for Travel

Release Upgrade comes with improvements and new functionalities and uses state-of-the-art technologies in order to meet users’ growing business requirements and increase their productivity. On the other hand, the transition to a new release is always challenging in the regard of data and system consistency and business downtime. However, the business downtime details will be communicated to customer well in advance to get ready for the new release upgrade. The notifications emails are sent to customers that contain details of the upgrade schedule, new features, standard Do’s and Don’ts and recommendations. There will be quarterly release upgrades for SAP Cloud Products like SAP Business ByDesign/SAP Cloud for Customer/SAP Cloud for Travel.

Some of the highlights of upgrade process are as follows –

1. Customer notification mails are sent to IT contacts approximately 4-6 weeks prior to test tenant upgrade. The notification mail include the upgrade schedules of test and production tenants, new features, standard Do’s and Don’ts and recommendations.
2. At first, the test tenant gets upgraded. After ~2-3 weeks, production tenant gets upgraded.
3. During the test and production tenant upgrade, systems will not be available until the upgrade is complete.

In a Nutshell, the below picture depict the Release Upgrade process –

Most importantly, Customer Testing and Restrictions during the upgrade period –

If a customer chooses to test an upgrade:

1. Testing can be performed in any existing test tenant (i.e. implementation, permanent, change project, etc. test tenants)
2. A customer can request and set-up a new test tenant immediately following notification of planned upgrade dates (requests are submitted via the Service Control Center work center)
3. Any issues are reported by the indicated deadline to SAP via an incident in the test tenant (SAP can decide to delay the upgrade if issues impact business critical items).

During the time period when test tenants are upgraded and production tenants are not:

1. Change projects CANNOT be merged from test to production
2. Go-lives should be avoided
3. Avoid applying partner solutions via SAP Cloud Applications Studio
4. Do not request new tenants (~2 days from before the start of the test upgrade till the upgrade of the production system)
5. Do not request termination of tenant