Roadmap to Unicode Conversion
SAP Unicode White Paper
Navigation
Poll
What are your plans for migration to Unicode for your SAP system?
Defer to and combine with the next SAP upgrade
0%
Defer to and combine with a hardware upgrade
33%
Defer until a business need for the JAVA stack forces the issue
0%
Defer as long as possible
0%
As soon as we can
67%
Total votes: 3
Who's online
There are currently 0 users and 1 guest online.
SAP Unicode - Should you upgrade or not?
You probably received the letter from SAP stating that all customers need to upgrade their SAP systems to unicode. A second letter went out in 2008 raising the urgency. The question is, should you upgrade now or not? ... Click "Read More" for additional opinion.
Let's begin with the first communication.
In 2007 SAP sent a letter to customers stating the following:
"New releases of SAP NetWeaver and SAP applications based on SAP NetWeaver, which are released in 2007 or later, will no longer support new installations of Non-Unicode systems.
Non-Unicode upgrades and system copies of Single Codepage systems will still be possible. Existing non-Unicode systems can be efficiently converted to Unicode using reliable tools from SAP. An additional option is to combine the Unicode conversion with a release upgrade, thus keeping system downtime at a minimum."
Read the actual letter here. (OSS logon ID required).
In 2008, SAP took a stronger stance on Unicode and a second letter followed stating:
"Dear customer,
SAP would like to inform you on an important change taking place in 2008, when we will take a further step towards establishing Unicode as the standard at SAP.
Unicode has become one of the most essential international standards in the business software world for code pages. All SAP applications are Unicode enabled. We have noticed that non-Unicode systems face increasing restrictions and imply greater risks (For details have a look at SAP note 838402). Therefore, as of SAP NetWeaver 7.0 Installation Package SR3, SAP will no longer support new installations of Non-Unicode systems. This means that SAP ERP 6.0 has to be installed on Unicode starting with this release level of the installation package. Non-Unicode upgrades and system copies of Single Code Page systems will still be possible. Existing Non-Unicode systems can be efficiently converted to Unicode using reliable tools from SAP."
Read the actual letter here (OSS logon ID required).
So what's with all the fuss?
Read about the Case for Unicode by clicking the link.
If you have questions or thoughts to share, post a message in our Unicode forum
