printing, SPAD, printer short name + transports systemlandscape

[christoph_ostrop]

how do other customers work with the field printer short name (Table: TSP03L)  ?

are all printers in your landscape 100% identically configured (including the generated printer short name) ?

note:   we are not using Printing Assistant for Landscapes (PAL)

the case:

unfortunately (we did not have 100% identically configured printer through all systems)

we do some customizing action (in our dev system) with selection of a (printer long name) printer to a customizing function.

(within internal logic the selected printer long name "TPA4711" will be translated into a (generated) printer short name eg "P059")

and after that, this customizing will be transported (with that printer short name eg "P059") to QS-system and prod-system,

in QS-system we have a different printer connected to that used printer short name "P059",

so the transport of that customizing changes the used printer to another printer long name

from printer short name "P059" to an unwanted other printer e.g. "TPW7877"

is there any functionallity to translate printer-names or printer-short-names during TMS, or when executing transports in the next system?

are there any SAP-reports to synchronize that printer short name through several systems ?

[divyanshu_srivastava3 · Accepted solution]

Hi Chris,

It's always better to use a series of Short ID for a specific destination host.

That segregates the printers and make it easy to access in huge printing landscape.

Every printer should be created in Development and transported or exported to other systems.

If you have same printers with different IDs in different system, better sync other system with development, create in developed and test it, and export/import to other systems

Regards

[bxiv · Accepted solution]

I have never transport a single printer setting, I leverage PAL to keep all printing names consistent on all the ECC systems in my company.

There is no translate or rename option for printers as the short name is the primary key within the printer table, changing that will cause a long weekend for numerous people.

PAL is the only technology that I am aware of that will sync the printer names through your landscape.  I should also point out that we blacklist print servers in non-Prod environments to ensure we don't have automated processes generating hard copies at a remote office (we update the host file with the DNS name we have set in SPAD for the mapping).

A consideration to also have with PAL is that some types of printers will not sync, ARCHLINK is one example; but in most cases is always called ARCH.

[divyanshu_srivastava3 · Accepted solution]

The user is not using PAL.

So export/import is the option to keep in sync which I have suggested.

[bxiv · Accepted solution]

While valid, I was trying to point out that PAL can be useful in making one's life much easier and not have to track a bunch of csv/xls files and importing the wrong one causing other issues in a printing landscape.

[christoph_ostrop · Accepted solution]

thanks for your reply,

why SAP is not able to refactor those very-old datastructures and to-short columns,

e.g. 4-character printer short name (with significant usage as unique-key field) and the trouble this is causing,

or another columns is those very-old 1-character language-column or 2-character language-column, which are recognizable from the last century .

why is it not posible to make a refactoring round through the whole ECC software to get rid of that stone age software?

[bxiv · Accepted solution]

I couldn't agree more with this @Christoph, I have found via trial by fire that functional teams have two types of rules they write (condition based and event based) and these rules point to the short name; if you have been running SAP for a while and have printers around the world, and SAP forced changes to ATR/PTP/OTC they would probably have a riot! 

If you have never seen how a Order to Cash process works for printing invoices, I recommend seeing the process at least once; in my case I know I have customer service reps in Monterrey Mexico that service other locations within the country of Mexico, instead of them having to choose specific printers for every invoice they process the OTC team setup rules that if they are processing an invoice that matches something unique for a site the condition rule comes into play and sends the output to the remote office.