SAP Community - SAP Mobile Start

Exciting new features with SAP Mobile Start 1.9, including new iOS 17 features.

2023-09-29T16:39:55+02:00

With the latest release of SAP Mobile Start, you get some great new features like SAP S/4HANA situations and Insight Cards - plus some cool new iOS17 features.

Situation Handling helps your business run smoothly by automatically informing the right users about situations that need their attention. This includes, for example, upcoming deadlines, delays, expiring contracts, and so on. Now, users get their new situations in the SAP Mobile Start app, right on the Start screen in the “New To-Dos" section, as well as on the To Do tab.

Furthermore, users get in-app notifications and native push notifications to ensure that they never miss a new situation or a new task and can act immediately.

Screenshot: SAP Mobile Start with SAP S/4HANA Situation Handling

For further information on SAP S/4HANA Situation Handling, please check: SAP S/4HANA Situation Handling

With the integration of the SAP Task Center Service, SAP Mobile Start provides users with a consolidated view of all their tasks, coming from various backend systems like SAP S/4HANA, Concur, or SuccessFactors.

With the release of version 1.9, users will get native push notifications on their watch, tablet and phone, as well as in-app notifications whenever a new task or situation is assigned to them. Thus, users won’t miss any new task anymore while being mobile and can act immediately to ensure that no important business event or workflow is delayed. Users can comfortably navigate from a notification directly to the task details.

With SAP Mobile Start Version 1.9, the app provides users with their Insight Cards that they already know from their SAP desktop applications. Insight Cards are shown on the Start screen, as well as on a dedicated “See All” cards view. Compared to a regular app tile or a so-called monitoring tile, Insight Cards (aka UI Integration Cards) allow for a more in-depth analysis and offer direct navigation to their parent application. Users can hide them or snooze them if required.

Currently, the following card types are supported: analytical cards, list cards, object cards, calendar cards, and table cards.

Screenshots: SAP Mobile Start with Insight Cards.

Remark: Currently, SAP Mobile Start supports Insight Cards in combination with SAP Start, our new central entry point edition for cloud solutions. The support for Insight Cards via SAP Build Work Zone is planned for later.

Furthermore, SAP Mobile Start Version 1.9 allows deep links to open apps that are maintained in the configuration of SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition. For security reasons, only those apps can be opened via deep links. This feature will enable users to share links to UI5 apps, for instance via email, and the apps will automatically be opened within SAP Mobile Start.

The team has also improved the in-app search of the iOS version to bring it to the level of the Android app. When using the search, users will see their last five search terms on the search screen, and users can open them directly.

Screenshot: Search with recent search terms

Finally, SAP Mobile Start now supports latest iOS 17 and watchOS 10 features.

You can add SAP Mobile Start widgets to your iPad Lock Screen (small format) and to the Smart Stack on your Apple Watch. Further more, you can add your SAP Mobile Start widgets to Your MAC, to ensure that you are always on top of your critical business KPIs, even when you are not logged into a system.

For further information on the new topics, please check our SAP Mobile Start documentation (iOS/ Android).

I hope you like our latest enhancements and new features. I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Stay up to date with the latest news and post your questions or feedback about SAP Mobile Start in the Q&A area. Start by visiting your SAP Mobile Experience community page and click “Follow”. We’ll be publishing more informative blog posts. Want to be notified? Check your #communicationsto ensure you have your notifications activated.

The Future Is Mobile: Your guide to SAP’s TechEd mobile offerings

2023-09-29T16:48:28+02:00

Mobile devices and apps are shaping the future of business and redefining how we connect and interact with the world. If you’re keen to future-proof your organization with the help of the latest mobile technologies, you’re in for a treat this year at SAP TechEd! We have put together a total of 12 sessions on mobile to help you realize your ideas, wherever you are. Gear up for a journey into the mobile universe, where innovation knows no bounds.

For everyone joining TechEd online

With our global audience, we’re going to tackle the hottest topic of the year – AI. In this lecture, learn how you can create a chatbot to support your users harnessing the power of Large Language Models (LLM) and adopt it in your mobile apps. We will be using the SAP Ariba Shopping app as an example to share with you our best tips and tricks using Generative AI.

For everyone looking to optimize business processes on the go

The perfect place to start is our mini theatre session See How Our Mobile Apps, Running on SAP BTP, Support Digital Transformation (XP508). Get a comprehensive overview of SAP’s mobile app portfolio and how these mobile apps can accelerate your organization’s digital transformation.

Then, dive deeper into a selection of our mobile apps. SAP Mobile Start is your native entry point to SAP’s mobile apps. Join our hands-on workshop (DT162) to discover how to set it up with SAP S/4HANA, how to add your apps, and how to configure SAP Mobile Start to meet your organization’s unique needs.

While SAP Mobile Start was crafted for every organization and a wide variety of personas, the rest of the app portfolio caters to specific industries. In the demo session Mobile Apps Using Procode: SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Warehouse Operator (AD914), you can discover two apps SAP has built for two specific personas - salespeople and warehouse operators - using pro-code and how these apps optimize business processes and maximize productivity for these personas on the go.

Before you leave the arena, make sure to stop by our demo booth Modern UX for the Mobile Intelligent Enterprise, powered by SAP BTP. There, you’ll get to know how SAP leverages the new Fiori design language to produce the best-in-class user experience for our users, and, more importantly, how you can do the same for yours.

For developers

TechEd is where great minds come together to get crafty. Join our hands-on session (XP161) to find out how easy it is to build a mobile SAP Build app and to provide your users with it via SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition and SAP Mobile Start.

If you’re looking to dive even deeper into SAP’s mobile technologies such as SAP BTP SDK, check out the following sessions:

Future-Proof Your Mobile Investments in the Cloud (AD503)

Develop Mobile Apps with Pro-Code Tools, Access Them with SAP Mobile Start (AD162)

Unlocking the Power of SAP Mobile Services with Pro-Code Tools (AD912)

Develop Native Mobile Apps for the Enterprise Using Pro-Code Tools (AD128)

We look forward to welcoming you at TechEd and creating the future of work with you!

