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Thoroughly modern Basis by Jon Friesen

While preparing to deliver a recent webinar on large-scale CUA, I was struck at how cross-disciplinary a Basis administrator’s job has become.

I was configuring SAP’s LDAP connector to load users from Apache’s LDAP Directory (technically not supported, but it worked – don’t you love it when standards live up to their promise) in order to demonstrate the LDAP/CUA synchronization on my laptop. The configuration required knowledge of LDAP directory schemas, ABAP data structures and the LDAP connector mechanism, in addition to a comfort with CUA and user administration in general. This is not an unusual situation for a Basis administrator these days; in fact after the basic system configuration is complete, subsequent project tasks these days (I’m thinking of things like SSO configuration, SOAP Logical Destinations, plus just about anything on the J2EE stack) are almost certain to send you hacking through XML, reading Java stack traces, and traversing multiple (probably non-SAP!) systems.

This is the new Basis. I’ll be dedicating this blog to my thoughts (and hopefully solutions) on modern Basis administration, away from the comforts of SM21, ST22, RZ10, etc, venturing as deep as I can into the colder corners of large heterogeneous landscapes. I’ll be drawing from past and current experiences both at SAP and here at DBSi where we provide Basis hosting services to multiple customer landscapes and solve these kinds of challenges every day. I’ll be focusing especially on the edges of Basis: where it touches and overlaps the developer and security areas, on SOA and integration situations, and going deep into Solution Manager and other support tools available to the modern Basis admin.