From Release 2302 of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition, the Spaces and Pages become the default format for all new systems provisioned to the new customers. In other words, the Group and Pages approach is becoming a history. We are entering the Spaces and Pages era!
In my previous two blogs, I discussed the usage of Spaces and Pages and how to design and transport them in a 3-System Landscape:
- How to Use Spaces and Pages in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition
- Transport Your Spaces and Pages Configurations in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 3-System Landscape Systems
In the latest SAP Activate for SAP S/4HANA Cloud 3-System Landscape Systems, SAP provided an accelerator called How to set up a Naming Convention – for Business Roles, Spaces and Pages in a 3-System Landscape. I will call it the Naming Accelerator within this blog. This Naming Accelerator provides a recommendation to our customers, especially the new customers just entering the SAP arena, how to systematically name user business roles and their associated spaces and pages. In this blog, I further strengthen this accelerator with an Excel based organization tool to help naming and organizing these new names.
Where to Find the Naming Accelerator?
First thing first, to find this Naming Accelerator, you launch the SAP Roadmap Viewer at https://go.support.sap.com/roadmapviewer/. Click on Explore All Roadmaps button.
SAP Roadmap Viewer
In the tab Cloud Specific Methodology (15), select SAP Activate for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition (3-system landscape). Click on the star to mark it as your favorite, so that you can quickly come to this topic when you launch the Roadmap Viewer next time.
Select SAP Activate Roadmap for S/4HANA Cloud, public edition (3-system landscape)
The Roadmap Viewer with A Favorite for S/4HANA Cloud, public edition (3-system landscape)
Under tab Content, select Explore Phase, find Identity and Access Management Planning and Design -> Plan and Design Identity and Access Management and click on it.
Find Topic Plan and Design Identity and Access Management
Now you can see the Naming Accelerator is listed under Accelerator(s) section.
The Naming Accelerator
I don’t provide a direct link to this Naming Accelerator PDF file here since the link might change when a new version is uploaded. If you want to quickly allocate this file, just enter “Spaces and Pages” in the Search box of the initial window SAP Activate for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition (3-system landscape).
Search the “Spaces and Pages” Naming Accelerator
On the search result page, the first item is the Naming Accelerator PDF file itself, and the second item is the topic containing this Naming Accelerator under Explore phase.
Search Results: The Spaces and Pages Naming Accelerator
Explanation of the Naming Accelerator
In a well-designed SAP system, there are many business roles and their associated spaces and pages; this number could go up to hundreds. The reason is that we want to give users as little authorizations as possible but can do the job to tightening the security of system access. In projects I participated in the past, we wouldn’t give more until the end users screaming at us. In addition, we create very specific user business roles to segregate the roles and responsibilities.
The above approach creates a challenge to the system administrator: how can I systematically create and name these business roles and make them transparent to end users? The key is a well-designed naming convention:
- Saving time through simplified searching, filtering, and sorting of roles
- Reducing effort in identifying the roles and understanding the role content
- Streamlining the location and association of roles with a particular workplace and organization with the enterprise
- Enabling a dedicated authorization assignment for user and authorization administration by using a hierarchy structure
In the Naming Accelerator, it illustrates three pillars of a good business role naming convention from three aspects: identifiability, reusability, and consistency. These principles apply to spaces and pages as well.
Three Pillars of a Good Business Role Naming Convention
Naming Convention for Business Role IDs and Descriptions
As a best practice, I recommend my customers creating a new business role ID by copying from an existing SAP created roles, and you modify and adapt it. This saves you at least 50% of work in comparison to creating it from scratch. This immediately brings up a topic of how to distinguish customer’s business roles/spaces/pages from SAP’s.
Following the tradition of SAP naming convention, like in ABAP programming, customer created objects all start with a prefix Z or Y. For example, there is SAP role ID template called BR_AR_MANAGER for the Accounts Receivable Manager role. When I copy it to make a new customer specific role, I name it as ZBR_AR_MANAGER. Immediately we separate it from SAP delivered role ID BR_AR_MANAGER.
By design, space and page IDs can contain up to 32 characters, including the last 3 characters for the space/page indicator and counter. In comparison, business role IDs can contain up to 40 characters, longer than spaces/pages. However, considering business role IDs and space/page IDs are usually named/used together, we recommend keeping the length of business role IDs at 29 characters as well. This can make them consistent.