ID	Session Type	Title	Date	Time
AD162	Hands-On Workshop	Develop Mobile Apps with Pro-Code Tools, Access Them with SAP Mobile Start	Friday, November 03, 2023	10:15 AM – 12:00 PM
XP508	Mini-Theatre Session	See How Our Mobile Apps, Running on SAP BTP, Support Digital Transformation	Friday, November 03, 2023	12:00 PM – 12:45 PM
XP161	Hands-On Workshop	Develop Mobile Apps with SAP Build Apps, Access Them via SAP Mobile Start	Friday, November 03, 2023	02:15 PM – 04:00 PM
DT162	Hands-On Workshop	Learn How to Set Up and Configure SAP Mobile Start with SAP S/4HANA	Friday, November 03, 2023	04:15 PM – 06:00 PM
AD128	Lecture (45 min)	Develop Native Mobile Apps for the Enterprise Using Pro-Code Tools	Thursday, November 02, 2023	12:00 PM – 12:45 PM
AD912	Demo Session	Unlocking the Power of SAP Mobile Services with Pro-Code Tools	Thursday, November 02, 2023	03:30 PM – 05:00 PM
AD503	Mini-Theater Session	Future-Proof Your Mobile Investments in the Cloud	Friday, November 03, 2023	01:00 PM – 01:45 PM
AD914	Demo Session	Mobile Apps Using Procode: SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Warehouse Operator	Friday, November 03, 2023	01:00 PM – 02:30 PM
AI201v	Virtual Lecture	Enhance Your Mobile App Experience with SAP Business AI	Thursday, November 02, 2023	12:00 PM - 12:25 PM CET

SAP User Experience Update: What’s New for SAP S/4HANA 2023 (Private Cloud and On-Premise)

2023-10-12T08:57:42+02:00

SAP S/4HANA 2023 brings many UX innovations and improvements, including powerful new collaboration capabilities, a new proactive home page, new features in the launchpad, as well as improvements for SAP S/4HANA applications (SAPUI5 based as well as classic UIs). We have significantly enhanced our central entry points, web and mobile, as well as our web and mobile UI technologies and development tools.

This post covers:

Entry point for users.

Updates on the Horizon theme.

New collaboration capabilities.

Intelligent Situation Handling news.

Web UX innovations.

Mobile UX innovations.

Unlike my previous blog posts, this one contains some forward-looking statements about what we plan to deliver in the near future. As always, these are subject to change, but of course we hope to deliver as planned.

If you want to see how good SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, now looks, across all the main product areas, then I thoroughly recommend that you have a look at the new online Product Tour.

Entry Point for Users

New My Home Page Planned for Q1/2024

Let’s start with the main forward-looking statement in this post: we plan to bring you the cool new My Home product home page with SAP S/4HANA 2023 Cloud, private edition and SAP S/4HANA 2023 (on-premise) in Q1/2024. This builds on the spaces and pages functionality of the SAP Fiori launchpad, so if you have not yet moved from the launchpad’s classic home page, which uses groups, now is the time to get started!

Figure 1 shows the main features of this new start page, which benefits from extensive feedback from users of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, where it was first introduced a year ago, and which has had two updates since then.

Figure 1: The new My Home product home page, planned to be made available in Q1/2024.

The new My Home is an easy-to-use product home page that supports business users in their everyday tasks and optimizes their work environment significantly. Building on the functionality of the SAP Fiori launchpad and leveraging ‘Spaces and Pages’, it orchestrates information, tasks, and applications so that you can thrive in today’s challenging work environment by accessing exactly what you need to get your job done with speed and agility.

Combining items from the ‘My Inbox’ and ‘My Situations’ SAP Fiori apps, it enables you to access and manage your to-dos and favorite pages and apps. Insights offer a particularly powerful capability: users can personalize which insight cards they want to have on the My Home page, by choosing from cards in their overview page apps, or by creating cards directly from SAP Fiori elements list report applications. In addition, the news section allows administrators to provide users with important news, and users can personalize the selection of topics.

To find out more about the planned new My Home product home page, have a look at these three videos from SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, showing the main features plus the additional features introduced during the course of this year. All these features are planned to become available for SAP S/4HANA 2023 in Q1/2024:

VIDEO: The new My Home start page

VIDEO: Additional My Home features introduced in Q1/2023

VIDEO: Additional My Home features introduced in Q3/2023

You can read about the features shown there in these blog posts:

My Home in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2302 – What’s new ?

My Home in SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Your business Insights at a glance.

My Home in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2308 – What’s new?

System News: Customizing the My Home news feed.

New Capabilities of the SAP Fiori Launchpad

All new innovations in the SAP Fiori launchpad will come with spaces and pages, which offer a more structured and better-organized setup for end users, so do start planning your move to spaces and pages if you haven’t already done so.

The classic home page, using groups, has been set to deprecated, meaning that it may be removed in a future release.

Now, let’s have a look at the new capabilities covered in this section:

Space menu personalization.

New system information bar.

Further smaller improvements for end users.

Improvements for administrators.

Space Menu Personalization

Users can now change the order in which spaces appear in the navigation bar at the top of the screen, and they can also pin and unpin spaces to the navigation bar. A new spaces menu has been introduced, which gives users access to all spaces, including the unpinned ones, and which provides the features for pinning and unpinning and for changing the order of the spaces. Figure 2 shows this in action.

Figure 2: The new spaces menu, allowing users to personalize which spaces are shown and in which order.

New System Information Bar

Users who not only work in a productive system, but also do testing and validation work in development and test systems, have requested some kind of easy way to tell which type of system they are currently working in. I am pleased to announce that we now provide a simple way for users to distinguish the type of system: a color-coded system information bar above the shell header that displays the system’s role, name and client number. You can easily make it visible in all non-productive systems by setting the corresponding configuration parameters, as described in the documentation. Figure 3 shows an example from our demo system.

Figure 3: The new system information bar at the top of the screen, in this case with an orange color.

Further Smaller Improvements for End Users

As always, the details matter for providing a good user experience. Here are some detailed improvements worth mentioning.

