Project Management using Solution Manager

Question

Hi,
We are trying to use solution Manager for managing our IT projects - specifically for SAP projects.
We browsed through the existing functionalities that are available and are not able to get info on the following:
___Project Admin tab for Roadmaps :_ __ In the transaction RMMAIN, we are able to define the scope of the activities at each phase and assign team members and track the status of the activity / task.
However we do not have the tab for tracking the planned start date / end date and the actual start / end dates. Similar is the case for efforts.
So not sure how to track these?
Integration of Roadmaps and Blueprints : Once we have defined the project and assigned the Roadmap, we have all the activities that need to be tracked. In addition in transaction SOLAR01 / SOLAR02, we can define the scope and configurations which in itself are a kind of sub projects to be embedded withing the Blueprint and realization phases respectively of the main Projetc Plan.
How to link these Blueprint specific plan and the realization related plan to the main project plan created out of the Roadmap chosen and to track them as one single project?
Synchronization wih ms project : I see only the option to download the plan as an mpp file. But is there any option to upload mpp as well so that the project can be tracked using mpp and synchronized with Solution manager at frequent intervals?
Your answers would definitely be helping us a lot and would be greatly appreciated.
thanks in advance.
regards,
suresh velan

Answer 1

Hi Suresh,
Solution Manager is a Project Management tool. But it is not for Project Planning. If you want to do Project Planning also from the SolMan system, then you have to enable cProjects component of SolMan.
Synchronization between your MS Project and cProjects is possible. But synchronization between SolMan's RoadMap/Blueprint and MS Project is not possible.
In RoadMap, you can capture and track the status of all phase-wise activities as to what is their status. Here capturing date details is not possible.
In Blueprint/Configuration you can capture and keep track of the individual object's blueprinting and configuration activities. Here you can capture the planned/actual start/end dates for each object.
As I said earlier, Solution Manager provides lot of Project Management features, but Project Planning is not possible. For that we have to start using cProjects component in SolMan.
Hope it helps.
best regds,
Alagammai.