When you log on to an SAP System, you log on to a particular client of this system. Any activities you carry out in the system are always carried out in one client. When you plan your SAP system landscape, you must consider which clients you need for which activities.
By assigning activities to be performed in a client, you give each client a particular role. This section describes the most important client roles.
A client is organizational and legal entity in the SAP system. All the business management data is protected here because other clients cannot access them. The main objective of the client is to keep the data isolated. The data in a client can be only visible within that client; it cannot be displayed or changed from another client. In a physical SAP system there can be multiple clients. Each of these clients can have different objective or each client represents a unique work environment.
Customizing is a method in the SAP R/3 system that helps the user to configure the functionality from SAP, according to the customer requirements. When the SAP objects are just used by only one client, we define them as client dependant data. We must know the fact that client independent customizing can create problems if the authorizations and the client strategy are not defined properly. For example if we have three clients in a development environment then the role of each client should be defined properly. One of these three clients should be used for client independent customizing and in other clients, users will not have the authority to do any client independent configuration.
In addition to the central clients, you can also set up other clients for other tasks. However, you must remember that each extra client takes up additional system resources (main memory and database space). They also need to be administrated. For example, you need to set up and administrate access authorization for the users, and also distribute any changes to other clients with the CTS. You must weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of setting up other clients.
simratsdh 