Integrate SAP with your continuous delivery pipeline using latest ActiveControl 7.1

‘Practise what you preach’ is a mantra we live by here at Basis Technologies. We encourage our customers to use our automation technology to be more agile and to deliver SAP change when it’s ready, rather than being held back by planned release cycles.

Being more agile is what allows us to continuously release new updates to our market-leading automation solution ActiveControl almost every month of the year. But every so often we also bring out a larger update, one that has all the exciting new features that our customers have asked for and have put at the top of their wish list.

ActiveControl 7.1 is one of those releases.

One of the key features that I’m sure many customers and prospective clients will be excited about is the ability to integrate SAP with Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) processes to enable full visibility of change of the entire IT landscape.

It is a major enhancement to DevOps and CI/CD processing to ensure that SAP changes are fully tied in with other related technologies so that they can be tested and deployed together.

ActiveControl can now be integrated into CI/CD tools like GitLab to automate the build, testing, and deployment process of all related applications. This means that SAP application changes are no longer disconnected from other connected application changes and when there is new code to be deployed all applications can trigger the CI/CD process automatically.

For example, in SAP, when the development of the relevant changes is complete ActiveControl can trigger a push to GitLab to indicate that it is ready to be deployed. GitLab will then manage the CI/CD process to coordinate all the affected application changes and will then trigger the deployment of the SAP changes alongside all the other related applications.

Along with existing integrations into tools like Jira and ServiceNow this ensures that SAP delivery is fully integrated and automated so that it doesn’t slow down critical application and change delivery. It’s difficult to put words to how transformative this is to a lot of companies.

Another really useful feature that customers have requested is full transport form maintenance in the web to further enable development and functional teams to be self-sufficient, particularly teams working on Java systems with non-ABAP transports. This provides easier integration into ActiveControl functions and provides web enabled options for functions like dependencies, manual steps and change / release allocation.

To support S/4HANA migrations, new functionality is available to split and segregate transports to avoid mixing certain object types. This enables a more automated process when synchronizing current ECC and S/4HANA environments.

Enhanced conflict and inter-dependency checking is provided for developers to understand whether there are potential conflicts and crossovers between their work and other developers working in the same system. This is embeded into the development process to provide an early warning of potential downstream issues relating to the same objects.

Enhanced integration checking provides validation to external system ticket statuses as part of the approval process. This brings further synchronization and control between ActiveControl and ITSM / Agile tools to ensure that approvals are prevented until all relevant systems and changes are in the correct status.

A range of ShiftLeft analyzers are also released to improve segregation of duties (SOD) checks and to provide greater control and granularity over conflict and dependency management which is critical in agile and DevOps processes. These a coupled with the ability to allow URLs to be configured to directly take the user to a web page to provide further information and documentation on how to address any issues during approvals.

Other really useful enhancements include the global activation and suspension of import schedules, updates to custom fields processing, better backup and release error handling, improvements to manual steps and enhanced BW transport and merge processing along with a number of bug fixes, making ActiveControl the most flexible and powerful automation solution for SAP environments.

Many of the world’s largest global organizations are using ActiveControl to automate SAP delivery, and the business benefits are remarkable: