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Author's profile photo Gordon Leslie McDorman

SAP Solution Manager 7.2 IT Service Management – Text with Inline Screenshots

Introduction

One feature which CRM introduced and is available in the SAP Solution Manager 7.2 with SP06 is the ability to enter formatted text with embedded (inline) screenshots.

We have ensured that this new feature can be used in the Solution Manager IT Service Management scenario when users create incidents but there are a number of limitations you should be aware of before you proceed.

Limitations

  • Formatted text with screenshots is only available in the CRM WebClient UI.
  • The formatted texts cannot be exchanged with any external system or service:
    • You cannot exchange formatted text if you send incidents to SAP for processing by SAP Customer Support.
    • You cannot exchange formatted text with the external Service Desk interface.
  • Other UIs do not support the formatted text. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:
    • Fiori applications such as “My Incidents”, “Create Incident”, “Resolve and Dispatch Incidents”.
    • Web Dynpro UIs, such as the Test Suite, or the Incident Management work center.

Check frequently for updated notes and corrections related to this function. Since this is a new feature, it is still being refined. See the Further Information section at the bottom of this article for existing master notes and related documents.

SAP Solution Manager 7.2 SP07 has further functions to ease the use of formatted text and to improve its integration. Since we continue to improve this, we always suggest you update to the latest SP for the best experience.

Prerequisites

You also have to do a certain amount of configuration in order to enable formatted text:

  • Activate Business Functions (switches)
  • Make entries in customizing tables
  • Use UI configuration to enable the assignment block in the CRM UI which supports formatted text.

I’ll go through these steps below.

Activate Business Functions (Switches)

Enable the following Business Functions (transaction SFW5):

  • CRM_ITSM_COM – Content and Text Management
  • CRM_TM_1 – Text Management Assignment Block
  • UI_FRW_RTE – Assignment is defined in business function

The three business function sets in the Switch Framework Customizing transaction (SFW5):

Make Customizing Table Entries

1. CRM Formatted Text Customizing

Call the following transaction:

  • CRMC_TEXT – CRM Formatted Text Customizing

For each text type (Description, Internal Note, Reply, …) which you want to use, add a corresponding table entry:

  • Select Formatted
  • Select HTML-Text
  • Enter CL_CRM_TEXT_FORMAT_CONVERSION as the converter class

These customizing entries tell the CRM system to activate formatted text conversion and storage for the corresponding text types. When you select “HTML-Text”, the system will use the new text storage area for HTML formatted texts with the embedded image capability.

2. Assign Business Objects to Switches Customizing

Call transaction SM30 (Maintain Table Views) and maintain entries for the following table:

  • CRMV_ITSM_SWITCH

Add an entry with the following values for Switch and Trans.Cat:

  • Switch = CRM_ITSM_COM
  • Trans.Cat. = BUS2000223

You can also add an entry for Trans.Cat BUS2000116 (Service Orders, including Change Control Management transaction types), or BUS2000224 (Problem transaction types) if you use these. BUS2000223 specifies Service Requests including incident transaction types.

The following example has all three transaction categories maintained:

These customizing entries tell the CRM system to use the new formatted text editor with embedded image capabilities in the CRM UI component GSTEXT (see next step – UI configuration).

CRM WebClient UI Configuration

Enable the GSTEXT assignment block in relevant WebClient UI components.

  • Navigate to an incident in the CRM WebClient UI.
  • Select Configure Page
  • Add GSTEXT to the list of displayed assignment blocks
  • Save the UI configuration.

The configure page toolbar icon (you may have to activate this button in CRM WebClient UI personalization – see the CRM WebClient UI documentation for further details).

Add “GSTEXT” to the list of displayed assignment blocks:

Result

Once you have completed the above steps, the system will display a new “Notes” assignment block in the CRM WebClient UI. You can past images into the text:

Further Information

  • Note 2116845 – Business Function: new Rich Text Editor
  • Note 2117779 – – WebUI Text Editor Enhancements with TinyMCE – Part 2
  • Note 2498809 – SAP CRM Rich Text Editor – Guided Answers
  • Note 2568144 – Collection of SAP-Notes related to HTML-texts in SAP CRM and important aspects
  • Rich Text Editor wiki article in SCN.
  • Note 2493984 – Text Views in CRM (See the attached PDF document which provides further information regarding the GSTEXT assignment block.)

 

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      41 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Christoph Kronauer
      Christoph Kronauer

      Thanks for this interesting information.

      I would like to reference to a PDF document attachted to the following note, which provides further informations and customizing opitons to this topic:

      2493984 - Text Views in CRM

      Author's profile photo Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Christoph,

      Thanks! I've added a reference to the note and PDF at the end of the blog article.