More intuitive time-zone selection: The SAP Fiori launchpad now supports the IANA time zone format, which allows a much more intuitive selection of time zones than choosing the number of hours before or after UTC. Figure 4 shows what I mean. These time zones are also used in the ABAP backend, and are now supported by the SAP Fiori UIs in SAP S/4HANA. Users can choose the time zone via the Languages & Regions tab of the user settings.

Figure 4: Selecting timezones using IANA timezones in the SAP Fiori launchpad settings.

Relative dates for “Save as tile”: Users can save a view of an SAP Fiori app to the launchpad via “Save as tile”, i.e. with filter parameters defined by the user. In Q1/2024 we are planning to support relative dates such as “today” or “yesterday”, so that the information shown in the tile always shows data relative to the current date.

Improvements for Administrators

Checking for broken references: The report Check Pages for Broken References (transaction /UI2/CHECK_PAGE_REFS) checks if the selected pages contain any broken references to tiles or target mappings, and displays a list of broken references. For more information, see Checking Launchpad Pages for Broken References in the documentation.

Space Templates for “Employee” and “Administrator” Roles: We now provide templates for spaces with pages defined for the roles “Employee” and “Administrator”, which you can copy to your own custom spaces, making the setup of your spaces and pages easier overall.

Exposure of composite roles to SAP Build Work Zone: Composite roles can now be selected for exposure. They consist of several single roles. The composite roles are exposed to SAP Build Work Zone with the complete launchpad content of all single roles that are included in the composite role. They can be assigned to users in the SAP Build Work Zone. For more information, see “Manage Launchpad Content for Exposure” in the documentation.

Central Entry Point (Web)

We are progressing with our entry point strategy, which I outlined in my January blog post:

SAP Fiori Update: More Products with Horizon, Entry Point strategy, UX news for SAP S/4HANA and More

I’ll explain below about how:

SAP Start is now available for selected usage scenarios, and

the features which were in Beta for the SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition, are now generally available.

SAP Start

The vision of SAP Start is to bring together all truly relevant business information for each user in one central place, and also to provide the one place to go to start your SAP applications in the cloud, no matter which product you want to use. Rather than having to manually create your own bookmarks for your systems and/or applications, you can simply go to SAP Start and start them there via the simple yet powerful search field, which prompts you with a list of your recent searches and frequently used apps whenever you click on it.

SAP Start gives you much more than that though, proactively informing you about your to-dos from all products which are connected to the SAP Task Center, as well as giving you key insights via insight cards from products connected to SAP Start. Both the to-do and insight cards allow users to drill down to the originating application from the connected cloud product, which is opened in a new browser tab.

In other words: when you start your day, SAP Start will be the best place to start, to simplify your access to multiple SAP cloud products.

Figure 5: SAP Start, with an example showing To Dos from SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, and Insights from SAP SuccessFactors (the leftmost card) and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition.

If the application you are starting requires a one-off activity, such as requesting vacation or approving a request, users will most likely then close the browser tab and return to SAP Start. On the other hand, if they use SAP Start to start their work in a product with many interdependencies, such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud, they will most likely stay within the product’s shell and use the product’s start page, such as the My Home page, for the rest of the day. At the end of the day, the user has the choice to do whatever works best for them, without being forced to go one way or the other.

Time for another forward-looking statement, which as always is subject to change: we currently plan to integrate SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition with SAP Start in Q1/2024. SAP Fieldglass is planned to be integrated later in Q4/2023. As of today, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, and SAP SuccessFactors are integrated with SAP Start.

SAP Build Work Zone, Standard Edition

If users also need to access on-premise solutions or third-party solutions, and/or you want to give your users dedicated spaces and pages for accessing their applications, then SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition, is the next step up from SAP Start, providing these capabilities on top of those provided by SAP Start. These new features, which were previously in beta, are now available:

Customers can define the navigation menu of spaces and pages for accessing remote pages, such as those provided via SAP S/4HANA content exposure, as well as pages defined locally within SAP Build Work Zone.

Customers can use the flexible page builder to define spaces and pages. This allows you to embed the To Dos section and the Insights section from SAP Start into a page of your choice.

Custom applications and UI cards can be integrated directly onto pages defined in SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition.

SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition, is also required if you want to use our native mobile entry point, SAP Mobile Start.

Mobile Entry Point: SAP Mobile Start

SAP Mobile Start is the native mobile entry point to a user’s business applications, be they native mobile apps, responsive web applications, web links or news feeds. It follows our design approach of providing proactive information to users, via To Dos and Insights sections, as well as providing native notifications. It provides access to SAP S/4HANA, SAP Success Factors, SAP Fieldglass, SAP Concur and SAP Ariba, and is available for iOS and Android. To learn more about how SAP Mobile Start provides the best user experience for Apple devices, have a look at this blog post:

SAP Mobile Start provides the best user experience, leveraging native Apple platform capabilities.

The main innovations we’ll look at below are:

SAP Mobile Start for smart watches

General enhancements

Corporate branding for mobile apps

SAP Mobile Start for Smart Watches

SAP Mobile Start is now also available as a smart watch app for Apple watchOS and Wear OS. The watch companion app shows your latest to-dos, as well as business information. For the best user experience, you can filter to-dos by type, drill into details, and take care of your to-dos immediately. With Apple Watch complications, you can even see the number of your open to-dos and monitoring information right on your watch.

Figure 6: The new Apple Watch companion app for SAP Mobile Start. The example shown in the middle shows how you can approve a leave request directly on your watch, starting from the list of to-dos.

General Enhancements to SAP Mobile Start

The latest version, SAP Mobile Start 1.9, released end of September 2023, brings some great new features, such as support for Intelligent Situation Handling from SAP S/4HANA, insight cards and some cool new iOS17 features. Figure 7 shows how situations and insight cards from SAP Start are visualized.

Figure 7: Situations from SAP S/4HANA are now supported, shown on the left, as are insight cards from SAP Start, shown on the right. Both examples shown here originate from SAP S/4HANA, public cloud.

These three blog posts summarize the latest improvements in SAP Mobile Start user experience:

Exciting new security features with SAP Mobile Start 1.7, amongst others, one of these features allows admins to restrict the data which users can extract from apps and share with others.

