Preparing SAP for an S/4HANA migration with OpenText solutions: five questions
Preparing an SAP landscape for S/4HANA with OpenText products in it means asking one question per product, because each runs on its own clock. Archive first, to shrink what moves. Choose the VIM release your target S/4HANA release requires. Settle capture before the add-on upgrade. Get the archive and Extended ECM releases onto supported versions. Decide what happens to content in the systems you retire. OpenText's own S/4HANA migration page puts the idea plainly: move less, connect more.
The clock everyone already knows: SAP provides mainstream maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 core applications, SAP ERP 6.0 included, until the end of 2027, with optional extended maintenance to the end of 2030 at a premium of two percentage points.
What can we archive before we move? OpenText's answer is to start here. Its migration page says archiving inactive SAP data before the move shrinks the database and the migration scope, and its January 2026 RISE guidance lists archiving legacy documents and reducing the data sent to S/4HANA among the first steps. The owner is whoever answers for data volume in the migration plan, with finance and legal agreeing what must stay retrievable.
Which VIM release does the target S/4HANA release need? The VIM target follows the SAP target. An SAP product expert's upgrade checklist on SAP Community cites SAP Note 3654390 for S/4HANA 2025 needing VIM 25.4, and describes VIM 7.6 as the generation for ECC-oriented landscapes. A 7.6 landscape heading to S/4HANA is therefore a conversion with a VIM upgrade inside it, not a quick add-on refresh. OpenText's lifecycle page ends Current Maintenance for VIM 7.6 and 20.4 on 31 December 2027, 23.4 on 31 December 2028 and 25.4 on 31 December 2030. Monday's post covers who does what in a 25.4 upgrade.
Is capture settled before the add-on upgrade? The same checklist says VIM 25.4 no longer supports Business Center Capture or Invoice Capture Center components. If either still runs in production, the capture decision (on-premise Capture for SAP Solutions or cloud-based Core Capture) belongs early in the plan, not in cutover week.
Are the archive and Extended ECM releases on supported versions? OpenText's lifecycle page ends Current Maintenance for three 21.4 releases on 1 November 2026: Archiving and Document Access for SAP, Core Archive for SAP and Extended ECM for SAP. The newest rows run much longer, ADA 26.4 to 31 October 2031 and Core Archive 26.2 to 30 April 2031, and Extended ECM for SAP's later releases sit under the OpenText Content Management name. A content platform that drops out of maintenance halfway through an S/4HANA program is a risk you can see coming. The SAP Community checklist adds a useful point: there's generally no direct version dependency between VIM and OpenText Archive Center, so the archive upgrade can travel on its own track.
What happens to content in the systems we retire? Retired systems still hold records people need. OpenText's migration page talks about retiring legacy applications without losing compliant access, and about setting classification and retention rules during migration prep instead of retrofitting them after go-live. Name the records owner before anyone sets a decommissioning date.
One page, one owner per row. We'd put all five on a single page, one row per product: current release, target release, maintenance date, named owner. The S/4HANA program lead owns the page and each product owner owns a row. It isn't glamorous. It's the page that stops the archive upgrade, the VIM upgrade and the capture migration from landing in the same quarter by accident. Our OpenText for SAP maintenance calendar keeps the OpenText and SAP dates side by side if you want a place to start.
