The SAP authorization concept
Background processing
Compiling and identifying external services in the role menu of CRM business roles is tricky. We show you how to bring order to external services. In SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM), the role concept is based not only on PFCG roles, but also on CRM business roles. These roles are created in customising and enable the presentation of CRM applications in the SAP CRM Web Client. In order for a user to work in SAP CRM, he needs both CRM business roles that define the user interface and the respective PFCG roles that entitle him to work in the applications. The CRMD_UI_ROLE_PREPARE report identifies and lists all external services defined in the customising of the CRM business role. These are displayed in the role menu of the PFCG role. You will notice, however, that the displayed services represent only a small part of the external services in the role menu.
For a long time, SAP authorization consultants and ABAP developers have disagreed on how to implement authorization object characteristics in the coding. There are two positions: On the one hand, consultants advise never to test for the signal word DUMMY, the constant space or the literal ' '. These tests only superficially check for the existence of an authorization object and do not react to settings in the field specification in the profile of the roles. Moreover, the literal ' ' is then authorized because it is displayed in the transaction STAUTHTRACE. On the other hand, there are situations where development uses these superficial tests to save the user time and the machine resources. If the program determines early on that the user does not have the necessary objects in the user buffer, it may abort before the first SELECT and issue an appropriate error message. Both positions contain a kernel of truth. Let's look at the effects of different programming on a simplified example. The role(s) have only the authorization object S_DEVELOP with the field value DEVCLASS "Z*".
Get an overview of the organisations and their dependencies maintained in the system
Certain SAP authorizations, including those for table maintenance (S_TABU_*) require special attention for data protection reasons. These are known as critical authorizations. In the course of authorization planning, a company should determine which authorizations are to be considered critical, which roles may receive which critical authorizations or values for critical authorization fields, and so on. The German Federal Office for Information Security has compiled detailed information on defining critical authorizations.
In Step 2b (Customised Proposal Values), you must manually adjust the entries that you manually changed in the SU24 transaction in the initial release. This will start the SU24 transaction in upgrade mode, and you can step by step through all applications and match the changes. If you have created custom organisational levels (ormits), you must restore them at this point using the PFCG_ORGFIELD_UPGRADE report. The report must be called for each organisational level. Only the organisation levels that you create are displayed through the Value Help. SAP Note 727536 lists questions and answers about the use of customer-specific organisational levels.
The possibility of assigning authorizations during the go-live can be additionally secured by using "Shortcut for SAP systems".
SAP Basis refers to the administration of SAP system that includes activities like installation and configuration, load balancing, and performance of SAP applications running on Java stack and SAP ABAP. This includes the maintenance of different services related to database, operating system, application and web servers in SAP system landscape and stopping and starting the system. Here you can find some useful information about SAP Basis: www.sap-corner.de.
For the transport of PFCG roles with their profiles there is also an SAP notice: Note 1380203.
A note box in which data of all kinds can be quickly filed and retrieved. This is what Scribble Papers promises. At first, the program looks very spartan. But once a small structure is in place, you realise the great flexibility of this little helper.
In addition, you have created a transparent way to document for which applications your customer's permissions are available.