There are a lot of ways how system landscape can be built. We at Skybuffer have taken into account the best practices from SAP of the development and sales levels of the landscape built and our experts have designed the concept of SAP Business One landscape architecture for small and medium size consulting companies or SAP Business One consulting departments.
What are the main principles for system landscape design?
Depends from the main focus of the consulting business in the certain company, different aspects must be considered at system landscape design phase.
Skybuffer strategy in SAP Business One consulting and development is to have the finite number of leads and ongoing projects to be able to deliver them in time and with the best possible quality. Therefore, the system landscape design project was executed to find out the balance in the number of systems and their assignment.
The following facts were considered:
- golden data system (master system) must be encapsulated in the landscape in the separate server;
- master system must only be used as a source system for any system copies;
- Leads and Clients must have an access to the system landscape time to time during the prototyping phase;
- consulting team is constantly developing new demonstration scenarios for the sales activities;
- it must be a sandbox system for the educational tasks, rapid proof of concepts development and ideas backing purposes;
SAP Business One Landscape Assignments
Taking into account the goal to design the minimal system landscape and to be able to follow all the principles mentioned above, it is possible to define four landscape assignments.
MASTER
- Golden databases level, must be used only as a source system for the landscape refresh activities. No demos could be executed in MASTER system landscape.
- EXDEMO
- External demos landscape is designed to be shared with Leads and Customers. An access could be granted via VPN connection for RDP sessions; via Citrix connection; via HTML clientless RDP connection.
- DEV
- Development landscape is created to be used by functional consultants and technical developers for the prototyping purposes, proof of concept builds or for the small projects. When prototype is ready to be shared with Lead or Client the database must be copied to the EXDEMO landscape.
- SANDBOX
- Sanbox system landscape must be used as usual for the educational purposes, ideas testing or rapid prototyping.
Note: it is a best practice to copy all good demo scenarios and development cases from any landscape level to the MASTERlandscape system to be able to store it for the future sales demos.
SAP Business One System Landscape with Enterprise Service Bus
In case Integration Framework of SAP Business One is used in the company, it is good to install it at the separate box (either real or virtual one). In this case it is possible to keep the same landscape assignments, but with additional tuning of the integration scenarios after each refresh from the MASTER landscape systems.
Note: it is highly recommended to refresh both SAP Business One and Integration Framework for SAP Business One servers in the same cycle. This will help to keep data flow integration scenarios in the latest development state.
Skybuffer SBO LogonPad
The only one disadvantage of having separate servers that covers different business needs of SAP Business One consulting and development teams is that SAP Business One Client could not switch between license servers.
To enable SAP Business One license sever change possibility Skybuffer has developed the freeware wrapper of SAP Business One Client named Skybuffer SBO LogonPad.
You can download and start using it for free immediately!
Advantages
Encapsulation of SAP Business One systems with different assignments to the separate landscapes is designed for the following goals:
- to have a golden database server that could be easily copied to any landscape for the sales and educational activities;
- to involve Leads and Clients into the prototyping phase of the sales cycle that increase a probability of the positive sales deal;
- to encapsulate a sandbox system that could be freely used for any kind of experiments and ideas implementations.