New enhancements for To-Dos with SAP Mobile Start 1.8, which includes updates to the watch companion app, for example allowing users to add a comment via voice.

Exciting new features with SAP Mobile Start 1.9, including new iOS 17 features.

Corporate Branding for Mobile Apps

Customers can adapt the Horizon theme for mobile apps to fit their corporate branding – for example by replacing the SAP logo with the company logo, and adapting the colors used on the screen. The UI Theme Designer is a browser-based tool which allows you to define your corporate branding once, and then deploy it your web apps as well as native mobile apps.

For example, as of SAP Mobile Start 1.5, SAP BTP SDK for iOS 9.0 and SAP BTP SDK for Android 5.1.0, you can apply your UI theme designer definitions also to SAP Mobile Start.

Figure 8: Applying your corporate brand to mobile apps using UI Theme Designer: on the right you see that the SAP logo has been replaced, and other colors have been used.

Find out more in these blog posts:

Branding and Theming for Mobile Applications

SAP Mobile Start supports UI theme designer based branding

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Updates on the Horizon theme

Improvements to the Horizon visual theme for SAP Fiori

We have been listening to users about how they are getting on with the Horizon visual theme for their work – what they like, and whether there are areas for improvement. Overall, the theme is well received, looking fresh, friendly and modern – however there were some details which could be improved, and which we are indeed now improving.

With SAP S/4HANA 2023 we already bring you improvements on areas where we received most feedback, namely input fields and buttons:

Input fields are now white, not gray: users expect gray fields to be read-only, and white ones to allow input, so we have swapped the colors to enable this.

Buttons are now more easily recognizable, in particular the secondary button, which used to be gray, is now white with a gray border.

These updates are best understood by looking at examples, which you find in this blog post:

Improvements Coming to the Horizon Visual Theme for SAP Fiori.

The blog post also shows you a number of further improvements to Horizon which are currently planned for Q1/2024, such as:

Improved contrast for the SAP Fiori launchpad.

Reduced size of heading text.

Improved contrast and section separation in the Flexible Column Layout floorplan from SAP Fiori elements.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Projects Now with Horizon

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for projects, resource management and SAP S/4HANA Cloud for projects, collaborative project management, both of which can run independently on SAP Business Technology Platform or integrated with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, now also support the Horizon visual theme for SAP Fiori. Figure 9 shows an example of the Manage Resource Utilization app from SAP S/4HANA Cloud for projects, resource management.

Figure 9: The Manage Resource Utilization app from SAP S/4HANA Cloud for projects, resource management, with the Horizon theme.

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New Collaboration Capabilities

With SAP S/4HANA 2023, we introduce powerful collaboration capabilities with Microsoft Teams, as well as providing the fully integrated SAP Collaboration Manager for ad-hoc collaboration between colleagues. We have also made some enhancements to the Google Workspace integration.

Microsoft Teams Integration

We introduce two options for users to share their current work context with colleagues via Microsoft Teams: share as chat and share as tab. Figure 10 shows how a user can select between the two.

Figure 10: The options provided to users for sharing via Microsoft Teams.

Share as Chat

Users can share content from apps with other users in Microsoft Teams via chat. This improves efficiency in processes where they need to collaborate based on the data in the system. Typical cases are approvals, exceptions, and validations. The receiver of the chat can directly launch the SAP S/4HANA app from Microsoft Teams. If the sender defined filters for the application, for example to select only a few entries in a list, the receiver will have these filters applied, too. This video shows it in action with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition 2208 – note that the application menu shown in the video has changed since then and now looks like what you see in Figure 10 This functionality is provided for applications built with SAP Fiori elements.

Share as Tab

The share as tab option is even more powerful, allowing users to expose live data directly from your SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition system as “tabs” to Microsoft Teams channels, groups, or chats and give your co-workers easy access to up-to-date filtered information. The SAP S/4HANA for Microsoft Teams app is required. This is easiest to understand by watching a short demo video, taken from SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition 2308:

SAP Collaboration Manager

The new SAP Collaboration Manager is seamlessly integrated in the SAP Fiori launchpad to enable collaboration directly in the system. Users can chat directly with peers out of their UI and:

link their chat to any screen in their apps for reference,

take screenshots without having to close the SAP Collaboration Manager and annotate, highlight, or conceal areas within them,

find out which screen the screenshot was created from, and

see how many unread messages they have received on the SAP Collaboration Manager icon.

The SAP Collaboration Manager is available now for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, in addition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition. Watch this demo video, which shows the features in use in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition:

Google Workspace Integration Enhancements

We have enhanced the Google Workspace integration which was introduced with SAP S/4HANA 2022: with this release, you can now easily select where to download and upload the template to via an enhanced file browser dialog. You can use this feature to upload general journal entries as well as tax rates from Google Sheets. Additionally, we offer the possibility to export SAP data from all important UI tables and provide some advanced capabilities such as different formats for table export and new features in the file browser dialog. This video shows these new features in use:

VIDEO: Google Workspace Integration Demo.

The classic UI Web Dynpro ABAP list viewer, most commonly referred to as the ALV, also supports the export of Google Sheets documents to Google Workspace. In addition, print version (*.pdf) documents can be exported to Google Workspace. The Export As dialog has been adapted accordingly.

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Intelligent Situation Handling News

Intelligent Situation Handling speeds up the resolution of critical business situations by automatically and hence proactively alerting users about urgent issues, proposing follow-up actions, letting you monitor situations, and automating the resolution by using business rules.

In addition to many new use cases from applications in SAP S/4HANA, we have continued enhancing the extended framework for Intelligent Situation Handling, in particular:

The “Monitor Situations – Extended” app gives customers more capabilities for monitoring situations in SAP S/4HANA. Find out more in this blog post:
- Monitor Your Custom Situations.

Partners can now create situation objects with ABAP Development Tooling (ADT) via developer extensibility. These can be transported to customer systems, which means that partners can offer their Situation Objects to more than one customer. This series of blog posts explains:
- How Developer Extensibility lets you create your own Situation Handling Use Case (1/3).

If you want to benefit from SAP’s pre-defined use cases for Situation Handling check out this list:

Use Cases for Situation Handling.

