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Wouldn't it be nice if the SAP backend system could tell you whether a comprehensive job documentation for a background job exists, or not? Wouldn't it be even nicer if you could access this documentation from within the backend system?

Actually it is possible, and this blog will tell you how.

The concept behind 

Still today the large majority of SAP customers document their background jobs via MS Excel. But this documentation is usually not sufficient and not really following Best Practices.

If you have followed the topic "job management" over the last two years you will have already learned that the SAP Solution Manager provides a Best Practice functionality for central Job Documentation. SAP is first vendor to provide a comprehensive Job Management Suite

The Job Documentation provides also many small features that should solve many problems from daily operations that remained unsolved up until now, e.g.

  1. Jobs always come easily into a system but they get hardly out of the system again because they are forgotten. That's why the Job Documentation provides a "Validity Date" and the Job Management Work Center provides a standard query to show all documents that should be reviewed based on this "Validity Date"
  2. Customers are always struggling on creating naming conventions for background jobs and then applying them consistently for their thousands of jobs. That's why the Job Request as well as the Job Documentation provide a feature to suggest and even check a given naming convention for a background job. You can learn more about it in the SDN blog Implementation of a naming convention in Job Scheduling Management

Now that said, I would like to mention one of the latest integration features. If you document background jobs in SAP Solution Manager and schedule these jobs via the Job Documentation alone or via the Job Documentation and SAP Central Process Scheduling by Redwood then this information will be transferred to the respective SAP backend system and you can see and access this information via transaction SM37.

How does it look like?

So what you need to do is accessing the scheduling part within the job documentation and schedule the job directly via the Job Documentation (as shown below) and hence the BC-XBP interface or indirectly via SAP Central Process Scheduling by Redwood.

Within transaction SM37 on the backend system you can find a new column Job Doc. Every background job that you documented in SAP Solution Manager and that was scheduled in a way described above shows a documentation icon in this new SM37 column.

This answers basically my first initial question "Wouldn't it be nice if the SAP backend system could tell you whether a comprehensive job documentation for a background job exists, or not?". With the help of the new SM37 column Job Doc you will know if a documentation exists or not. Hence in the future it will be very easy for you to identify which background jobs are properly documented and which are not, because they are perhaps bypassing your central scheduling (see also An easy way to identify end-user scheduled jobs which bypass your central scheduling tool).

What about my second question "Wouldn't it be even nicer if you could access this documentation from within the backend system?" is this also possible? Yes, it is. Simply by clicking on the documentation icon in SM37 a browser window opens and after logging on to your SAP Solution Manager system you directly access the respective Job Document.

Technical Prerequisites

So what are the technical prerequisites? From SAP Solution Manager side you need to have software component ST400 on support package level 21 or higher. The new column for SM37 and hence the integration described above was only released recently. Your backend system requires one of the following support package levels

Support Package

 Release Package Name
SAP_BASIS
700
SAP_BASIS
701
SAP_BASIS
710
SAP_BASIS
711

 

If you want to use the scenario together with SAP Central Process Scheduling by Redwood then you will need to have SAP CPS Build M31 which is not yet released for customers but shall be available soon.

Related previous blogs:

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