Usage scenarios

Why consider using ILM?

The amount of data is growing. This is a fact and an issue every company has to cope with even though not only limited to an SAP environment. But regarding an SAP environment, Information Lifecycle Management defines a strategy to handle the amount of data – at least for SAP documents.

SAP Information Lifecycle Management combines two concepts:

• archiving data outside SAP in an external archiving system to keep SAP’s database small and handy

• regarding the lifecycle of every document that needs to be archived

In addition to this, the folder-based WebDAV interface grants simple access to the documents via a Web browser or even as a Microsoft Windows Explorer integration.

In combination with the possibility of assigning metadata to a folder or document and the possibility of searching documents via the ImageMaster WorkplaceClient, SAP documents can easily be searched outside of SAP.

Organize data

The SAP ILM interface is folder-based. This makes organizing data very easy. The following example shows how a data structure may look like in an ILM enabled archive:

Access to a resource (in general a document) can then simply be realized by handing over the correct URL to the module in combination with the desired request:

GET http://...webdav/C11/000/sales_order/salesInEurope/.../Report.pdf

The Web interface of the module can be viewed by simply opening the URL in the Web browser:

(You will be asked for user and password credentials when accessing the page. Those credentials match the ones given in the configuration of the module.)

Scenarios

The ImageMaster Information Lifecycle Management Service module for ERP can be run in two variants:

Which variant is more appropriate depends on the scenario used within the SAP system. However, the ImageMaster ILM Service module for ERP is supporting both scenarios out of the box without any extra configuration. For using the decommissioning scenario, content repositories must be configured in ImageMaster.

Retention management in a live application system

The purpose of this scenario is to optimize archive storage by controlling the information lifecycle. That means business information is moved from the SAP database into the ILM storage. This scenario is similar to the scenario using ArchiveLink. Instead of Content Repositories on both SAP and ImageMaster’s side, folders are used for structuring data.

A typical use case would be in a human resource scenario, storing employee’s documents via SAP and ILM in ImageMaster and in doing so adding retention rules defined by law, where the leading application for handling expiration times and legal holds is SAP.

System Decommissioning Using a Stand-alone ILM System (Retention Warehouse)

This scenario can be split up into two scenarios:

• decommissioning of non-SAP systems

• decommissioning of SAP systems

The following will focus on decommissioning SAP systems as the other scenario depends on whether and how storing non-SAP documents with different structures is doable.

The picture above shows the principal use case for decommissioning a legacy SAP system. All data is transferred to the new system allowing to completely shut down the old system. For the special need of accessing the files stored in the content repository, data is migrated from the legacy content server to ImageMaster. ImageMaster then serves as a one-stop-shop to the SAP system for all data regardless if the ArchiveLink or ILM interface is used.