VA02/VA03 Activating Services for Object Attachments: Overhead on System

[Former Member]

Hi All -

In Release 4.70, the object services for Transactions VA02/VA03 were deactivated in the SAP Standard System (for performance reasons). However, the object services can be reactivated individually by setting user/profile parameter SD_SWU_ACTIVE = X.

We are getting requests from the business to activate the

SD_SWU_ACTIVE parameter which will allow users to attach documents to

Sales Orders and Purchase Orders. We are worried that in our system,

since we will have thousands of documents, that users will attach

multiple documents to many PO's and SO's. Can you tell me what type of

impact this will have on the system in terms of performance and

overhead? Any information will be helpful. We do not want to see this

create issues. What table do these documents get saved into? Please

advise on any considerations we should make before turing this

functionality on. Thank you. - Will Sadler

[Former Member]

Hi Will,

My previous company instituted this process for inserting faxed purchase orders from customers into the sales order. I can't speak to the question of specifically how putting this in your system could impact processing times in your R/3 system, but it definitely could have a storage impact for your company. One thing that we did was to put those documents on a web-based document repository like SharePoint or Stellent (which is what the last company used). When doing this, a user can create an external document (URL) and insert the title (i.e. Customer PO) along with the link where the document is located. This way, when you view the attachments list and double click on a link, your browser will open up with the particular document. This could be helpful for outside sales people who need to see the specifics of a PO and are logged in via VPN. At any rate, since the link is merely text the impact to the system would be minimal.

Hope this helps.

[Former Member]

Hi,

Saving the documents through the link with slow down the system as the files will be saved on the SAP server. If the client wants to save so many documents then they can look at DMS (document management server). It has a seperate server and storage capacity and has links to the most of the master data and transaction data in SAP. But this will be extra cost for the client for servers and space. However this is a better solution as it is part of SAP can be accessed in Project system node.

Regards,

Deepak

[Jelena]

You might want to start by reading the FAQ page here:

http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/SI/FrequentlyaskedquestionsaboutGenericObjectServices+%28GOS%29

If there are still any questions, I'd suggest to post them in ABAP or Basis forum since it's not specific to SD and is too technical for this forum IMHO.