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Complimentary Access to Figaf to run your SAP PI/PO, CPI or API Mgt

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Companies are closing down. You will be affected by your work habits.

Today Denmark is closing down, and I expect a lot of other countries follow. 

You probably will not get less Integration work. Probably you will need to implement some new integrations fast. 
We want to help you make your work easier for the coming period, so you can focus on creating integration and not having to use time on manual work. 

We have made tools to simplify your SAP PI/PO, CPI, and API management processes, and it will help you with your projects.
We can help with:

  • Monitoring
  • Transports
  • Documentation
  • Tests
  • Migrations from PI to PO (To migrate from <7.5 to 7.5
  • Git integration for CPI and API mgt

Until 30 May 2020 you can use our DevOps package to test and transport up to 100 ICOs, Iflows or API proxies. 100 Tickets to register changes and 50 Migrations from PI to PO. And use the other functionality to document, and monitor your integration. 

The tools can be set up really fast. In just one hour you can get started. For the on-prem, you can use your laptop. In most cases, you will be able to use your normal PI or S-user for the tool. There are video instructions on how to get started, and we have also improved our manual. The biggest challenge will be to get the optional agent installed on your SAP PI environment to improve the testing.

You can use Figaf on-prem or the Figaf Cloud for the duration. 

Signup here

Figaf IRT onprem
Figaf IRT Cloud

We do hope you will find the tools so useful you will continue to use them after the complementary period. 

Please use responsible and not overload our systems, otherwise, we may need to change something. Please use your company email. We will be providing support via email or remote sessions.

I expect to conduct some free training sessions (Online of course) next week for the people that have signed up for the trial. 

There will also be a webinar on Thursday 19, with the topic of how Figaf can help you manage SAP CPI.

SAP PIT sp 17 first look and compared with Figaf IRT

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We now have gotten SAP PIT the test tool for SAP PI/PO upgraded to SP 17. 

SP 17 was released Thursday 27 February you can see the release notes here. 

It contains the following updates

  • PIT: Developments & bugfixes for SP17
  • PIT: new UI5 based web interface for PI Test tool
  • PIT: Scheduled Test Execution and Verification

I did not have a look at SP16, we skipped that one. You can also create test suites, which is a collection of test executions. (Probably added in SP 16). Now it becomes interesting because you can schedule them at specific times. Like each night. Then you can see if something has happened to your test/development system. 

You have the WebUI now where business users can run the test and see if everything is okay with the test executions. They can see which fields there is something wrong with.

You can see my video of the tool here

Why Figaf IRT can save you money comparing to SAP PIT.

PIT is free and you get it with all SAP PI 7.5 installations above SP 14. 
At Figaf we do have some benefits that you will enable you to save time on your testing. 

We do have the following features that makes testing much simpler.

  1. Creating of multiply cases of many ICOs at one time and no need to edit ICO to enable the correct logging
  2. Comparison on module level, so you can see the payloads after EDIComparison so you can get to test the full flow. 
  3. Managing the test cases and update changed items
  4. Generate Excel Reports of your test cases
  5. Secure testing, so normal developers will not be able to see confidential messages but can still run tests with them. 
  6. With our tracing of changes are you able to run the tests on what is changed? And an embedded transport system.
  7. A faster release cycle, so we can deliver new functionality to make your SAP Integration easier.

To view it in real life see.

Try Figaf IRT

You can get started in less than 60 minutes with the Figaf IRT tool. In most cases, you can use your current computer to run Figaf at and use your SAP PI user to connect with.

Sign up now

The new Roadmap for SAP PI/PO and SAP CPI Suite

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At DSAG (German-speaking user Group) there was a roadmap session that we could see some points from. This is what happens after SAP updated their support for ECC/Business Suite to 2027 it and implications for other tools. 

I would assume that this is the current working model and we will see more updates on this later. There will come an official roadmap later, once everything has been cleared. 

I created a video with some more information.

Biggest takeaways were:

  • PI 7.5 will be the last release but support extended some years until 2027.   
  • So now a new version that we got the impression the last years. 
  • There will be an on-prem version of SAP CPI and API management you can run on your own hardware. With a monitor and development tool. 

I really love this. It will have a lot of benefits to SAP customers. 

SAP PI

Java 8 has been extended support for longer by oracle. So there is no reason to upgrade to Java 11 and create a new version of NetWeaver Java. It would be costly for SAP to upgrade and also for customers so it makes a lot of sense. It is both PI but also all the other applications on the suite.

It would also be a stretch to get customers to move to the next NetWeaver release within 2 years, now have customers that have not upgraded for 10 years. 

I don’t know what the investments will be into PI/PO with this extended support. I would assume they free some capital for not having to perform the upgrade. 

SAP CPI

SAP CPI is the path forward and where customers should move. 

Removing PI from the Netweaver stack makes a lot of sense. It was probably 6 months behind cloud deployment and was costly to implement. I would assume there is quite a bit of work to port the framework to use the Netweaver stack compared to the cloud. 