Of the new ones, I would like to highlight these three, which notify experts in the finance department about changes to a customer’s credit limit, risk class or score, which usually occurs infrequently and which requires their attention:

Change of Credit Limit.

Change of Risk Class.

Change of Score.

If you are not familiar with Intelligent Situation Handling, have a look at this new blog post:

How to Start with Custom Situations: High-Level Design of the Use Case (1/4).

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Web UX Innovations

Many of our customers’ users feel at home with SAP GUI in their existing systems, which means that change management when moving to the SAP Fiori launchpad and web UIs is particularly important – something which we have seen to be often underestimated in customer projects. To help make the transition easier, we are providing an additional Quick Tour for SAP Fiori list report applications, as well as providing SAP Companion for classic UIs too, as explained below.

Beyond that, as always, the details matter for good user experience, and we have invested in enhancing many of the smaller details or our web UI technology to improve the overall user experience when using SAP S/4HANA applications. Below we’ll look at some of the more prominent examples.

Improved User Assistance: Help for Classic UI Fields and a new Quick Tour

Classic UIs (SAP GUI for HTML and Web Dynpro ABAP) now also help users with the meaning of individual fields on the screen. This makes it easier for new users to get started with these applications. Users access it via the SAP Companion icon in the shell header, and then via the green help icon next to the field, or by selecting the topic in the list on the right, as shown in Figure 11 below.

Figure 11: User assistance for individual fields in Classic UIs. This example shows the Change Sales Order classic UI (based on transaction “VA02”).

The list report is a very commonly used pattern for SAP Fiori apps, typically all “Manage” apps use it as the start screen. A new Quick Tour is now available for these applications, which are developed using SAP Fiori elements. When users first open any list report application, a Quick Tour is started, giving an overview of the key features:

Users are shown all the useful features proactively right from the beginning.

Users see animations immediately, much richer than just showing text and static images.

The Quick Tour is only started proactively once in total, no matter how many different list report applications are used. Users can restart manually via the “help” icon. Figure 12 gives you an impression of what it looks like, and how the embedded animations are immediately visible.

Figure 12: Quick Tour for applications based on the SAP Fiori elements list report.

Further Improvements in Design and Usability

Improved Information Density

Increasing numbers of users benefit from wide screen displays at their desks. As a result, we have received feedback that some of our screens show too much white space when viewed on large screens. In particular, when looking at an object page, only up to four columns of text used to be displayed in the form sections. Now, the maximum has been increased to six, which not only reduces the white space between columns, but also means that the section takes up less vertical space, so that users see more of the application on the screen. Figure 13 shows an example for a sales order.

Figure 13: On wider screens, sections within an object page can now display six columns.

Type-ahead Search within Fields Enhanced

The type-ahead feature in SAP Fiori apps has been adjusted: If a user types something in a smart field, as used in the filter bar above list reports, the text the user enters is no longer automatically completed if it is an exact match. Instead, the user will see the item that exactly matches their entry in the dropdown list, and this item gets highlighted in the list, so that if the user presses enter, the value is chosen. If the user intends to continue typing, they can do so without having to delete the auto-completed characters. Figure 14 shows an example of this.

Figure 14: The type-ahead drop-down list highlights the entry which is an exact match to what the user has typed in so far.

Messages Shown in the Order of the UI Fields

If a user enters a lot of erroneous data in an object page before saving, quite a few error messages will appear, one for each field with incorrect data. Now, the messages are shown sorted in the order the fields appear on the screen, as you can see in Figure 15.

Figure 15: Messages now appear in the order of the fields on the UI of an object page.

UI for Defining Filters on a Table

We have made the dialog for defining filters on a table more intuitive, so users can now grasp the filter criteria immediately, as you can see in the example in Figure 16, showing the same filter definition as it was before, and how it looks now.

Figure 16: More intuitive filter personalization for tables (click on the image to enlarge).

You can find out more, and look at another example, in this blog post:

Improved Design of Filtering in Smart Table Personalization

Displaying Descriptions next to Code Values in Table Personalization and Value Help

When personalizing a view on a table, for example by defining specific filter values, the personalization pop-up now shows the descriptions of codes as well as the code value itself, as shown in Figure 17 on the left.

These descriptions are now also displayed within the value help dialog, as shown in Figure 17 on the right.

Figure 17: The description texts are now shown next to code values in the table personalization dialog, displayed on the left, and in the value help list, displayed on the right within the red box.

Technically this is done by supporting the text arrangement annotation in the underlying OData service.

Performance Improvements in UI technology

Nobody likes having to wait for a UI to respond to their input, which means that better performance leads to better UX. In this release, we continue to fine-tune our UI technologies to improve performance: SAPUI5 has improved loading performance via bootstrap evolution; for combo-boxes we have introduced client-side validation of entered data, so that we avoid a roundtrip to the backend, and draft handling by SAP Fiori elements based on OData v2 has significantly reduced the number of network requests – and also improved the user experience by reducing the number of interruptions caused by message popovers.

Additional End User Enhancements from SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori Elements Technology

The object page allows developers to enable or disable UI elements based on entries made in a checkbox or in a combobox, which is what users expect: if certain fields are only relevant if a particular option has been chosen in a neighboring field on the object page, then users expect the fields to be grayed out if the option has not been selected.

Data validation in object pages of draft-enabled applications can now be triggered by pressing Enter, in addition to clicking on the Save or Create button – something which will help users transitioning to SAP Fiori apps from SAP GUI, where they are used to pressing Enter to validate data.

Another nice improvement in detail has been made to object page personalization: tables and charts in object pages provided by SAP Fiori elements have variant management enabled by default. As a result, the table and chart personalization settings can be saved in the corresponding object page views defined by users.

Combo boxes support alphabetical sorting by name now, which makes it easier for users in different countries, since the alphabetical order of entries will change according the language being used.

Finally, the last improvement I’d like to call out here is the export to Excel functionality from list reports: it now includes the filter parameters which the user had set in an easily understandable format, by adding a collapsible section called Filter to the Excel, with rows describing the filter values. Figure 18 shows an example.

