KB0018 – Delivery Transport Management
Overview
This KB note describes the customer responsibilities with regard to correct installation of Promenta solutions within their environment
IMPORTANT- Failure to follow the advise and instruction can result in :
– Outages of Promenta solution in Production systems and other landscape systems
– Data loss or corruption in Promenta solutions
– Incur additional fees from Promenta to resolve issues
Incorrect installation of Promenta solutions by customers is not covered by Support contract (unless explicitly mentioned in customers specific contract)
Background
Promenta provide delivery packages to customers for installation of Promenta solutions. These packages will mainly contain SAP ABAP transports but may also contain Portal packages in some situations.
It is critical that transports are installed in the proper sequence as provided by Promenta.
It is common for many customers to partially or fully outsource their BASIS and server support to third party providers. It is also common to have separate teams (or even separate providers) managing the servers and managing the SAP system itself.
In addition there will normally be a project team that is working with Promenta.
Therefore miscommunication between customer teams, which results in incorrect installation, is also unfortunately possible.
Customer Process
It is advised that the customer creates an internal process involving all teams so that proper communications can occur.
During the lifecycle of a project it could be a number of months between installation on development system and import into Production. The process should ensure that the teams can still pickup the correct lists even after a significant length of time has elapsed.
Customer Obligations
It is the customers obligation to ensure that the transports delivered are implemented in the correct order as supplied by Promenta.
In addition:
– Promenta will only support transport lists that have been provided by Promenta.
– If a customer decides to keep their own list of transports they do so at their own risk.
– Promenta will not “validate” customer lists of transports – although we may (at our discretion) review and feedback. However the full responsibility of these internal lists is with the customer at all times. See Promenta Delivery Note info below.
– Customers will communicate Promenta lists accurately within their organisation.
– Customers may generate their own transports to add additional customisation to Promenta solutions. Customer generated transports are not the responsibility of Promenta.
Promenta Delivery Notes
Promenta issues a Delivery Note with every delivery.
This note contains the following information
– Link to download all files . This link will take you to the Promenta Support system https://support.promenta.com
– Transport order. The transport order for this delivery. All transports listed must be installed
– Post-install steps. Any steps that you must perform after install.
FAQ : What transport order should I follow?
A section of the delivery note will look like the image below
ALL transports listed must be applied – this list is customised to your particular environment and previous installation history
It is not recommended to import all transports in a single STMS queue. It is recommended to import each Patch level in individual queues OR import each transport one-by-one.
Note : transports highlighted in yellow are client-dependant and should be applied to all customer clients
FAQ : I have several clients on the same system – what should I do?
You should perform the import in these steps
1) Import ALL transports (workbench and customising) into the “Gold” client. This is only done once per SAP system.
2) Import ONLY the yellow customising transports into all other clients on that system
FAQ : I have made a sequencing error – what should I do?
If you have imported transports out-of-sequence OR you started importing workbench transports for a second time into the same system you have an inconsistent code base. Promenta will help but this is not part of software support and additional charges may apply.
This must be resolved immediately. To resolve you must effectively start again on the import.
Note that during the re-import as described below you will get transport failures as now you have a mix of object versions that will not necessarily compile.
– First install ALL transports in correct order into “Gold” client
– Secondly import all yellow customising transports into other clients
– Ignore transport errors
After the last transport has been deployed you should now have a consistent code base and all objects should compile and syntax check. Perform a syntax check on the transports.
FAQ : I use an external transport management tool
If you use an external management tool to manage your transports AND the tool allows external transports to be managed then you can use the tool.
You will have a method of attaching external transports to the tool for subsequent management.
The tool must be able to deploy the transport according to the sequence supplied by Promenta.
FAQ : I need to modify Promenta transports/Create my own transports/Transport-of-copies
Promenta test and stage all transports delivered to customers – we therefore can be confident that the transports are correct.
Some organisations have a policy of modifying or copying external transports to be deployed through their SAP landscape.
For example you may want to create “Transport-of-copies” transports from Promenta transports.
Promenta does not support this process because we cannot guarantee the consistency of object versions. This can lead to unexpected behaviours of solutions. In addition the process needs to be repeated for every delivered patch and so can add significant delay to projects.
Some customers have done this successfully but Promenta would charge additional services to resolve any issue caused by this process.
FAQ : I received a transport error on import
If you are correcting a previous sequencing issue then this is expected. Please see above.
If you experience an error code 8 or above then please first check the deliver note to check if it is a known error. Occasionally a subsequent transport in the queue may fix the error.
If you experience an error code 6 on importing MIME objects then these errors can be safely ignored.
If you experience a warning (code 4) then these can be ignored.
If in doubt please check the release notes and then contact Promenta.