Performance improvement with Organization Management buffers

[Rickayzen, Alan]

First a quick thank you to those of you who take the trouble to report
problems through our SAP Online Service System. I know the pressure many of
you are under to get results as fast as possible but by reporting the
problems to us through SAP OSS we can either:
>       provide a fix for you (and anyone else using workflow) or
>       improve the quality of the OSS Note so that it can be found more
quickly or
>       provide support in a hot package.
Problems that don't get reported are not fixed and the temporary workarounds
suggested in this forum may not be robust enough to survive the next Release
Upgrade
 
If there is a reason why you are reluctant to use these services please
contact me directly and I'll try to help.
 
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Back to the buffer discussion!
 
As with all buffer implentations the exact internal mechanism is complicated
and liable to change from release to release so this is a very brief summary
of how it works.
 
The first time you check your inbox each day, the buffer is generated by
reading the details direclty from the database. Subsequent calls to the
inbox read the details from the buffer which is a lot quicker. If you want
to refresh your inbox buffer manually, you can do this either in the inbox,
or in SWUS or in SWUD (calling the test environment does this
automatically), or when you start the workflow from the workflow builder. In
all these cases you refresh your own inbox and noone elses.
 
In addition, there is an administrative function (in the administration
menu) to refresh everyone's buffers. This resets a flag so that the next
time a user accesses their inbox their buffer is refreshed. It follows, that
this only costs load on the system when a user subsequently accesses their
inbox. No access leads to no load. On the other hand if you have many users
accessing their inbox and this flag is reset several times a day, it can be
quite annoying. It is this flag which is reset at midnight so that all inbox
buffers are regenerated the next day (when the use logs on).
 
In addition there is a second buffer associated with a task. This buffer is
a central buffer accessed by all users. You can reset this buffer (for one
task) from the menu when assigning agents to a task.
 
R u l e    o f    t h u m b
>       Avoid refreshing the buffers manually, they will be up to date the
next day. This is the most important rule!!!
>       If a user complains that he/she does not receive a work item then
that user can refresh the buffer from their own inbox.
>       If you are aware that a user should receive a work item in their
inbox but cannot see it (actual agent), then tell that user to refresh the
buffer from their inbox (you cannot do this for them).
>       If you only have a few users accessing work items (or you don't mind
annoying a large number of users) then you can use the central refresh in
the administration menu.
>       If you make changes to the agent assignment to a mission critical
task then refresh the task buffer (agent assignment screen).
 
If you're confused then please be patient while I put together an OSS Note
and double check in some of the different releases what I've written
here!!!!
Alan Rickayzen
SAP AG