Johan van Zijl

The ability to send and receive e-mail is critical to any CRM system. Sending e-mail from SAP is really simple, but battling the network administrators can sometimes be challenge.

In this post I want to show how to technically configure sending of mail from a SAP Server running Linux with Postfix. I have not used Microsoft Exchange(so won’t try to describe here), but the concept is the same. In future, I will describe the receiving of mail into SAP and the configuration required to send and receive CRM WebClient mail.

With WAS 6.10 the SAP system contains its own SMTP Server. In theory the SAP SMTP Server can be used to send and receive mail on the Internet, but in practice you probably don’t want to do this due to following reasons:

• Exposing your SAP System directly to the Internet is a security risk.
• Normally you only want 1 or 2 addresses to be used by SAP and these must use the corporate domain. You don’t want all your corporate mail to come into SAP.
• The standard SMTP port required for sending Internet mail is 25. On Unix systems, root privileges is required to start services that listen on port 25. The SAP System runs with normal user rights, therefore it can’t start the SMTP server on port 25. Unless you use icmbnd.

The receiving of mail will be tackled later, but if you ever want to receive mail you must configure your sending addresses in such a way that receiving will be possible in future. Therefore, I need to create an internal mail domain(I don’t really need to do this for sending, but its the slick way).

The diagram below describes the end state we want to achieve.

Postfix Setup

Install Postfix or another SMTP Server on the SAP Server or another machine in the network. The SMTP server will run on Port 25 and will relay the mail from SAP to the world. Typically you would reuse your existing corporate SMTP server.

Importantly, you have to allow the SAP Server to relay mail via Postfix. This is done by adding the IP address(e.g. 10.20.30.40) of the SAP Server to the mynetworks spefication in the main.cf file(located in /etc/postfix on suse).
mynetworks = 10.20.30.40, [rest of what was there before]


Also, SAP will send the mail from crm@sap.company.local, but we want to change that to crm@company.com. You achieve this by maintaining a mapping in the sender_canonical file in /etc/postfix. The line below shows the entry to be maintained.

@sap.company.local @company.com

Once the above change has been made the postmap command below must be run in configuration directory to create the lookup file./etc/postfix> postmap sender_canonical

SAP Setup

Here all the setup is done in transaction /nSCOT. You must point the SMTP node to the Postfix server and activate it. Double click on the smtp node as shown below.

The 2 important settings to maintain is Mail Host(the IP address of your Postfix server) and the node in use tick.

You must also maintain the Default Mail domain(very important) under Settings->Default Domain to crm@sap.company.local. The nasty way to configure this is to simply send mail from crm@company.com, in which case you don’t need the Postfix sender mapping.

You must now schedule a periodic job to send e-mail from SAP. This can be done by going to Settings->Send Jobs. In the popup select “Schedule Job for INT”, the pop up below will allow you to schedule this job. E-mails will be sent periodically every time this job runs.

Finally, make sure that you have an e-mail address maintained(e.g. user@sap.company.local) in transaction SU01 for your user.

You can now goto system->short message and test sending an e-mail to an external address.

Here is some code that will help you to determine the Sales Areas assigned to a CRM Business Partner and also the sales area details maintained for the BP.

The variables you will need are provided below:

data: lv_partner_guid type  bu_partner_guid,
      lt_sales_areas  type  crmt_bus_sales_area_t,
      ls_data         type  crmt_bus_set0030,
      lv_owner        type  crmt_bu_set_owner,
      lt_return       type  bus_bapi-return_table,
      lv_error        type  bus_bapi-error.
field-symbols: <fs_sales_area> type  crmt_bus_sales_area.

Below is the code which allows you to retrieve the billing data tab(price group, currency, customer group, etc) .

    call function 'CRM_BUPA_FRG0030_GET_LIST'
      exporting
        iv_partner_guid = lv_partner_guid
      importing
        et_sales_areas  = lt_sales_areas.

    loop at lt_sales_areas assigning <fs_sales_area>.
      call function 'CRM_BUPA_FRG0030_GET_DETAIL'
        exporting
          iv_partner_guid = lv_partner_guid
          is_sales_area   = <fs_sales_area>;
        importing
          es_data         = ls_data
          ev_owner        = lv_owner
          et_return       = lt_return
          ev_error        = lv_error.
    endloop.

The export parameter ev_owner will contain an X if CRM is the owner of the set.

The function module CRM_BUPA_FRG0010* allows you to read the Sales Data tab and CRM_BUPA_FRG0020* allows you to read the Shipping Data tab on the BP.

Someone finally performed a Salary Survey that is specific to the South African SAP Market.

You can find the Salary Survey here. Unfortunately, you must register at your own risk to see the results.

The survey makes for good reading and caters for both contractors and permanent employees. It provides data such as average contract rates, contract lengths, and salaries by sap component.

A slight concern I have concerning the survey is that they don’t release the size of the sample used, and I am not 100% convinced the sample is truly representative(I have asked and they’re not telling). Still, I think this is a good thing and hopefully next year’s survey will be better.

I stumbled upon Digiata’s site by accident. Have a look at it.

It is really simple, nothing flashy… but, it gets the message across.  The content is structured logically and describes the products and services clearly.  

For each product there is a short and sweet description, that includes the following:

• What is ProductX?
• Business need 
• How we solve it
• 10 Reasons to use ProductX
• Features
• Requirements 
• Screenshots

In a previous post I commented on what it would take to make SAP CRM work with Internet Explorer 8. Well, it seems that Microsoft solved this problem for SAP by providing Compatibility View with IE8.

The SAP CRM 2007 Web Client doesn’t work in IE8 with the default settings, but as soon as you click that little icon, the application works perfectly.

This is excellent news. If you want a copy of IE8 Beta you can get it here.