SAP has been offering a trial system called Mini SAP for many years. It's a powerful application to run on your home computer, for training purposes, to try out new things, or to create customer demonstrations. This article will show you how to get the most out of it. This tutorial is written both for absolute ABAP and SAP beginners, as well as experienced SAP users who don't know how to set up the trial system.
What is Mini SAP?
The easiest way to answer this question is to explain what Mini SAP is not. Any ECC or ERP business components are missing in this package. But all basis components are available, such as ABAP, ABAP Objects, SAPscript, ALV, Graphics Framework, all other control frameworks, SAPoffice etc.
Mini SAP, which is also known as SAP NetWeaver Trial, or SAP NetWeaver Developer Edition, is free for personal use. Licenses must be renewed every three months.
So Mini SAP is the ideal tool both for students to get used to the SAP programming environment as well as ABAP developpers to use as a sandbox system. If you want to get a sandbox for the ECC components, you'll have to obtain a license for an IDES system from SAP. This would usually be too expensive for personal use.
Part 1: Download
There are several ways to get the installation DVD for the Mini SAP system. Although it's available in the SAP knowledge shop for about 20 Euro, and is also contained with some ABAP books, I'd recommend to download it to be sure to get the most up to date version with all available service packs.
The downloads on the SAP FTP server no longer seem to be maintained, so the download source would be the SAP Developer Network (SDN). If you haven't got an account yet, you'll have to sign up for it. You'll also need the account for the free Mini SAP license renewals.
The most recent version currently available is SAP NetWeaver 7.01 SR1 SP3. The free download has a size of 3.2 GB and is available at SDN. This is the first version that is available as a unicode system.
The two files you'll get are packed in the RAR format, which can't be unpacked by the standard software. If you don't want to install a trial version of WinRAR or WinZip, you can either use the open source software 7-Zip to unpack the RAR files, or do it the crude old fashioned way and get the free command line tool unrar.exe from RarLab. To extract Mini SAP, put the file unrar.exe into the same directory as the two RAR files, and extract them by typing "unrar x SAPNWABAP701SR1_TRIAL.part1.rar" at the command prompt.
Along with the NetWeaver server software, you'll also need some client software, the SAP GUI. Although the patch level of the GUI that comes with the NetWeaver downlaod is quite up to date, it's a special compact GUI version with many components missing. Since the SAP GUI software isn't available on the SAP FTP server any longer, the only download source for the full GUI version is the SAP Service Marketplace. To access it, you'll need to have a special S-account with download authorisation that is only available to SAP customers. If you haven't got that, you'll have to go with the trial GUI version, or get the GUI software from an unofficial download site such as the University of Marburg.
Alternatively, you can access the SAP system via the Internet Explorer. In fact, NetWeaver is a fully functional webserver, and most of the functionality can be accessed through the browser. Still another alternative would be the SAP GUI for Java, which is available directly from SAP on their FTP server, and should be used if you want to access your system from a non Windows environment (Linux, Unix, Apple Mac OS X).
Another useful piece of software, that comes with the NetWeaver download, but in an outdated version, is the database utility for the MaxDB database that is underlying the actual NetWeaver software. It's useful for database administration. You can get an up to date version at SDN as well.
Part 2: Installation - running Mini SAP in a virtual PC
As of NetWeaver version 7.01, the software can be installed on Vista as well. For a couple of reasons, I'd suggest to install the NetWeaver server software within a virtual environment. For that, of course, you'll need to have a spare license of Windows XP or better.
So the first step of installation would be to set up a virtual environment e.g. with Microsoft Virtual PC. But now the reasons why I think it's better to install NetWeaver virtually:
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NetWeaver is extremely sensitive with respect to any other software installed on the same system, and easily dies during istallation for various reasons. That unfortunately also and especially includes security software such as firewalls and anti virus applications.
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If you do risky experiments within your SAP, you can activate the undo functionality of Virtual PC beforehand. So should your systen not survive your experiments, you can quickly return to the last working state.
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If you have to reinstall Windows, it's quite difficult (however not impossible) to extract your packages you've developped from the system. So if you have everything within a virtual machine, you can just copy the whole VM to your new Windows installation.
