The Profile Generator is the perfect tool for setting up user authorizations in authorization profiles. The Profile Generator is also used to set up the user menus that appear when users log on to the SAP System.
The functions of the Profile Generator are based on the use of activity groups. An activity group is a collection of activities that describe a job role.
The SAP documentation about the Profile Generator, will provide any user with the necessary data to get started and create authorization profiles. Therefore, this section will try to focus more on hints and tips following our experience with the subject, especially after our upgrade from level 3.1H to release 4.6B, as the changes are quite drastic.
Where are my “old” activity groups ?
After upgrading to 4.6B, we had the bad surprise of discovering that our activity groups (created in 3.1H version of SAP) had disappeared. The corresponding authorization profiles were there, in the user masters, and somehow the authorization SAP_NEW had been assigned to all users, making their normal work possible. In transaction PFCG however, the activity groups had vanished, so how were we to maintain them with the new objects introduced in 4.6B ?
What SAP had forgot to tell us, was that a transaction called PFCG_OLD had been created to allow the conversion of all the pre-4.6B activity groups into 4.6B activity groups. Once converted, the activity groups can be updated and assigned to users.
There was another problem however, in 4.6B, user defined area menus have disappeared and are replaced by user menus which appear at sign-on. These menus are defined within each activity group. For the converted activity groups, these menus do not exist and have to be added. We chose to re-do our activity groups completely rather than patch up the old ones, as we were not sure that the jump from 3.1H to 4.6B had not damaged them in unsuspected ways. The increased ease of use of the Profile Generator was a decisive factor in this choice.