Complex

I've been implementing some of the functionality of SAP Solution Manager to help with system upgrades in our environment and it is incredibly complex. SAP has been having trouble getting customers to adopt Solution Manager and now I know why.

All I want to do is add my systems to a landscape and let the tool help me figure out what files need to be downloaded from SAP to get to a given service pack level. Since they now have a configuration wizard, you would think that would be about a two week task of installing and doing some configuration and then it would just work. Wrong. I've been at this for over a month and it still isn't quite there. It's been a series of patches and errors and patches and errors just to get the systems connected. There has to be a better way.

Why doesn't SAP maintain a Solution Manager lite environment at service.sap.com that we can just register our systems in and have it figure out what files we need? Why should every individual customer have to set up an on-premises tool for this? For large customers, there might be a lot of other benefits of having the system on site, but for us, it makes no sense and is just frustrating.