      Regards,

      Gordon

      Author's profile photo Oliver Buyssens
      Oliver Buyssens

      Hi Gordon,

      following note is also relevant: 2368086 - Pilot: New Texts in SAP CRM

      kr,

      Oliver.

      Author's profile photo Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Oliver,

      Thanks for this information. Instead of adding that note, I added the note collection which contains that note and other related notes:

      Collection of SAP-Notes related to HTML-texts in SAP CRM and important aspects

      https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2568144

       

      Author's profile photo Richard Pietsch
      Richard Pietsch

      Hi Gordon,

      I don't understand note 2568144... according to the note I should not enter text types in CRMC_TEXT that are maintained with "P" in COMC_TEXT. So, I have a text profile containing SU99, SU01 and SU04. If I want them to use as "HTML-text" I should delete them in the text profile and add them in CRMC_TEXT instead? Or do I need to create a complete new text profile?

      Regards, Richard

      Author's profile photo Zaid Hamoudi
      Zaid Hamoudi

      Hi Richard,

       

      You only need to remove the P from the respecting Text Profile in COMC_TEXT. Not in all text profiles.

       

      Regards,

      Zaid

      Author's profile photo Axel Börke
      Axel Börke

      Hi Gordon,

      thanks a lot for implementing this feature. First, let me tell you that our users biggest paint point is that embedded pictures are not possible currently (on SP4). So we are really excited hearing about this and your blog entry.

      We have configured a SP6 Sandbox system for evaluating this funcitonality. We've setup everything according to your (very clear) instructions and were able to play around with it a bit.

      However, with the current implementation state, we have some questions / doubts. We would greatly appreciated it if you could clear this up for us:

      • As far as we understood, "old" Solman Assignment Block "AIC_LONGTEXT" becomes obsolete when using embedded screenshots, instead component GSTEXT / TEXTMNGMT have to be used. Can you confirm this?
      • When maintaining View CRMC_TEXT and enabling the HTML text we got a message (UIU_TEXT21) which confused us a bit, as we understood it that "old" texts cannote be read anymore after the switch. However we found that in GSTEXTS we still find the old text types. Can we discard this message?

      I have a couple more questions but would like to wait for your response on these first.

      Thanks a lot and best wishes from Germany,

      Axel

      Author's profile photo Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Axel,

      1. Yes, you should be able to replace AIC_LONGTEXT completely with the GSTEXT assignment block. AIC_LONGTEXT does not support the new formatted texts, while GSTEXT supports both old and new texts.
      2. CRM does not like it if you switch back and forth between types of formatted texts. GSTEXT can still read both types, but it was always my impression that CRM prefers if if you create completely new text types for the new formatted texts. This way, the system will read a specific text type from only one repository, instead of having to look in the old and new repository for a single text type. This is something to consider when moving to the new formatted texts: the cleanest way would be to create completely new Z-namespace text types, and then perform the switch only once.

      Regards,

      Gordon

       

      Author's profile photo Axel Börke
      Axel Börke

       

      Hi Gordon,

      thanks a lot for clearing this up.

      I understand point 2) perfectly, this would result in some major changes on our end but well, the embedded texts feature would most likely be worth it.

      However, I’m not too happy with exchanging AIC_LONGTEXT with GSText. But maybe we were just using it wrong, or are already too much used to the AIC_LONGTEXT functionality. Anyway, I feel that the user experience with this block leaves room for improvement.

      Just to list a couple short feedback notes I got from our test users. I was hoping that maybe we missed somthing during configuration, because this might be a deal breaker for us

      • Non-expanded version requirers users to expand every text individually, requiring a round-trip. This makes reading longer conversations tedious
      • Expanding all can lead to to a very very long notes block as the individual fields are not scaled to text and are either too large or too small depending on the text
      • Overall, working with the block involves a lot of roundtrips
      • Old notes could be changed, this was not possible before and is certainly not desired

       

      Author's profile photo Axel Börke
      Axel Börke

      Sorry for the double reply, apperently editing posts is bugged at the moment. I wanted to add the following issue:

      • A lot of unnecessary information, toolbars, etc with past notes, making the actual interesting text a bit hard to read

       

       

      Author's profile photo Patrice HERICHER
      Patrice HERICHER

      Hello Gordon,

      do you know if this rich text editor is planned for Fiori apps ?

      i noticed TinyMCE libraries are available in SAPUI5 libraries.

      https://sapui5.hana.ondemand.com/#/api/sap.ui.richtexteditor.RichTextEditor/constructor

      Is there a guideline to implement it in SOLMAN Fiori apps ?