Here is the definition of business role ID at each character space:
| Character Position | Character Num | Usage |
| 1 | 1 | Role Type, Y for business role, and X for custom business catalogs, and Z for spaces and pages |
| 2 | 1 | Product, H for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, S for SAP SuccessFactors, C for SAP Concur, etc. |
| 3 | 1 | Target System, Q (roles only exist in Q and not transport to P system) or P (roles used in both Q and P systems) |
| 4-7 | 4 | Organization Specification. Can be company code like 1710, or a combination of country and location, such as USFL for an org in Florida or US. |
| 8-9 or 8-10 | 2 or 3 | Line of Business which owns the business role, such as FIN for financial department. |
| 10-11 or 11 | 2 or 1 | Separator |
| 12-29 | 18 | Role Description. Although there are 18 characters, sometimes, it is still not sufficient. Try to be abbreviated but also understandable. Such as ACCOUNTING_CLERK (16 characters). |
| 30 | 1 | Separator (optional) |
| 31-34 | 4 | 2nd Organization Specification (optional) |
Illustration of Naming Convention for Business Role IDs
By following above naming conventions, we can easily read following two examples:
Example 1: YHP1070FIN_ACCOUNTING_CLERK__
It is for a business role ID on an S/4HANA Cloud system. It exists in both Q and P systems. It is used in the financial area of plant 1070 for an accounting clerk role. Any unused spaces in the description are replaced with an underscore together with the separator.
Example 2: YHPUSFLFIN_CONTROLLING_MGR___
It is for a business role ID on an S/4HANA Cloud system. It exists in both Q and P systems. It is used in the financial area of plant in Florida, US for an auditing manager role. Any unused spaces in the description are replaced with an underscore together with the separator.
Comparing with Business Role ID, Business Role Description is more flexible in terms of character numbers. In the below figure, YHP1070FIN_ACCOUNTING_CLERK__ is the role ID, and its description is “FIN: Accounting Clerk – Leading” to indicate this role should be assigned to a leading accounting clerk.
Naming Convention for the Space and Page IDs and Descriptions
As indicated previously, allowed number of characters is limited to 32 for space and page IDs. The naming convention can be defined in the below table on a character basis.
| Character Position | Character Num | Usage |
| 1 | 1 | Role Type, Y for business role, and X for custom business catalogs, and Z for spaces and pages |
| 2 | 1 | Product, H for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, S for SAP SuccessFactors, C for SAP Concur, etc. |
| 3 | 1 | Target System, Q (roles only exist in Q and not transport to P system) or P (roles used in both Q and P systems) |
| 4-7 | 4 | Organization Specification. Can be company code like 1710, or a combination of country and location, such as USFL for an org in Florida or US. |
| 8-9 or 8-10 | 2 or 3 | Line of Business which owns the space and page ID, such as FIN for financial department. |
| 10-11 or 11 | 2 or 1 | Separator |
| 12-29 | 18 | Space or Page Description. Although there are 18 characters, sometimes, it is still not sufficient. Try to be abbreviated but also understandable. Such as ACCOUNTING_CLERK (16 characters). |
| 30 | 1 | Separator (optional) |
| 31 | 1 | Space (S) or Page (P) indicator |
| 32 | 1 | Space or Page counter. Considering there are 26 alphabet letters and 10 numbers (0-9), it is possible to identify 36 different spaces and pages by using 1 character, respectively. |
Illustration of Naming Convention for Space and Page IDs
By following above naming conventions, we can easily read following two examples:
Example 1: ZHP1070FIN_ACCOUNTING_CLERK___S1
It is for a space ID on an S/4HANA Cloud system. It exists in both Q and P systems. It is used in the financial area of plant 1070 for an accounting clerk role. It is a space, number 1.
Example 2: ZHPUSFLFIN_CONTROLLING_MGR____PA
It is for a page ID on an S/4HANA Cloud system. It exists in both Q and P systems. It is used in the financial area of plant in Florida, US for an auditing manager role. It is a page, number A.
Business Role and Space/Page Name Repository – An Excel Based Organization Tool
With above naming convention in mind, I developed an Excel based organization tool to simplify naming process and organize all customized names in one place. That is the Business Role and Space/Page Name Repository.
Business Role and Space and Page Name Repository Tool
This Tool is quite simple and self-explanatory. It can be used for either business role IDs or space/page IDs, depending on your selection of Column 1. I only explain a few columns.
- Columns 1-3 correspond to characters 1-3. You select one of predefined values from the drop down list. For example, for Column 1, you can select either Z for a space/page ID, or Y for a business role ID.
- Column 7 (char 12-19) is for descriptions.
- To maintain 18 characters, any space entered will be truncated.
- If the text entered is less than 18 characters, an underscore is inserted to maintain the 18-character length.
- If the number of characters entered is more than 18 after truncation, you will get an error: This value doesn’t match the data validation restrictions defined for this cell. Just reduce the length of text.
- Column 9 (char 31-34) is only used for space and page IDs.
- Column 10 (Trimmed Desc Length) is used to display number of characters you entered in Column 7 after truncation to save your effort of counting number of characters.
- Column 11 (Complete Name) is the final product of ID name.
As the number of business roles and spaces/pages increases, you need to organize them. Plus you want to be transparent on defining business roles, but not all users have access to the Maintain Business Roles or Manage Space Details app. This Excel Tool can be used for this purpose by storing it in a central location and sharing with the project team, so that all the business role related names are stored in one place and transparent. This can simplify the naming process and keep things organized in your organization.
Note: Until this Excel Tool becomes available as another accelerator in the next release of SAP Activate roadmap, you can get a copy of this Excel file by emailing me directly. In addition, I will be happy to hear about your practice and experience in this topic to improve this handy tool further.
