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Since the SAP Support Portal and the SAP ONE Support Launchpad became your primary access points to SAP support services, numerous applications have been migrated from the old service.sap.com infrastructure to modern systems. Only a few “niche” tools are still hosted on the legacy platform, retaining the requirement to choose a password with exactly 8 characters for them. This requirement no longer exists for the migrated applications.

Starting November 4th, 2017, you may choose a more complex, safer password. It must be at least 8 characters long – maximum length is 255 – and include three of the following: Uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, symbols. The “exactly-8-characters” oddity will be a thing of the past.

Well, almost. If you happen to be one of the customers who still have to access one of the legacy tools, you must use a password that complies with the old rules, but only for these old applications.

Not for the SAP ONE Support Launchpad.

Not for the SAP Support Portal.

So why, when, and how would you come into contact with the old platform?

There are potentially two touchpoints with the service.sap.com legacy infrastructure:

First, you might enter it through your web browser (1). A few legacy applications are still referenced from the launchpad.

Legacy incidents, access to tickets from 2014 or before;

Legacy Service Messages, communication about a service that was delivered prior to mid-2017;

Maintain Own Clusters or Mass Updates of Authorizations, special features to maintain your colleagues’ authorization profiles.

Second, you might connect to the legacy support platform through a support tool. The URL of the system you are connecting to and the logon credentials are not necessarily exposed, so this may even happen unwittingly:

SAP Download Manager;

Line Opener Program;

RFC from an SAP Solution Manager 7.1 or older (2).

Regardless of how you access the legacy support platform, these are your options:

You don’t do anything and continue to use your current 8-character password for the old and the new platforms. Nothing will change for you. You prefer to choose a new, safer password for launchpad and portal. In this case, you will end up having two separate ones: One for the new world, one (with 8 characters) for the old support platform.

SAP Support will do their best to mitigate any negative impact: In the SAP ONE Support Launchpad, whenever a link to a legacy tool is offered, a popup window will make you aware of the fact that you are about to enter the old world:

You won’t be caught on the wrong foot when you are asked to enter your password for the legacy platform, and you can reset or change it from there.

It goes without saying that SAP is committed to finalizing the migration of remaining legacy applications to the SAP ONE Support Launchpad.