      Thanks for your help,

      Patrice

       

      Author's profile photo Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Patrice,

      You are correct that the TinyMCD libraries are available in the SAPUI5 libraries.

      Unfortunately, I am not permitted to comment on features planned for future Solution Manager releases. I can only suggest that you review the release notes of future Solution Manager support packages and keep an eye on our blogs and other information channels for when we are permitted to disclose such details.

      Best Regards,

      Gordon

      Author's profile photo Patrice HERICHER
      Patrice HERICHER

      Thanks Gordon 🙂

      Point is this feature is already available on SAP one support portal incident app ...

      Hope it will come soon on solman.

      Regards,

      Patrice

       

       

      Author's profile photo Mike Zhang
      Mike Zhang

      Hello Patrice,

      Rich Text Editor in Fiori app had been available, please refer to SAP Note 2547895 - Can images be saved in the Text Logs while rich text is enabled.

       

      Best Regards,

      Mike

      Author's profile photo Patrice HERICHER
      Patrice HERICHER

      Hi gordon,

      Do you know how i can add some additional buttons in tinymce default toolbar ?
      Examples : Font size, color, hyperlink

      Thanks for your help,

      Patrice

      Author's profile photo Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Patrice,

      No, I'm not sure how to do this in the context of the CRM WebClient UI. As far as I know, this is a development task for the WebClient framework: it would take quite a bit of effort to change the buttons within the toolbar - unless you are developing your own UI5 app. There's documentation for that.

      Regards,

      Gordon

      Author's profile photo Joyca Vervinckt
      Joyca Vervinckt

      Hi Gordon Leslie McDorman ,

      Thank you for this interesting blog.

      Have you perhaps tried combining this with the SPRO activity “Specify Status-Dependent Required Fields”? I had some mandatory Text types upon status change there; but now with them having HTML enabled I seem to have an issue with these mandatory texts. Even if I added all mandatory texts, the error for mandatory texts still remains…

      Author's profile photo Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Joyca,

      That's interesting. Perhaps you should create an incident for this; our specialists will analyse the issue.

      Regards,

      Gordon

      Author's profile photo Joyca Vervinckt
      Joyca Vervinckt

      Thanks Gordon, I actually did create an incident last week as well 🙂 Hope I get a solution from there, I'll post something here again then to share the solution.

       

      Kr

      Joyca

      Author's profile photo Joyca Vervinckt
      Joyca Vervinckt

      Hi,

      in case anyone else ever gets this error; I got the following reply on my ticket with SAP:

      I found the root cause: there is part of the rich text handling logic missing on your SP06 system. This logic was part of our further enhancements for rich text editor and was delivered with SP07 release.

      Unfortunately the dependencies involved are too high to downport the change to SP06 with a note. Actually the new rich text editor was not completely rolled out in SP06 thus part of the logic was still under development and not ready.
       
      If you really need to have the mandatory text check for status changes, I would suggest you can use the standard text editor for those text types for now.

      Author's profile photo Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Joyca,

      Thanks for reporting this. I'll see if I can update the blog so that this information is more obvious.

      Regards,

      Gordon

      Author's profile photo Joyca Vervinckt
      Joyca Vervinckt

      Hi,

      Meanwhile an additional issue with the html-based-texts on SP06 popped up;

      in the activity

      SAP Solution Manager
      Capabilities (Optional)
      IT Service Management
      Inbox
      Assign Text Types

      you can maintain text types with a direction “reply from processor to reporter” which can be added to a mail form that is sent on e.g. the Proposed Solution status; e.g. the SUSO Solution text type.

      However again if the texts are html; also SEND_MAIL_WITH_MAIL_FORMS method does not “find” these text types anymore and cannot add them to an email. Non-html text types are still found.

       

      Also More - Print Preview (smartform print) cannot find the html texts. Even the "print icon" button top right of the screen cannot handle the html texts...

       

      I hope when we upgrade to SP08 that both these issues will be resolved.

       

      Kr

      Joyca

      Author's profile photo Charles Kaberia
      Charles Kaberia

      Hi Joyca and Gordon,

       

      However again if the texts are html; also SEND_MAIL_WITH_MAIL_FORMS method does not “find” these text types anymore and cannot add them to an email. Non-html text types are still found.

      I am facing this issue, how can I resolve it? I am using SP09

       

       

      Author's profile photo Guillaume Rébora
      Guillaume Rébora

      Hello Gordon,

      I have tried to implement this feature but i'm facing a problem.

      I'm able to add an image in the Rich Text Editor but they are removed each times the page is refreshed or when I tried to save. .

      exemple:

      and then, if i change Something in the page, images disappear :

      Could you please tell me if I miss Something?

      (I'm currently using Solman 7.2 SP8 and WEBUIF 747 SP16)

      Thank you and Kind Regards

      Guillaume.

