New in SAP - What additional skills are necessary?

[Former Member]

Hi all,

I have recently done an internal move in my company and soon I am going to support SAP applications. I have been working , so far, for > 5 years supporting high availability e-Commerce J2EE applications.

From my first look on several forums I am a bit confused whether my acquired skills would be enough - in addition to the SAP training which I will get soon- in order to support SAP applications. Moreover, my main concern is whether I should get more involved on Java development, where the only practical experience is from university projects.

From what I see , having some development and scripting skills, combined with the SAP knowledge is highly required and is much more compensative than being a pure SAP system administrator.

What is your 2 cents on this issue?

Thanks in advance,

[Former Member]

Hi Loukas,

As you have experience on JAVA and if you want to go to programming side then SAP Netweaver Enterprise Portal (EP) will be the best option for you. This involves main coding in JAVA. In addition you can also work with WebDynpro JAVA.

If you want less coding but to be related to JAVA then XI is the right path. Here you will mainly involve in configuration and less in coding. At the administrator side SAP BASIS is there if you have interest in SAP Administration.

Rest there is ABAP as programming language and various functional modules that are complete different and there is no use of JAVA as such in these.

Regards,

Subhasha

[Former Member]

Hi Subhasha,

thanks a lot for your comprehensive response. Indeed, my main supporting tasks on the e-Commerce J2EE applications so far were configuration and tuning tasks , since coding is completely done from another department within the organization. Of course I have had strong knowledge (theoretical) of the JAVA technology and how java coding is done but I did not get the chance in my company to code. On the other hand I see that good SAP consultants here in Germany are the ones who perform coding along with the administration tasks, while they customize the SAP modules.

Let's see, I will start next month and I will see how it will go. The more I will learn the better view about SAP support I will get.

Kind regards,

Loukas

[Former Member]

Hi Loukas,

Yes, you understanding is right. In SAP you can only be good when you have strong domain expertise as well as development knowledge. In the beginning you can start with either XI or EP based on your interest and start exploring it.

All the best.

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Regards,

Subhasha

[Former Member]

Hi Loukas Rougkalas ,

SAP NetWeaver was developed on JAVA and ABAP, as you are professional in java, you can understand the things easily by having a knowledge on ABAP

<i>having some development and scripting skills,</i>

i think you will be placed as a EP consultant as you were aware of design and scripting. their u might have know the concepts like web Dynpro etc...

any how all the best

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