Friday, 13 July 2012

Do customers need to convert to a Unicode-compliant environment?

Do customers need to convert to a Unicode-compliant environment?

If your company employs truly global business processes or manages global master
data, or if you open your system to the Internet by allowing your customers to
enter contact data directly, you will likely need to support multiple local language
characters. Various code pages enable the display of national characters, but collaboration
on the Web has led to a huge number of language-specific, platformdependent
code pages that must interact with each other. And this compliance is
only possible through Unicode – an international standard that supports virtually
all languages and scripts used around the world, ensuring that they work no
matter what the language or platform

Unicode conversion depends on the customer situation. SAP has encoded the

Unicode standard in the latest release so that multiple languages within the

ERP software, which required different code pages in the past, can now run on

one application.

The need to implement Unicode depends on your use of one or more languages

in the current SAP software:

I f your organization runs a single code page system prior to the upgrade to

SAP ERP and you do not plan to make use of Java or applications related to

an SOA, then the use of Unicode is not mandatory in all cases. For example,

German, English, Spanish, Italian, and French all run on code page 1100 and

thus can all live in the same system without Unicode. However, if the system

is deployed globally, using Unicode is highly recommended in order to facilitate

interfaces and connections. Please refer to SAP Note 1322715 (points 5 and 6)

for more information.

I f your organization uses multidisplay, multiprocessing (MDMP) or other older

technology such as blended code pages, which is quite common, then the

use of Unicode is mandatory for the SAP ERP upgrade. These projects always

include two steps: the upgrade to the target release and then the Unicode

conversion

of the ERP software. Existing installations of SAP R/3 Enterprise or

mySAP ERP 2004 can be converted to Unicode prior to the upgrade to the

current version of SAP ERP, resulting in two separate procedures. Customers

running SAP R/3 4.6 (or below) have to execute these steps in one project.

SAP supports the conversion to Unicode by offering country-specific services.

To find further information on Unicode conversions and the support SAP provides,

please visit SAP Service Marketplace at

www.service.sap.com/globalization

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