SAP R/3 was easy
The
application and the basis components all were in one system, installed
together, and they all had the same version like the product: product
version SAP R/3 4.6 used software component version SAP BASIS 4.6 as
well as software component versions SAP HR 4.6 and SAP APPL 4.6, see
figure 1.
Only a part of all software components are shown in this and the following figures.Nowadays it is more complex
A
product like SAP ERP (successor of SAP R/3) is based on a SAP NetWeaver
version, for example SAP ERP 6.0 is based on SAP NetWeaver 7.0. And
both the application as well as SAP NetWeaver use enhancement packages,
like Enhancement Package 04 for SAP ERP 6.0 is based on Enhancement
Package 01 for SAP NetWeaver 7.0. And they are bound to each other: EHP 4
for SAP ERP 6.0 requires EHP 1 for SAP NetWeaver 7.0.
The software components seemed always
to follow the numbering of the product: SAP HR 6.04 belongs to
Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0, just like SAP BASIS 7.01 belongs
to Enhancement Package 01 for SAP NetWeaver 7.0, see figure 2.
Correlating software component versions with product versions
So
it seems conclusive to inspect the software component versions of an
SAP system to deduce the product version. If you see SAP BASIS 7.02, you
know that it is part of the Enhancement Package 2 for SAP NetWeaver
7.0. And if you see this in an SAP ERP - ECC server, you may know that
it is based on Enhancement Package 5 for SAP ERP 6.0 (if you know about
the correlation of "NW 7.0 EHP2 <-> ECC 6.0 EHP5").
But
then, as stated at the beginning of the blog: EHP 6 for SAP ERP 6.0 is
different: the SAP ERP - ECC server is using software component versions
SAP BASIS 7.31, SAP ABA 7.31 and others - instead of 7.03, as you may
have expected. Indeed, these software components do not have a version
7.03! SAP has consolidated some software components, and as a result, an
SAP NetWeaver 7.31 Application Server ABAP uses the same software
component version SAP BASIS 7.31 as a system based on Enhancement
Package 3 for SAP NetWeaver 7.0. Figure 3 shows this for some software
components in a comparison for EHP6 for SAP ERP 6.0 and EHP1 for SAP BW
7.3.
Digging deeper
This
discrepancy between software component version and product versions is
not new: let us have a look at software component SAP HR: it does not
have a version 6.05, so you may have detected this already with
Enhancement Package 5 for SAP ERP 6.0. Figure 4 shows both EHP5 and EHP6
for SAP ERP 6.0.
Figure
4 now includes more software components - but still not all. Now when
you update your SAP ERP 6.0, you may select only some of all the
technical usages. If you select only these that do not require
software component EA-DIMP, this software component will not be updated
to the new version. That is why figure 4 shows the software component
EA-DIMP with version 6.00.
Evolution of code lines for software component SAP BASIS
Let
us focus on one prominent software component of the foundation of each
ABAP system: SAP BASIS. After SAP NetWeaver 7.0 was released, the code
line of SAP BASIS 7.0 was split. On the one hand, this allowed faster
innovation for technology solutions like SAP NetWeaver Process
Integration (PI), based on SAP BASIS 7.1, 7.11 and above (until 7.3). At
the same time, the SAP Business Suite based applications like SAP ERP
had the requirement of a stable core. This lead to the code line 7.0,
7.01, and 7.02.
Meanwhile SAP has reached a high
degree of interoperability between SAP Business Suite based application
systems (like SAP ERP) and SAP NetWeaver based technology systems (like
PI). So it was possible to merge the two code lines back into one – and
this one had to be named 7.31.
