It's almost Christmas time so I've been working on my own personal SAP wish list.  Since I work predominantly in SAP ERP (though I'm able to spend some time in BI occasionally), I'm trying to think of some areas of functionality that I would find most useful.  At the moment I'm not trying to think big thoughts so I'm not going to get into a long list of functional improvements that have been building in my brain for the past year.  Rather, I've stumbled onto something that is absolutely killing me right now and if you work in multiple SAP clients/instances (i.e., just about anyone other than an end-user), you might find this useful...  or you'll just be equally annoyed as I am right now.

 

Here is the situation that I'm dealing with. The customer I'm working at has just finished refreshing most of their ERP landscape.  Quality, Development, Sandbox, and Training have been updated from a cloned system and all brought up to the same patch level.  For them this is an excellent and well disciplined practice...  no complaints from me.

 

Now that this is complete and I'm able to get back into the system I have to maintain a ton of items that most people refer to as personalization.  To start off I have to reenter about 40 parameter IDs, then there are numerous line layouts for some PS reports that I have been working with, some table settings, upload my favorites...  and the list goes on and on.  SAP provides a control panel applet to maintain the configuration of SAPGUI, plus the other GUI options when you click on the [customize local layout] button.  There is also a wizard (somewhere) that guides you through this config.  But what is killing me is how disjointed this is and how much it bugs me when I have to do it in 4 DEV clients, 2 QA clients, 1 training client, and the sandbox.  Some of these items do have methods to download/upload (such as Favorites) but many of the rest do not.  At the moment I'm stuck with having to do the following:

 

1. Upload my Favorites
2. Upload my Parameter IDs
3. Line Layouts.  There are several that I tend to configure over and over again for CJI3, FI Document Display, etc.  Plus even more for some individual tables now that SE16N allows you to define layouts for each table specifically.  I'll never get these layouts back to the way I had them before.
4. Table Settings.  I'm referring to the small table icon that appears at the top right hand corner of a table (usually a config table).  Some of the tables I access really benefit from this.
5. F1 Help Settings.  I curse the F1 Performance Assistant.  F1-F9 no longer works and it refuses to launch in a manageable size...  always maximized to take up the whole screen even though the text may only be a few sentences.  I much prefer the older modal dialog box for these reasons.
6. F4 Help Settings
7. F4 Personalized Value Lists
8. SU3 settings...  printer, date format, etc.
9. SAPGUI Options
10. SAPGUI Design Settings
11. SAPGUI Config (in the control panel)
12. Technical Settings.  You'll see the personalization icon (looks like a person's face) on several technical tools such as SE16N.  It's worth specifying
13. User Specific Settings in the ABAP Editor.

 

Does the NetWeaver Client fix this?  Is it any better?  Does anyone know because we've been hearing about it for over 2 years and I haven't been to an established SAP customer that uses it.