Figure 18: An example showing how filter values are now included in the Microsoft Excel file when exporting from list reports. In this case, three filter fields had values maintained; the “Valid On” field had a “from – to” range, which resulted in two rows being added for this one filter: a “Valid From” and a “Valid To” row.

Key User Enhancements

Key User UI Adaptation for Specific User Roles

Now, for applications built on SAP BTP, ABAP Environment, key users can adapt UIs built with SAPUI5 for specific user roles, so that for a certain role A one view of the UI could be made available, whereas for role B (perhaps for a power user) a different view of the UI can be provided. This new functionality was developed based on a Customer Engagement Initiative we launched in 2022 to gain a deeper understanding of our customers’ needs and to work together with them on what the best solution would look like. Figure 19 shows how a key user can assign the roles to a UI adaption.

Figure 19: Key users can now assign roles to a UI adaptation.

This functionality is available for SAP BTP, ABAP Environment. Find out more via this blog post:

SAPUI5 Flexibility: Adapting UIs for Specific User Roles.

Multi-level UI Adaptation Projects

Adaptation projects in SAP Business Application Studio extend SAP’s standard applications and now also allow customers and partners to extend already-deployed adaptation projects. These are created by SAP (e.g. for industry solutions) or SAP partners. Up until now, customers were not able to adapt these already-deployed adaptation projects themselves. Now this is possible, enabling customers to adapt even more solutions to their needs.

Preview UI Adaptation Projects

Adaptation projects also have a new capability, allowing developers to preview an adaptation project in a separate browser tab. This enables a stand-alone preview for testing.

What’s New for Web UI Developers

There isn’t space to cover all the new features for UI developers in our tools and technologies, so I’ll give you pointers to where you can find out more. I would however like to mention these highlights:

The flexible programming model using OData V4 is now the officially recommended approach for web UI development for new business applications, both on SAP Business Technology Platform as well as on the ABAP platform used for example by SAP S/4HANA. Find out more here:

Typescript is now released for productive use with SAPUI5 (version 1.116 onward). Find out more:

SAPUI5 supports the latest version of JavaScript, ECMAScript 2022.

UI5 Tooling version 3 has a two-times faster build. Find out more in this blog post:
- UI5 Tooling 3.0

We provide an early information (preview) of new SAPUI5 functionality, read more about that in this blog post:
- SAPUI5: What’s New and when is it Coming?

To find out more about UI Technology enhancements for developers, have a look at

What’s New Viewer for ABAP Platform 2023 (user experience) / Classical View.

What’s New in SAPUI5.

Watch the recordings of the recent UI5con conference, where various experts presented the latest and greatest on SAPUI5 and OpenUI5. You can download the presentations from the site too.

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Mobile UX Innovations

In this section, we cover news for mobile design, applications and development tools. News on SAP Mobile Start was already covered in the section on entry points.

iF Design Award 2023 for SAP Fiori Mentor App

We are very proud to announce that we received an iF Design Award for the SAP Fiori Mentor app.

Figure 20: SAP Fiori Mentor app awarded the iF design award in 2023.

To learn more about the SAP Fiori Mentor app, have a look here:

Discover SAP’s Mobile Design and Technology with the Updated SAP Fiori Mentor App

SAP Fiori Mentor app in the SAP Fiori for iOS Design Guidelines

SAP Fiori Mentor app in the SAP Fiori for Android Design Guidelines

SAP Fiori Now Available for watchOS and Wear OS

The new watch design systems SAP Fiori for watchOS and SAP Fiori for Wear OS bring the power of SAP Fiori to Apple Watch and Wear OS devices for a more efficient, productive, and personalized experience. SAP Fiori for watchOS and SAP Fiori for Wear OS enable users to seamlessly access real-time business insights, smart notifications, and critical tasks on the go, all with a user-centric interface optimized for smart watches.

Figure 21: SAP Fiori now available for Apple watchOS and Google Wear OS.

Discover the new watch design systems based on SAP Fiori by exploring the guidelines and Figma UI Kits below.

SAP Fiori for watchOS Guidelines.

SAP Fiori for Wear OS Guidelines.

SAP Fiori for watchOS Figma UI Kit.

SAP Fiori for Wear OS Figma UI Kit.

Mobile Apps for SAP S/4HANA

SAP Service and Asset Manager for Windows

Recently we have introduced SAP Service and Asset Manager for Windows, our first native Windows mobile app. Find out more in this blog post:

Introducing SAP Service and Asset Manager for Windows

Augmented Reality 3D in SAP Product Model Viewer for Field Technicians

To further help manufacturing become more resilient, the 3D product viewer capabilities of the SAP Enterprise Product Development solution are now integrated into manufacturing, service, and maintenance processes. In SAP Digital Manufacturing, production operators now can view 3D product models in their dashboard and work environment to streamline complex assembly. In the SAP Service and Asset Manager mobile app, field engineers can use 3D augmented reality views to accelerate asset maintenance, increase first time fix rates and reduce downtime. Have a look at this video to see it in action:

What’s New for Mobile Apps for SAP S/4HANA

Have a look at these blog posts for further news on updates with improved capabilities which go hand in hand with an overall improved user experience for three mobile apps:

SAP Service and Asset Manager 2305 Now Available – What’s New?

What’s new with SAP Warehouse Operator Version 2.1

SAP Maintenance Assistant 2308 Now Available – What’s New?

Role Descriptions for SAP’s Mobile Apps

Native mobile apps make sense for those specific use cases where people are always or very often away from their desk as part of their job. To help you better understand for whom the apps are built, we have published persona descriptions for five of them:

Field Service Technician Persona in SAP Service and Asset Manager

Inventory Clerk Persona in SAP Service and Asset Manager

SAP Mobile Start for the Treasury Manager

SAP Mobile Start for the Industrial Hygienist and Environmental Engineer

SAP Mobile Start for the Hiring Manager and Temporary Worker (for SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Fieldglass).

Mobile UX Technology

Our mobile apps provide great usability with the Horizon theme. We build them with our mobile development kits, provided by SAP Business Technology Platform, which means that you can also build great mobile apps easily, with the same look and feel as SAP’s apps – for iOS and Android phones and tablets, as you can see in Figure 22.

