SAP中的client（也叫集团）的意义

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　　---翻译随后就到。就在这里
　　The Client Concept
Your organization will likely have multiple clients. Clientsin the world of SAP are the self-contained business entities or units withinyour various SAP systems. A client retains its own separate master records andown set of tables. The best way to think of this is in the form of acompanywithin a large multinational organization, for example, you might havefive or six companies. Each client within SAP represents a different company.Most of the time, you might log in to a particular client or company and do yourwork; others might log in to a different client or company on the same SAPsystem, though. In the end, the results can be easily rolled up so that themultinational organization as a whole can easily report on its cross-companyfinancials, for example.
In the same way, an SAP system also tends to maintain differentclients strictly for convenience, or to segregate critical data from perhapsless critical data. Here is a general example. When you are first installing SAPand configuring the system, you will likely have a set of systems that you canlog in to. Most SAP customer sites maintain a Development system, QA or Testsystem, and a Production system.
Within each of these systems you can choose the specific clientyou want to log in to. For instance, within the Development system you mightmaintain a "business sandbox" or "crash and burn" client along with yourworkhorse development client and later a copy of this workhorse client,called a "Golden Master" by many. These very distinct client environments withineach system enable you to segregate your critical data (important goldendevelopment or production client data, for instance) from your test and what-ifconfiguration data.
You might have many clientsconfigured within a particular system. For example, the technical team mightimplement a new client in your development environment for special developertraining purposes, to be used to teach developers how to use the system withoutactually making any changes to the important development data. This same clientconfiguration is often established in your other systems, toofrom productiondown to the QA and test systems, and so on.
Regardless of the number of clients, each one is assigned aunique three-digit number, which you are required to know and type at logintime. This makes it easy to distinguish between clients. A developer might login to client 100 to do training, client 200 to review and approve new businesslogic, and client 500 to conduct actual development activities for the company.In the same way, an end-user might log in to client 300 in the production systemto do his day-to-day work, and occasionally client 900 in the QA or Test systemto check on the status on new functionality being developed forproduction.

Watch Out!
Within the SAP world, the term client is used to describe something distinctlydifferent from what the Information Technology (IT) world in general uses itfor. In IT, a client represents an individual PC or workstation. For thepurposes here, though, I will use client in the manner used by SAPto describea logical andseparate business entity within an SAP system.