That was the main reason we dropped running our Figaf tool on Netweaver stack. 

My assumptions of this: 

  • I would assume that you need to upgrade every 1-3 months to get support or even be able to use the tool. I expect that SAP does not want customers running 5-year-old versions of CPI. So you need to be able to test and upgrade much more often.
  • If SAP did not have the dependency for Netweaver then CPI can be upgraded to Java 11 and Camel 3.0. 
  • If SAP will allow users to have an on-prem version of the CPI then it means that there will not be a change to WebIDE to develop CPI.

Learn more

If you want to learn more about SAP CPI we have created a course that helps you understand how you can develop SAP CPI, so you can get started faster. On the side you can also find our free version of the course.

If you want to develop and manage SAP CPI better try the Figaf IRT. It enables you to manage, govern, test and document SAP CPI and API management much simpler.

Figaf IRT 2.12 release, Secure SAP PI Testing, Dual stack and more

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In this release, we have added two quite interesting approaches for testing SAP PI/PO. 

Dual stack

If you have SAP PI dual-stack with Classical Scearnios and want to test your migration. Now we can fetch messages from the dual-stack, and want to create test cases. This is perfect for migration projects, where you want to test if everything works as expected. We have developed on our 7.4 dual-stack system, and successfully fetched data from clients 7.1 system. There will be some issues with older systems, but you can create test cases.  You can read more about the dual stack option here.

Secure messages

This is the big challenge with Record Replay scenarios. Where you take production data and rerun it on your development system. 

We created Figaf based on the assumption that real production data is what needs to be used for testing because it contains the difference in the data. Unforntaly most of it is sensitive and it could have implications of SOX and GDPR. 

That means everybody with access to Figaf can get access to the messages, so it creates a loophole in the SAP security. This means that ie externals may be able to get access to sensitive data. 

We already have an approach for handling the anonymization of data. It does require the developer to understand what is sensitive and it can be multiple values, and it will not work to test migration.
For potential clients with many confidential data that wanted to perform a migration, but it would be difficult to anonymize all interfaces. They wanted a solution to ensure end to end anonymization without external developers would have access to the payload. 

If you create test data on your productive system, Figaf IRT will ensure that all developers will only see the data scrambled data. This way they are able to see if there is something wrong with a specific field. They can see what field is affected and may be able to drive some information. They will not be able to see the specific data. If there is something they don’t understand they can ask an admin to view the difference. 
We are adding some functions over the next few weeks to 

  • Handle synchronize testing so data is not sent to the real system. 
  • Enable the user to access other SAP PI message payloads in the monitor. 
  • Enable same testing option on SAP CPI

I think this security will make it a lot easier to outsource regression testing because you don’t have the challenge if they get access to some secret data.
Improved Synchronization process

For customers with a lof of SAP standard components, our synchronization did not work. The simple query API we used timed out when listing datatypes etc. We are now only syncronizing the SAP objects that are referenced from any other objects. That way you only synchronize the real used objects. 

You can read more and see the demo here.

Improved comparison of SAP CPI iflows

We have improved the algorithm to show what objects were used in an SAP CPI iflow. You can now see which artifacts have been modified between two versions. 

Java 11 /OpenJDK

If you don’t want to use the Oracle Java license, we now also support Open JDK 11. You, therefore, don’t have to use a Java License. We will support Oracle Java for some time, it is really useful for PoC to test the Figaf tool because all SAP PI developers have it. 

Try it now

You can signup to try the Figaf IRT here.


Fetching SAP PI Test messages from Dual-stack system

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If you are planning an SAP PI/PO migration from a Dual-Stack system to a Single stack then this update is for you.

We have seen a lot of customers wanting to migrate from a 7.1 system to a 7.5 system. The biggest hurdle is how do you get test data for it?

We have solved the problem now. So we can fetch messages from a 7.1-7.4 SAP PI dual-stack system and convert them to a test case you can use for your ICOs. If you have a pre 7.31 system some functionality of the Figaf tool will not work, but you will be able to create test cases for your migration.

We have tested with

  • BE / Sync messages
  • Async messages that are split
  • Async messages

You can view a short demo of it here. It will take data from a dual-stack system and run the test on our new SAP PI7.5 ICO/IFlow based system.

You don’t need to install anything on the SAP PI system. You just need to ensure that you are logging both in and output messages for the flows. Then Figaf will just connect and find the messages that you have selected. In most cases, you can also use your normal SAP PI user.

You only need to add the JCO files into the libs folder where you run Figaf IRT.

We know that you may have confidential data in your SAP PI system, so we have added options to mask the test data in this release also. That way you can let contractors handle your testing, without giving them access to view your salary information.

Try it your self

You can signup to try the Figaf tool. It takes a few minutes to get started and connect to a dual-stack system.

You can signup and try it out at Figaf IRT.