SAP Password Manager with SAP BCM CDT (contact center client)

[Former Member]

Hey all,

We're testing the SAP Password Manager 2.0 SP3 (latest version out there).

It works OK....but now it seems we have a conflict/problem if the SAP Password Manager is running BEFORE our users start the SAP BCM CDT (now known as SAP Contact Center ) (that's the "softphone" software our reps use to connect to our IVR to answer calls / screen pops with SAP CRM).

So IF the SAP Password Manager is running first...and then the CSRs start the BCM CDT....SOMETIMES their BCM queues are grey'd out (not selectable).  Sometimes it works fine.

But the funny thing is that if I stop the SAP Password Manager, then start the BCM CDT, things work fine.  So it's easy to prove this is related to the SAP Password Manager, since we never had this problem before I started demo'ing the NW SSO software.

I can toggle back and forth (for the most part) to prove it is something to do with the SAP Password Manager.

Anyway, I did notice that SAP hasn't released any updates to the SAP Password Manager for about a year now, and there just are not that many notes at all regarding this software.

I'm sure this will turn into a SAP message but I was wondering if there are any folks out there that have run into this.

The most interesting thing to me is that we're not even using the NW SSO2.0 suite for SSO to BCM CDT.  it uses X.509 between our MS AD certs in the browser, and a config setting in the CDT.

Am also concerned that SAP hasn't released any updates to the SAP Password Manager in a while, so I wonder if this is even a product they plan on keeping up.  I will say that it does work fairly well for NON-SAP stuff, like external URLs and other applications.  it's helped fill in the blank for stuff I can't do via SNC / SPNEGO / X.509.

NICK

[Christian_Cohrs · Accepted solution]

Hi Nick,

I'm happy to hear that Password Manager helps you fill the gaps and works well for your non-SAP applications. This is exactly the scope that we build this tool for, to cover scenarios that cannot be supported with standard technologies such as Kerberos, certificates or SAML.

As such the scope of the tool is complete, and we do not plan to significantly extend it. Of course, Password Manager is still supported so please open a message for this issue.

Like all tools that automate user interfaces, Password Manager needs to integrate with different user interface technologies on a rather deep level. In rare cases this could interfere with something another applications is trying to do, which could be the cause of what you describe. I'm sure the development team will figure this out 🙂

Best regards,

Christian

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hey Christian,

thanks for the response.  Yeah, I put a message in yesterday, right after I created this thread.  I guess we'll see.

NICK

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Still no word from SAP support on this.  Unfortunately, since we're still just demoing the product, I can't raise this issue beyond a "medium" priority.  I'm going to call again today, but I wish I knew what was taking so long.  We have a work around at least.  Shut down passwd MGR, start BCM client, then start passwd MGR again.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

SAP support sent me over to the BCM CDT team, but they were not able to reproduce the issue.

I don't think they read my problem details very clearly!

So now it's been a full month and still no help.

We can prove beyond a doubt on our PCs that if you have the SAP password manager running and then you want to use the SAP contact center software (formerly BCM) CDT client, you will have a very bad day in terms of lost functionality in BCM and very bad overall performance.

I've opened a new message regarding the performance problems we are clearly seeing if we are using both of those software programs.

if we remove the SAP password manager from this equation, every one is happy!  Unfortunately, now we cannot fulfill our requirements for our SSO project, since we need a way to handle SAP and NON-SAP passwords.

The SAP password manager was our way to do that.

I really hope someone from SAP support will give us some real time out of there day to do a real investigation.

These are 2 SAP products, but the support of them might as well be on different planets!  that's what it feels like!

NICK

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I finally, finally got SAP to acknowledge the issue and got the BCM CDT folks to work with the Password Manager folks.  I eventually got sent to a BCM component queue inside of my message.

At the end of the day, the BCM CDT team had us modify the BCM source code to add a 10 second "sleep" statement instead of the default 4 seconds.

that gave BCM enough time to do its thing, so now the Password manager does not conflict with BCM, and so the BCM CDT queues no longer get grey'd out if password manager is running.

According to the BCM team, this fix will be included in future (yet to be created) BCM support patches.

NICK

[Former Member]

Hi Nick,

Have you noted the exact location where they did the changes ? or you have any troubleshooting document ?

Thanks,

[Former Member]

I Would say that as long as you are on the latest version of contact center you should be fine