SAP Upgrade: My experience and some tips

From time to time I receive e-mails with tips about upgrading SAP systems, what you should do and what you shouldn't.

I am glad to have participated in three and it's that experience that I wanted to share with you.

First of all if you read any white paper about it you'll come to a conclusion that there are a full hand of things to be aware about at certain times during the upgrade process. To organize yourself you should make a list of what to do before, during and after upgrade, kind like a road map through the upgrade process.

The second thing that comes to mind is to substitute the obsolete functions of download and upload.
From a complex level this not a big deal but if you have to change 2000 function calls is very time-consuming. Therefore I embraced this micro project: to do a program that would replace automatically the obsolete functions. It worked well and saved a lot of time. In 5 minutes or less it replaces 300 functions, checks for consistency and assures that everyting is OK.

Another thing that is forgotten is that when you use a temporary system you have to change the SOURCESYSTEM ID of your objects to the new system id. For this I made a simple program that updates this field on the DB.

Finally check with transaction code UCCHECK if all your programs are UNICODE compliant.