The journey continues. Following my first blog post about the Explore Migration Objects app (The New Explore Migration Objects App: The Game Changer in Planning Your Data Migration), new features are now available with release 2602.4 (CFD) and 2608 (Main Release) in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.
- New Availability Column for Migration Object
- New Status Column for Scope Items
- Enhanced Dependency Graph
These features may be small additions, but they bring meaningful improvements. They primarily focus on the availability of migration objects. As most of us know, migration objects are assigned to solution scenarios, as SAP Signavio Process Navigator refers to them, or scope items, which is the more commonly used term in the context of SAP Best Practices.
Depending on the activation status of a scope item, a migration object will either appear or not appear in the Migration Cockpit and can therefore be used or excluded from data migration accordingly. This behavior is very useful as it ensures you only see the migration objects that are actually needed to run your business processes. Beyond scope item activation, there are additional visibility restrictions for data migration objects. A data migration object can be linked to a feature toggle or depend on a business function activation, which determines whether it is visible or not.
But lets start with the first new feature: the migration object availability status.
New Availability Colum for Migration Objects
As mentioned earlier, migration objects always depend on the activated scope. If a specific business solution or scope item is not activated, the related migration objects will also unavailable , unless they are assigned to another activated business process .
A new “Availability” column has been added to the Migration Objects view , giving you a clearer overview of which of the hundreds of existing migration objects are available in your system based on your activated scope.
You can also use the new Quick Filter to narrow down the list of migration objects by availability status:
- All
- Availability: Yes
- Availability: No
The Quick Filter also displays the number of migration objects per availability status.
The result list in Figure 1 shows the status within the “Availability” column . Depending on the status, you immediately see whether an object is available:
- Yes – Object is available based on the activated scope
- No – Object is not available to be used
- (!) Yes – The object may be available if a specific condition is met. You might need to activate a feature to make it visible. Hover over the entry to open an information window that includes a link to the object's documentation, where you can find further details
Migration Object Availability Status on Selection Screen
Figure 1: Migration Object Availability Status on Selection Screen
In the example above, you can see that out of 240 migration objects, 23 are not available at all.
By selecting an object you will be directed to the “Migration Object” dependency graph where availability is displayed directly within the migration object's node as one of its attributes, highlighted in yellow in Figure 2 below.
Figure 2: Migration Object Availability Status in Dependency Graph
Similar to the migration object availability, it is also often useful to see which objects are listed for the activated scope.
New Status Column for Scope Items
The “Status” column on the “Scope Items” view (see Figure 3) shows the activation status of a specific business process or scope item. A Quick Filter option allows you to display All, Active or Inactive scope items including the exact count per status.
Figure 3: Scope Item Activation Status on Selection Screen
In the Scope items graph, the activation status is displayed in the header area. In our example, we have selected an inactive scope item for a Retail solution scenario (see Figure 4).
Figure 4: Scope Item base Dependency Graph incl. Availability Status
Enhanced Dependency Graph
Based on user feedback and the product roadmap the dependency graph has been enhanced with three additional features:
- Filter Available Only Migration Objects
- Group/Ungroup Migration objects
- Additional Node Attributes
Filter by Availability Status
The first enhancement improves the visibility of complex objects or dependency graphs with multiple relations. Using the new Quick Filter, you can filter migrations objects by availability status and choose to display either “All” objects or only those with “Availability: Yes”. The can significantly reduce visual complexity and improve clarity. As shown in Figure 5, the scope item example from above now displays only the available, while others are hidden.
Figure 5: Availability Quick Filter on Dependency Graph View
Group/Ungroup Function
The next very useful enhancement is the new Ungroup/Group button. By default objects are grouped by their development area domain, which is particularly helpful in the Scope Items view as it gives you a clear picture of where each migration object belongs. For example, Figure 4 shows the scope item along with all its available objects. You can see that the available objects belongs to “Classification” domain, whereas the unavailable RFM objects belong to the “Logistics Basic Data” domain.
Another example is a complex migration object such as “SD – Sales oder (only open SO)”. In Figure 6 you can see the Sales Order object, which belongs to “Sales and Distribution” domain and has numerous relationships to objects in other development domains. Note that the view is already pre-filtered to show only the available migration objects.
Figure 6: Complex Grouped Migration object
If you click on Ungroup button, the grouping is removed and the view changes to a much simpler layout that takes up less screen and is therefore easier to read (see Figure 7).
Figure 7: Ungrouped Complex Migration Object
Additional Node Attributes
As mentioned earlier the migration object node now includes the new “Availability” status attribute . In addition, if an object is not available, an exclamation mark icon is displayed in the upper right corner of the node.
Figure 8: New Node Attribute Availability Status
What’s Next
The enhancements described in this blog post are just the beginning. There are more exciting features already on the roadmap for upcoming releases and CFDs that will further improve the Explore Migration Objects app and simplify your data migration planning. Stay tuned for future blog posts where I will cover these new capabilities as they become available. In the meantime, I encourage you to explore the new features in your system and share your feedback with the SAP community.
