SAP BASIS ADMIN BLOG

What is SAP Basis?

If you are one of the persons, who is interested about the technical part of SAP systems than you are definitely interested about what is sap basis and what is its place in the system.

SAP Basis can be explained from two big points of view

I will talk about the two different meanings that should be remembered. These two meanings are complementary and one does not exclude the other.

SAP BASIS – The Administration Focus of SAP

First of all it describes the fundamentals of the administration of the SAP system. When you say SAP Basis, you must think about the guys who will install, configure, update, patch, migrate, troubleshoot any technical problem on your SAP system and manage all the daily operations for that specific sap system or system landscape.  Basis area emphasizes the administration of RDBMS (Relational Database Management System - or simply the database sap system is using), client-server architecture and the SAP GUI.  Moreover Basis defines the interface between the system components and the Basis components, which includes also the development platform for sap applications and data dictionary. System administration, user administration and monitoring tools are also features of the Basis components in the SAP system.

At the first glance you can divide the SAP system mainly into 2 big layers (actually there are three – with the presentation layer): the technical part and the application part. SAP Basis is pointing to everything in the system that is connected to the technical part or layer.

SAP Basis – Technical name of the SAP release back in the days

Second of all SAP Basis directly describes the technical part of the older releases of SAP systems. I will not go into too much detail now about the older releases but what is worth mentioning is that back in the days when SAP basically offered two products (SAP R/2 and SAP R/3) the development of the technical (basis) part was closely linked to the development of the application part. The release names of SAP Basis corresponded to the SAP R/3 version, for example, SAP Basis 4.0B was the technical basis for the sap release SAP R/3 4.0B.  After the year 2000, SAP Basis was evolving with additional enhancements needed for new products which lead to the transition of SAP Basis to SAP Web Application Server, and later on to the SAP Netweaver Application Server. The late ones include now Internet technologies and the classical ABAP supplemented with the J2EE environment.

SAP Basis and Security Technology

The term 'Basis' when used in the context of SAP technology refers to the application layer of the SAP system. When you think about the role a 'Basis Adminstrator' has, it should include system administration tasks such as managing the database, transporting development and configuration objects from one SAP system to another, monitoring system performance to ensure no interruption in system stability occurs in the SAP production environment, installing and upgrading the software on the servers, and system security.

Security refers to both application security in the SAP Run time environment and the system access outside the SAP Run time environment. The user accounts defined for users in the SAP Run time environment are secured by roles that grant authorizations to them. SAP Authorizations control access to transactions (Business Process Activities), or what can be performed within a specific business process step. For example, a user may be able to create sales orders, but only for their specific sales area, sales office and customer.