What about the testing process of an extension running against a new release of SAP Business One?

When we start to consider all of potential impacts you may decide that you are going to need to introduce some level of governance to control which extensions you deploy in your SAP Business One Cloud landscape. There is no right or wrong answer in how strict or otherwise you want to be in deciding the level of control, the trade off is between flexibility and cost/efficiency in running a SAP Business One Cloud. Ultimately it is for each partner to decide what is the best policy for their cloud however in order to try to create some guidelines you may want to consider the following aspects for your policy:

• Decide what type of extensions you are willing to consider deploying in your landscape, e.g. only SAP Business One Cloud certified add-ons, add-ons for lightweight deployment or compatible add-ons(I make no mention here of SBO Script add-ons as these designed specifically to avoid many of the deployment pitfalls we face in the lifecycle management and resource consumption of an extension)
• Define the categories you want for extensions and decide on the pricing of each band, e.g.:
  • Level 1 extensions - Up to 150MB RAM consumption per user
  • Level 2 extensions - From 150MB - 500MB consumption per user
  • Level 3 extensions - More than 500MB consumption per user
• Decide how a customer, consultant, sales person etc. can request the deployment of a new extension to the SAP Business One Cloud landscape.
• Collect information from the provider regarding compatibility with cloud, cloud commercial agreements (e.g. subscription pricing) etc.
• Ensure that your are satisfied with the development approach taken for extension updates, compatibility with new releases of SAP Business One etc.
• Define your own testing procedure for each new extension, to include:
  • Deployment
  • Operation
  • Resource consumption
  • Compliance with your cloud infrastructure (interaction with the resources in your cloud landscape - especially important if an extension has not been adapted for the cloud fully and doesn’t conform to the SAP Business One Cloud guidelines for extensions.)
• Based on the outcome of your testing use the metrics to classify your extension into levels you have decided on.
• Publish the pricing to your sales team so that they can quote effectively for new customers.

I’m sure that you will think of many other things and that your approach and policies will evolve and change over time, as your experience of running customers in the cloud grows. This post isn’t meant to be an “must do” list of working with SAP Business One Extensions, it is instead meant to provide some food for thought when you start working with them.

We are work with partners all the time to share best practice for different aspects of SAP Business One Cloud landscapes, so if you have any thoughts on the above or any related topic please let us know.