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Your computer's name may only be up to 13 characters. So you don't have to rename your computer if you install within VPC.
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The setup programme not only installs the files needed to run Mini SAP, but also several new services that constantly use your computer's ressources, and even sets up new Windows users, which you might not want to happen to your productive environment.
- Although Mini SAP in the newest version works properly on Windows Vista, the "home" of the NetWeaver Trial Version is still Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. For these two operating systems, Mini SAP has been optimised for years.
Microsoft currently provides two versions of Virtual PC: The newer one is called Windows Virtual PC, which comes in a 32 bit and a 64 bit version, and only works on Windows 7. To download it, you'll need to give the information that you use a Windows 7 Professional edition or better. When installing the software, it's never actually checked which Windows edition you really own.
Should you use a Windows version older than Windows 7, you'll also need an older version of Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1, which also comes both in a 32 bit edition, and a 64 bit edition. Download is possible with any Windows version, however when installing Virtual PC on a Windows Home edition, you'll get a message that this is not supported. Just click "OK" and ignore the message. I can assure you that Virtual PC runs fine on Home editions as well.
The amount of memory assigned to the virtual machine should be at least 1 GB, better 2 or even 3 GB. Mini SAP in fact used to work on Windows XP with 512 KB, but the current unicode version definitely needs 1 GB or more.
Once the virtual PC is set up, you'll need to install a Java JRE or JDK, which is needed by both the NetWeaver installation routine as well as the database studio, which, as of version 7.7, is based on Eclipse. Also new to version 7.7 is the fact that the database utility needs to be installed on the same computer as the NetWeaver server software.
If you ever had any other SAP system installed on the same (virtual or real) computer, you'll need to clear every trace of that from your registry using the tool in the directory "RegCleanTool". If you don't do that, NetWeaver won't install.
Now you can install the NetWeaver software according to the installation instructions that come with the package. Have a look at the file SAPNWABAP701SR1_TRIAL\DOC\html\index.htm for that. You can also install the database utility after you've installed the NetWeaver server, but it's not necessary to install SAP GUI on the VM. After the NetWeaver trial is up and running, your Mini SAP system can be accessed in the complete networking environment, including the host computer. You can install the GUI software on the host computer and on any other computer in the network from where you want to access the Mini SAP. As the GUI interacts e.g. with Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, the Corel Graphics Suite, any SVG plugin, and probably other software, you should indeed work from your productive environment, and not inside your virtual SAP server.
When adding Mini SAP to your SAP GUI, you'll have to choose the computer name of your virtual SAP system as application server. System ID is "NSP", and system number is "00". Now you should be able to start the server and log onto the SAP NetWeaver trial system.
Part 3: First steps in SAP and ABAP
If you've never worked with SAP before, I suggest you download part of the SAP print documentation, "Getting Started", which is available in English and German.
Other than in a productive environment, you'll find various links to blogs, documentations, tutorials etc. in transaction code SE80 (ABAP Workbench). You can have a look there for specific Mini SAP help.
If you want to do some structured learning, there are two possibilities that I'd recommend. The first would be to obtain the book "ABAP Objects" by Horst Keller, available in English (USA, UK or Canada) and German. All code examples from this book have already been integrated into the Mini SAP system, and it's generally a very valuable ressource of information and reference concerning all areas of ABAP and ABAP Objects.
The second possibility would be to use the free SAP print documentation instead. However, this documentation was last maintained in 2001, and therefore some aspects of it are outdated. But for structured work it's still easier to follow than using the SAP online help. There are many documents available that can be used with Mini SAP:
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more to follow...
Part 4: Renew your license
Once your license is about to expire, you'll have to renew it. This can currently be done for free, and has to be done every three months. First of all, you have to use transaction SLICENSE to find out your hardware key. With that key, you go to the SAP Trial License Key Request page, where you'll enter all your information. You'll also need your SDN user ID here.
Your license key will be sent to you by mail. Before you can import it, you'll have to replace the system number in the license file with your own system number, which again you'll find in transaction SLICENSE. Afterwards, you can import the license file. Within SLICENSE, choose "new licenses" and "install".
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