CRM IC 4.0 - Upgrade to CRM 7.0

Question

Hello All,
I am trying to understand the complexity and nature/skillset of work that would be involved when it comes to upgrading CRM Interaction Centre from 4.0 to 7.0.I would expect the look of the screen to be same or as close to original as it can be i.e. as rendered by our current Z BSP application that we have,used by the call center employees.
Can anyone run me through at a very high level the sequence of activity that will be carried out to have in place in CRM 7.0 the functionality of the Z BSP app that we have?Will CRM 7.0 have the Z BSP application post upgrade or is it case of reworking the entire app?The Z BSP application is the only one used with lot of changes to standard SAP classes.
I was just able to spot one similar query in SDN.
How to handle IC during the upgrade to CRM7.0?
Thanks.
Useful responses will be rewarded.

Answer 1

Hello Jayant,
Good question. I've written about this in my SAP Pressbook, "Maximizing Your SAP CRM Interaction Center". The short answer is that you will need to rewrite all of your custom ZBSP pages (assuming that they are still needed based on some of the new features and capabilities availabl ein RM 7.0) due to architecture changes. You will also need to re-do some of your customizing as well (e.g., NavBar, Scripts, etc.).
The biggest change is that you might experience in the BOL layer is, however, the complete BOL support of all CRM objects including all sub objects, relations and attributes. So the enhancements that you have done in your 4.0 project might not even be necessary anymore unless you've introduced completely new objects. Also fields you added via EEW will be available in the respective BOL objects without manual code effort.
On the UI layer itself you have to be aware that even though the whole CRM 7.0 UI is based on the same UI framework as CRM 4.0 IC WebClient, this framweork has been significantly enhanced and supports now also concepts as components (to organize, structure and manage different areas of the CRM application), reuse via components and windows etc. Also there are two new sets of tags: THTMLB (Low level UI controls such as input fields, tables and trees) and CHTMLB. The latter one contains eta tags for configuable views that allow the adjustment of views via the configuration tool, which allows defining fields and arrangement on a form or a table as well as re-labelling.
Also the toolset in general has been heavily enhanced and there's also the concept of modification-free enhancements on the UI layer based on inheritance.The upgrade will be "technical" meaning that all your stuff will survive but due to the componentization of the UI framework will not run out of the box in the new environment. You will have to "re-do" investments you've done on the UI side - however this should be much easier compared to 4.0 due to configurability of the UI and the improved toolset.
Although SAP provides an upgrade path from earlier releases of CRM to new CRM 2006s/CRM 2007, there is no upgrade path for the Interaction Center. Even if you are already using the IC WebClient in CRM 2005, much of your IMG configuration settings and related customizing and objects will need to be reimplemented. This is partially due to technical changes that were introduced to allow the rest of CRM to run on the IC WebClient architecture. Some examples of affected areas include:
- Interactive Scripting (scripts must be manually recreated in the Interactive Script Editor due to incompatibilities)
- Navigation Bar configuration (a new configuration concept was introduced and customizing for the navigation bar needs to be redone in transaction CRMC_UI_NBLINKS)
- Launch Transactions (a new configuration concept was introduced and launch transactions must be regenerated in transaction CRMC_UI_ACTIONWZ)
- Alerts (alerts must be recreated using the new Alert Editor tool available in the IC Manager CRM business role)
- Mail Forms (mail forms must be recreated in new HTML-based Mail Form tool available in the IC Manager CRM business role)
- Activity Clipboard (customizing for the activity clipboard needs to be maintained in the new view cluster CRMC_UI_CLIP)
- IC WebClient Profiles (the IC WebClient Profile concept was replaced by the CRM business role concept and is now maintained in transaction CRMC_UI_PROFILE).
Warm regards,
John