      Author's profile photo Antonela Bauer
      Antonela Bauer

      Hallo Gordon,

       

      in ITSM we have configurated gstext to be able to paste screenshots in su99.

       

      Now I have no possibility to make the Texttype SU99 obligatory, when creating an incident.

       

      The Workaround via "Specify Status-Dependent Required Fields" cannot be used, because I want to have the text mandatory, when creating the incident, so to say in the initial Status and therefor I get no Statuschange-Trigger for the Check.

       

      How can I check, if the SU99 Text is maintained, when saving the Incident for the first time?

       

      Thanks in Advance,

      Antonela

      Author's profile photo Kim Heckscher
      Kim Heckscher

      Hello together,

       

      I also got the same Issue.

       

      I changed alls from SUxx to ZHxx with HTML and now I don#T have a default Texttype while creating an Incident. And no possibillity to set ZH99 as obligatory?

       

      Any Ideas?

      Author's profile photo Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Kim,

      We always suggest you update to the latest SAP Solution Manager support package - features like this are always being improved. If you have done so, please create an incident on component sv-smg-sup and we'll take a look at it.

      Good Luck!

      Author's profile photo Mike Zhang
      Mike Zhang

      Hi Gordon,

      I am using Solution Manager 7.2 SP09, in Fiori app Create Incident, My Incidents, pasted images are stored in attachments separately.  End users are very demanding to show text and images in one place, instead of several more mouse-clicks. Is there a plan to improve this?

       

      Best Regards,

      Mike

      Author's profile photo Kim Heckscher
      Kim Heckscher

      Hi Gordon, OK but are you shure that this will help definitiv?

      I don't whant to implement SP9 and get some other issues instead..

      Author's profile photo Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Kim,

      Let me double-check with my colleagues. I'll try to get back to you soon.

      Author's profile photo Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Kim,

      It sounds like you are using SP08. If that is the case, I could not find anything we adjusted with SP09 for this. There was some work done for mandatory texts types, but if you already have SP08, you should have this improved handling too.

      I can now only suggest you create an incident for this: that way we can better analyse your difficulty.

      Author's profile photo Kim Heckscher
      Kim Heckscher

      Hi Gordon, I did allready 😉
      454354 / 2019 New Textblock GSTEXT no obligatory Texttype

      Author's profile photo Martin Herbinger
      Martin Herbinger

      Hello, does this work also for Knowledge Article?
      Best Regards,
      Martin

      Author's profile photo Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Gordon Leslie McDorman
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Martin,

      Knowledge Articles work in a slightly different manner. This blog article only deals with the SAP Solution Manager ITSM transaction types. I can’t remember the details for Knowledge Articles, but if I find them again, I’ll post an answer.

      Edit: I found that we did try this some time ago. The instructions here should be - more or less - also applicable for Knowledge Articles. Remember to add the corresponding text types (for example SUSO) which you use to table CRMC_TEXT.

      Regards,

      Gordon

      Author's profile photo Sven Schneider
      Sven Schneider

      Hi Martin,

      here you will find instructions, also for knowledge articles::

      2731517 - How to activate Rich Text Formatting for ITSM and ChaRM

      Regrads,
      Sven

      Author's profile photo Georg Koraev
      Georg Koraev

      Hello,

      any updates to issue of  Texttype SU99. We have the same problem, after upgrade solman to SP10,  by empty of  obligatory type SU99 we dont get any information, that field is required as before.

      Thx in advance.

      Best regards

      Georg

      Author's profile photo Charles Kaberia
      Charles Kaberia

      Hi Gordon,

       

      Thank you for this article; I managed to have Formatted Customization;when processors reply wit screenshot it works fine; however when I receive an E-mail with a screenshot from Customer, it strips and instead  shows me an reference to the content-server, eg. [cid:image001.png@01D05A75.12F36980].

      Would you know what would be the issue on this, I am on 7.2 SP09

      Charles.

      Author's profile photo Charles Kaberia
      Charles Kaberia

      Solution to this was to disable TNEF in incoming mails. Its showing perfectly now.

      Author's profile photo Martin Herbinger
      Martin Herbinger

      Hello Charles,

      can you describe your solution a little more detailed please.

       

      Best Regards,

      Martin

      Author's profile photo Kim Heckscher
      Kim Heckscher

      Hi Gordon,

      Are there already solutions to have HTML text also in the Service Desk API?

      We have a second service desk tool, and there can be entered in all texts rich text / html.

       

      Author's profile photo Cristiano Procacci
      Cristiano Procacci
      hi Gordon
      could you help me understand how I can enable these buttons.
      to date I see them disabled
      
      
      thank you