Despite being 17 years old and having the look and feel of an old R/3 report, LSMW is still used by millions of business professionals every day, but there are whispers of obsolescence from a tiny minority. The only problem with a conclusion of obsolescence is that is LSMW enjoys 100% target market penetration; all SAP customers have it.

An increasingly-large host of vendors promise an alternative to LSMW that is better, but few come even close in terms of functionality and none come close to the price. Many of these alternatives promise to eliminate the need for programmers by making the process simple and that works as well as trying to eliminate doctors from an operating room by making surgery simpler.

It is an incredible honor to be invited a third time to work at the greatest client in the world. SAPLSMW is offically off sabbatical and back in the data migration saddle.

While not nearly as rewarding as saving old buildings or coaxing small engines back to life, the return to work couldn't be with a better client. Miami is a wonderful international city filled with warm, beautiful and vibrant people and we're very happy to be here again. It seems like yesterday, but it was five years ago that we were last hear.

As of April of 2015 SAPLSMW.com is on sabbatical and taking some time off from the hectic life and constant travel requirements of SAP implementations. In addition to recently becoming a husband, I am investing a lot of time in parallel endeavors to insure that there will always be time in my life to support the Data Migration community.

The risk of neglecting my new family has opened my eyes to a great number of things that I have taken for granted or just put off until such time that I'm not on a project. Little things like repairing a dash camera take a back seat to a client's needs and are forgotten for years.

The tools and expertise available only at SAPLSMW have been utilized to roll out SAP's CRM product to dozens of US locations from their headquarters in Canada. Using a brutally tight four-week life cycle, the team managed to complete three full implementations and successfully convert dozens of sales and service offices from three disparate legacy systems to SAP in just three months.

It was four months ago when we discovered that we were the first four hits on Google. We're not as obscure today as we were then. SAPLSMW is now the top eight hits on Google!

Years ago when we first set out to provide support for the data migration community one of our secondary goals was be recognized by Google in any way possible. We have far exceeded all of our goals and are recognized throughout the data migration community as an authority on the subject.

The tools and knowledge from SAPLSMW are being utilized by an international manufacturer that produces closures for bottles and cans of food, soap and cosmetics. While the legacy systems in this implementation are older versions SAP the transition is neither easy nor smooth because of simultaneously-changing methodologies and changing business requirements.

Spain kicks off the start of Spring along with a go-live for Bacardi in Mollet. The factory is experiencing a cut-over from JD Edwards' ERP product to the company-wide SAP system. Master data has been transported smoothly, but transactional warehouse and finance data isn't going as smoothly.

While still an obscure website in an obscure niche, it is somewhat reassuring to know that a potential audience is being reached by SAPLSMW.com and that technical help might be finding its intended recipients. We would like to thank everybody whose help, no matter how large or small, makes this website possible.

We recognize that being the first four hits in a search with 620 results isn't the recognition of any official governing body nor the official acknowledgement of authority on a particular subject matter. Still, it feels good and inspires us to keep producing content and providing support for the data migration community. We will continue to strive for our goal to be the authority on legacy data migration no matter what the outcome may be and no matter how obscure we remain.

Too often we encounter impasses while using SAP. Getting around these are the aim of a new section on our site called Workarounds. Examples of how to use LSMW in unintended ways to solve simple problems will be the mainstay of this new section.

The Workarounds section is off to a good start with the Coffee Cup Method. This low-tech solution allows data to be loaded unattended even when SAP throws up a non-issue warning like "screen field missing". Non-developers tend to complain when they have to hold the Enter key down and this is a great workaround for that.

The advice, standards and software developed by the SAPLSMW community are now helping the data conversion team at Bacardi load data into their SAP system. Currently the teams are extracting, transforming and loading in preparation for user acceptance testing. The schedule is very tight and the teams are working very hard to stay on track with a lot of success. The project has a scheduled Go-Live in October.