Well, there we were again in Marco Island. What a sacrifice we make for our companies;The CWG returned to beautiful Marco Island yet again, and a great conference was held, hopefully for all!

If you couldn't be there, the program committee did a wonderful job of bringing together a multitude of different topics for us to consider.

And then there were the networking dinners on Monday evening;

Slowly, but surely, we are upgrading the CWG sandbox to the latest ERP enhancement packs available from SAP. Over the last week, the Enhancement Pack 3 (SP02) has been implemented. For those of you who are on older versions of SAP, or even on ECC6 but without enhancement packs, feel free to check out the enhancement pack functionality on the CWG sandbox and share your experience by responding to this blog entry. If you have particular requests to enable some currently unavailable functionality, please contact me at sandbox@configuration-workgroup.com.

Daniel

Some irrational habit held me back from writing this blog entry, waiting for the number of CWG sandbox users to reach 100. But who cares about nice looking round numbers anyways, the fact that CWG sandbox is alive and kicking with 96 registered users is reason enough to celebrate!

An even more interesting  statistic is how many KMATs have been contributed and by whom. To date we have 40 new contributed KMATs and here goes the first ever "CWG Sandbox Hall of Fame" list:

CWG Sandbox has been growing steadily, we now have 115 members. In this blog I will also show you how to access the sandbox if you are behind a corporate firewall.

As a reminder, CWG sandbox is an SAP ERP (ECC6) system with pretty much the latest support packs and your CWG membership status entitles you to a free account at the sandbox, request it at:

http://www.configuration-workgroup.com/sandbox/accessrequest

Hello everyone, I have been getting inquiries whether CWG could also host a CRM sandbox - not every company has access to CRM and a lot of the CWG activity, including the conference program, revolves around CRM.

SAP has been extremely supportive of the CWG and Marin Ukalovic has done wonders securing the original ERP license for us. A CRM sandbox however won't happen unless we can muster wide support for it and document use scenarios which would benefit CWG and SAP.

Andreas Kraemer had a very interesting talk about improvements to the IPC at the Berlin conference and he also threw in a few "VC goodies" like the ability to use the PMEVC editor within the CU01/02 and CU21/22 transactions. I have implemented this on the CWG sandbox so that we can help SAP test this out more fully, here is how it looks:

I got several inquiries about using IPC on the CWG sandbox so a blog on this topic is long overdue. Using the IPC UI instead of the CU50 is actually quite easy, just follow these steps:

1. Either run transaction SE38 and report RCUIPCSWITCH or use PMEVC to set the "IPC switch" for your KMAT. Please be careful and only set this switch to "VC in production, IPC in test" first as you can always go back. Please use the "IPC Only"setting only if you know what you're doing and only on your own KMATs (as it can not be undone).

Some of you have made use of the free tool we have made available to extract your VC models and upload them to the CWG sandbox as described at http://www.configuration-workgroup.com/node/263. If you happen to be using IPC and have created an IPC knowledge base for your model, you can also  import the IPC knowledge base and turn it back into VC master data on the sandbox. Does this sound like magic? Read on then...