Figure 22: Native mobile apps from SAP: on the top left you see our new icons for our current portfolio of apps, which can be accessed using SAP Mobile Start – both on mobile phone and tablet.

You can find out more about latest capabilities of our mobile SDKs for iOS and Android as well as our mobile development kit in these blog posts:

Latest Releases of SAP Fiori for Android 6.0 & iOS 9.1 – New Features to Support Mobile Business Users

SAP Fiori for Android: How to Build Efficient and Delightful Mobile Enterprise Apps with SAP’s Design System

What’s new in Mobile development kit client 23.8

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Final words

Well done! You’ve made it to the end of another long post from me!

Come join us at TechEd, November 2^nd to 3^rd, 2023, either virtually or in Bangalore, to find out more about our latest user experience innovations. These blog posts summarize the UX related sessions you can join there:

User experience sessions at TechEd 2023 Virtual.

User experience sessions at TechEd 2023 Bangalore.

I am looking forward to hearing from you on the community about your experiences with SAP Fiori. Please continue using the community to share your learnings and best practices, either by posting articles yourselves or via comments on this post. You can also follow me in the community if you want to be notified about further similar updates from me.

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Connecting the Dots of Enterprise Mobility: Highlights from SAP Mobile Day Chicago

2023-10-25T09:45:31+02:00

SAP Mobile Day Chicago - hosted by SAP's Mobile Experience and Engineering team - united SAP customers, partners, and industry experts to build relationships and share knowledge around modern enterprise mobility at scale.

SAP Mobile Day Chicago was a resounding success, bringing together a diverse and passionate part of the SAP community from across North America. The event provided attendees with invaluable insights into the transformative power of enterprise mobility and SAP's cutting-edge mobile technologies.

”You get all of these people who've had various successes and failures, and you get to hear about how they are doing with mobility and SAP. Seeing the technologies come together, that was probably the highlight for me." said Gerry Mecca from The EKG group when reflecting on the event’s collaborative atmosphere.

Throughout the day, attendees had the opportunity to learn from industry leaders and SAP experts, gaining a deeper understanding of how mobile strategies can empower businesses in today's fast-paced and digitally-driven world. The event featured engaging presentations and discussions from notable speakers, including SAP, Apple, Freeport-McMoRan, Trifork, Great Lakes Cheese, and Jamf.

Laura Musgrove, Manager of Global Business Solutions (for Operations) at Freeport-McMoRan, shared her company’s experience with SAP Service and Asset Manager: "We had a lot of paper-based processes, so we wanted to bring some automation and digitization to those processes. When you have a mobile app, it allows supervisors and technicians to be closer to where their work is in the field."

The event attracted dozens of SAP customers and partners from various industries, providing a rich opportunity for networking and knowledge sharing. Attendees were treated to impressive application demonstrations that showcased the potential of SAP solutions, such as SAP Mobile Start and SAP Service and Asset Manager, in driving business success and innovation.

"For me, it's realizing that, while I'm focused very much on HR, there is so much more that we could be doing. We are an SAP shop and we can expand so much to other spaces within the mobile platform, and that is something that I'm looking forward to taking back." Said Brian Shellhorn, HR Information Systems Manager at Great Lakes Cheese.

The focus of SAP Mobile Day Chicago 2023 was on educating attendees about creating successful mobile strategies, including application development, device management, security, and more. SAP's mobile development technologies, including the software development kits (SDK), design systems, and more, were showcased as powerful tools that help customers build, deploy, and run a suite of SAP applications and custom applications. These technologies are instrumental in supporting customers to enhance workforce efficiency, bolster supply chain resilience, and improve financial health.

Kat Garbis, Senior Channel Program Manager at Jamf, highlighted the breadth of SAP’s mobile technologies and applications, stating, "The highlight for me was seeing how the same technology is used in so many different ways…There are also a lot of really great minds here, so just connecting with people who are eager to learn is really wonderful to be a part of."

SAP Mobile Day continues to be a flagship event in the world of enterprise mobility, fostering connections, and fostering innovation among industry leaders. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, SAP remains at the forefront, equipping businesses with the tools and knowledge they need to thrive.

Check out Episode 5 of the Mobile Matters Podcast for a great recap of SAP Mobile Day Chicago 2023 and a deep dive into Freeport-McMoRan’s mobile journey!

7 Things You Need to Know About SAP Start

2023-10-27T09:37:30+02:00

SAP has introduced SAP Start, the new default central entry point, designed to easily engage with all cloud business solutions across the SAP portfolio. It is now generally available and included out-of-the-box, at no additional cost, with all integrated SAP cloud business solutions. For customers with Rise with SAP, Grow with SAP contracts (public cloud) as well as existing SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition subscriptions, SAP Start can be used by all eligible users at no extra costs. For other customers, there is a fair-use limit of 1.000 active users per month. In this blog, we answer the top 7 questions we received from customers and partners.

1.) What is SAP Start?

SAP Start is SAP’s new out-of-the-box default central entry point running on the SAP Business Technology Platform. It is based on SAP Build Work Zone technology. SAP Start gives users a powerful, yet simple, home page experience when adopting SAP’s cloud solutions.
SAP Start makes use of SAP's suite qualities like consistent security and identity management, seamless user experience and one workflow inbox (SAP Task Center) to provide a consistent, integrated experience across SAP's product portfolio.

SAP Start offers key capabilities including:

To Dos : Integrating with SAP Task Center, SAP Start pushes your workflow to dos from all SAP cloud business solutions into one place as action cards. To Dos are prioritized to ensure you can access relevant information quickly, and can take actions where they are most needed.

Interest Cards: Based on your individual role and business needs, interest cards consist of rich and relevant business content tailored to you. Today, SAP Start includes interest cards from SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition and SAP SuccessFactors. Additional SAP cloud business solutions (SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, SAP Ariba, SAP Concur, SAP Fieldglass) are a priority and will follow over time.

Search: Search and start applications from any connected SAP cloud solution. SAP Start remembers your most frequently used applications. In addition, the search functionality supports launching a content search in any of the connected cloud solutions, for example, to find an employee in SAP SuccessFactors or a sales order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition.

