System Administrator — Guiding Principles 1

I have a day job ( & most of you too — Alhumdulillah ) and we are implementing SAP this year . In this endeavour, I have this opportunity of reading through a book published by SAP Press. The book is titled Practical Guide for SAP Administrators . As I am reading along, I thought, writing down important points, will serve a note to myself and will benefit others too. This is inspired by the thought Ballighu ^anni walaw-ayah . Hence lets begin this journey of learning SAP Administration ( & few other concepts ) together .

In this introductory post, lets discuss few guiding principles , as suggested by authors :

• Protect Integrity of your System — As an administrator, it is expected of you to protect integrity of your System. What does integrity entail of ?

It includes system availability for users to perform business operations . Data consistency to ensure decisions made are appropriate Protecting the systems from external attacks or hacking

• Ask for Help — The SAP product has had plenty of research put into it. And for the features & price of support it commands, it can get a bit-overwhelming for a newbie to triage & troubleshoot errors. The best way to navigate during the troubled-waters is to ask for help. Look for notes, documentation & forums first as the paid support from external consultants is costly.
• Network — Building relationships with other customers & with consultants . Here the authors suggest to reach out to customers using SAP in your business vertical, as the SAP Solution is configured to the specific needs of the industry . Meeting customers & consultants in technical events & seminars is a good way of enhancing learning.
• Keeping it Short & Simple ( KISS) — Looking for technically simple solutions are the best way to around about solving a situation . Simple solutions are not only easy to implement, they can also be cost-effective compared to sophisticated solutions. Also complexity increases confusion, hence breaking down them to simple tasks can be more helpful.
• Document Every Step — This is my personal favourite, i.e. to document everything that you do in production environment. This may sound overwhelming when it is suggested to document all processes, procedures, hardware changes, configuration changes, checks, problems, errors & so on. However that is the best way to ensure you are able to quickly revert any changes that may have caused any issue. This is also helpful, to safeguard knowledge given the attrition in this field.

{ To be continued…

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Originally published at www.sarfarazmulla.com on July 28, 2015.