Ohhhh, I was so miffed the first time I ran into the idea that you HAD to use solution manager to patch your SAP systems. I knew SAP at some point in time would do something to force adaptation of this horrible bastard technology. But I was cross when I found out it had to be in the basis functions.
Dont get me wrong, when it works, is correctly configured, and you have a decent change and support porcess to mirror the processes within the maintenance optimizer, it does mean you dont have to read tonnes of notes about package dependencies, or the likes. A calculated queue is easily created, downloaded and applied.... IF the process works as supposed. I have never seen that happen even ONCE in the last 6-7 years I've worked with the maintenance optimizer.
And if you just need to download 4 packages and get on with your work, it would be nice to be able to skip the MOPZ entirely.... and you can !!!!
Simply find the packages you need as usual, now they will be in the "waiting for approval" step in your download basket, because.... Well, that's how SAP forces you to use solman. Now simply go to solman and run the se38 report /TMWFLOW/MO_UI_BASKET_AUTHORIZ
And voila. You can now approve the basket. Go back to the downloadbasket, and start downloading, and apply packages they way we have done it the last 25 years...
