There are so-called orphan customers or in other words who are without support. Typical reason is decision to stop paying annual maintenance plan somewhere in the past.
If you do not have active annual contract then your original consulting firm is not interested in dealing with you including technical support. Situation is not ideal but it is not the end of the world for you. Let’s talk about what could be done and how you can be back on track. Let’s take a look at details:
1. Where to look for help? Probably not directly through SAP but rather via consulting firm with technicians familiar with old versions. It might be tough to find something like that sitting next to your office so we would recommend the idea to accept remote support via web sessions and phone conferences
2. What kind of issues could be resolved? Each SAP B1 VAR should have access to knowledge base on SAP portal. Business logic of the old version should be considered as subset of the logic of the recent release. It is also possible to help you to design new report (likely in Crystal), new integration in Data Transfer Workbench or Software Development Kit. If you need user training there is no problem to do it remotely via something like Gotomeeting. Establishing reliable backup plan and help you if things go wrong and you need to restore with minimal transaction loss
3. What is not possible or at least to be characterized as ‘very complicated?’ It is probably impossible to add new user licenses or at least until the time where you resolve active annual contract problem with SAP by paying historical outstanding balance. It is difficult to move SAP BO to the new server and we are explaining the problem in the following paragraph
4. SAP B1 license key nature. It issued based on the application server (where License Manager typically resides) MAC number. What does it mean? It means that MAC is coupled with server computer motherboard and in order to move the software to the new computer license key should be reissued. This would be not a problem however support is no longer available for 2005A and 2007A as we are writing these lines in January of 2012. Currently supported versions are 8.82, 8.81 and 8.8. The best strategy would be keeping your old server running in best possible conditions that include the policy to prohibit service packs and new software installation on the server. Consider also moving SAP BO databases to the physical drive which is not the same as the one where Windows is installed. If server crushes then you would need to replace crushing parts and hopefully they do not include motherboard (usually it is hard drives or RAM memory)
5. Are we still having an option to upgrade all the way to the current version? In order to update you should settle relations with SAP and be reenrolled into annual contract. Then your chosen consulting partner should have access to historical DVD containing the releases that are required in multi-step update. Typical scenario here is shipping your databases to the consulting firm via FTP upload or physically via UPS or FedEx on USB external hard drive. Consulting firm should have laboratory with several virtual machines where intermediate versions are installed
6. Walking away from SAP B1 and moving to another accounting platform. It is probably always the option. Often you need to come through data export and conversion to new ERP application. There are several options to do the job. First one is via reports export to Excel. Second way is via custom queries. And the third way is pulling data from SQL tables. Table structure could be reviewed in Software Development Kit or if you prefer shortcuts then just enable View - > System Information in user interface and open the document where you need to know the hosting table
7. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904 (for international customers, where our representative pick up the phone in St. Joseph, MI call center). help@efaru.com. We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, Atlanta, South West Michigan and Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA, Canada, Mexico and Brazil nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed). Our consultants speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese. We feature our expertise is in International Business. We provide second opinion in SB1 data migration, customization and reporting
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