During the SAP Teched 2009 most session were about new versions of SAP Netweaver or SAP Netweaver components. During these sessions the version numbers in which these features would be available were mentioned, but every time it seemed to be a different version than the other speaker was talking about. The list below gives an idea of some of the permutations that I have heard:

• 7.0 Enhancement Pack 1 / 7.0 Enhancement Pack 2
• 7.0.1 / 7.0.2 / 7.1.1
• 7.1 / 7.2

I’m not sure about how other folks received this version-puzzle, but it started to dazzle me. Especially when my junior colleague (he will probably slap me after he read this for calling him that) was asking about these versions, of course I couldn’t show that I was probably just as confused him. Fortunately, I was able to apply some logic to those version numbers and made a nice story out of that was actually not too far from reality.

Eventually, Thornsten Franz confirmed that our best guesses were actually quite close. As I can imagine that more folks would have the same questions, or would apply similar logic, but still not know how the versions correlate, I decided to write this down in a blog:

A few years ago, Netweaver 2004s was released and not much later rebranded to Netweaver 7.0. To avoid more confusion, I’ll take that as a starting point

Development on both the ABAP stack and Java stack were both proceeding and the besides support packs, enhancement packs were introduced. Contrary to support packs, enhancement packs would add new functionality to the system. Because of that, Enhancement Pack numbers are reflected in the version number, while support packs are not.

This means that 7.0 Enhancement Pack 1 is the same as 7.0.1, so that’s where the current version of the ABAP stack get its version number from. A new Enhancement Pack is planned for the ABAP stack, so soon we’ll have 7.0 Enhancement Pack 2, 7.0.2 in short.

At the same time, a larger “enhancement” was implemented at the Java-side of the house. While 7.0 was still running on Sun’s Java 1.4 release, the new version was based on Java EE 5 (the enterprise edition of Java 1.5). As upgrading the engine is quite a big step, SAP branded this version 7.1. Very quickly after 7.1 was released, Enhancement Pack 1 was released: 7.1.1.

According to rumours, the version after SAP ABAP 7.0.2 and SAP Java 7.1 was supposed to be version 7.2 which would be released in one big Netweaver release. Instead of individual components, a new version of all Netweaver components would be bundled in a big-bang. It seems however, that this isn’t feasible and that the Java stack will be released before other Netweaver components are ready. The first suite that is probably going to benefit from this is Netweaver CE, which is planned to be out by the end of the year.

Summary:

	ABAP Stack	Java Stack
Previous versions	7.0	7.0 (Java 4) & 7.1 (Java 5)
Current version	7.0 Enhancement Pack 1, a.k.a 7.0.1	7.1 Enhancement Pack 1, a.k.a. 7.1.1
Future version	7.0 Enhancement Pack 2, a.k.a. 7.0.2	7.2