Joule is already integrated with SAP Start and currently available in an Early Adopter Care program. Joule is the AI copilot that truly understands your business. Joule revolutionizes how you interact with your SAP business systems, making every touchpoint count and every task simpler.

2.) What makes SAP Start special and how does it provide value?

As an out-of-the-box offering, SAP Start enhances our cloud portfolio experience across multiple SAP line of business solutions. SAP Start:

Delivers immediate value and requires minimal configuration, reducing time and costs of setup through automation, and maximizing your return on investment.

Delights users by providing them with a home page experience which helps to quickly see and act on important & relevant data across their various SAP cloud solutions.

Makes it simple for end-users to access and act with their SAP cloud applications by intelligently delivering personalized, prepackaged content for end-users based on their business roles.

As SAP Start is built using SAP Build Work Zone Standard technology, it can easily be extended by using SAP Build Work Zone Standard. Look at SAP Start as a pre-defined, out-of-the-box, SAP Build Work Zone Standard site and page; you can either use it as is and directly benefit from all its features, or you can extend it if needed.

3.) Will SAP Start replace the home pages of SAP’s cloud business solutions?

No, SAP Start does not aim to replace any product home pages. SAP Start aims to bring together the most relevant business content across all SAP cloud solutions into one place for the end user who needs to access and work with more than one SAP Solution. Thus, SAP Start will not offer the level of detail the individual product home pages do, nor will it offer all the deep business functionality; instead, SAP Start focuses on bringing together what matters truly most across all business solutions in one place.

4.) What about a native mobile client for SAP Start?

Great news! While SAP Start is designed for the web, there’s a great native mobile counterpart to it : SAP Mobile Start. It’s available for iOS and Android devices. Get the latest news on SAP Mobile Start here and learn about the roadmap here.

5.) Any advice on how to setup SAP Start?

As an out-of-the-box offering, one of our top priorities is to ease the setup of SAP Start. The first step in that direction is a dedicated BTP booster (which can be found and executed in the SAP BTP Cockpit) that automates the service creation. In addition, establishing LoB system connectivity is simplified, starting with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition. Visit the SAP Start help page with instructions on SAP Start setup.

6.) Where can I learn more about Joule?

Use cases from SAP SuccessFactors are available in an Early Adopter Care phase in Q4 and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition will be available in Q1 2024. Joule and its content will be available for all SAP Build Work Zone editions. The press release can be found here and you can learn more on our webpage.

7.) What is next for SAP Start?

SAP Start is generally available for only a few weeks, and its scope and reach are constantly increasing. While it already includes To Dos from all major SAP cloud business solutions, the business content in terms of Interest Cards is limited to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, and SAP SuccessFactors only. This will change over the next releases, and all remaining major SAP cloud business solutions will add relevant content for SAP Start. Feel free to check out the SAP Start roadmap for that.

In parallel, we are eager to include customer feedback, both from early adopters and a customer engagement initiative, in our further planning.

Ultimately, SAP Start will grow stronger over the coming releases, to ensure the vision of SAP Start – to be the single place to go to when you start your day, or the single pane of glass into all business information relevant for you – is met.

Want to learn more?

Try out SAP Start and let us know what you think.

Stay updated on the SAP Start roadmap.

Watch the recording of our SAP Start session from SAP Sapphire here.

Engage & Connect in the SAP Community:
https://community.sap.com/topics/integration-strategy
https://community.sap.com/topics/mobile-experience
https://community.sap.com/topics/work-zone

Product Highlights for SAP Build Work Zone at SAP TechEd 2023 - Get to Know Our Modular Offering for SAP's Central Entry Point

2023-11-07T13:59:08+01:00

An exciting SAP TechEd event is already over, it contained an in-person event in Bangalore along with a companion virtual event. This blog will give you an overview on the news and the product highlights, that were communicated for SAP Build Work Zone at SAP TechEd this year, and it also gives you a glimpse on the key investments areas in 2024.

In Bangalore we had a great selection of sessions showcasing the power of SAP Build Work Zone and SAP Start, roadmap and demo sessions, hands-on sessions and one session with customer HMEL's migration story from SAP Cloud Portal Service to SAP Build Work Zone, and there was much more to learn and discover.

For the people who could not make it to the event in Bangalore, I can recommend watching the replay of SAP TechEd virtual session "What’s New with SAP Build Work Zone – Innovation Meets Productivity - AD102v. With this session you get a great overview on the latest innovations for SAP Start and SAP Build Work Zone - including a demo of the new site experience of SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition.

One product with multiple editions

In most of the SAP Build Work Zone TechEd sessions you could hear about our product vision of a complementing modular offering for SAP's central entry point based on Work Zone technology, providing:

a true single product portfolio with multiple aligned editions offering a complementing set of capabilities.

a common experience for admins and end users such as technical foundation, horizon visual theme for SAP Fiori, mobile experience based on Mobile Start, common page builder, etc.

You can see on the image above, that there is a clearly defined path in terms of when to use each edition. We are also working on enabling an upgrade path starting with SAP Start to standard and then advanced edition. A company could kick off its journey with SAP Start, later add on-premise systems in a unified experience via SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition, and finally upgrade to SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition extending the standard edition with enhanced capabilities for content management, web content, team workspaces and integration of third-party solutions.

At SAP TechEd last year we reached an important milestone with the unification of SAP Launchpad service and SAP Work Zone into one solution (= SAP Build Work Zone) on the same technology foundation. It is our constant focus to bring these two solutions still closer together in terms of content model, administration tools and user experience.

In July 2023 we reached another big milestone with a major release for SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition including a new site experience for spaces and pages (see also section under Product Highlights). It is now possible to create and edit pages using a flexible grid-based page layout. This brings us also to a closer alignment with the page/workspace editing experience of SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition.

In July 2023 we released SAP Start, which became generally available and was added to our offering. SAP Start is SAP’s new out-of-the-box default central entry point based on SAP Build Work Zone technology. SAP Start gives users a powerful home page experience when adopting SAP’s cloud solutions.

Product Highlights

SAP Build Work Zone, Standard Edition

In Q3 we announced that SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition (formerly known as “SAP Launchpad service”), is available with a set of new features related to a new site experience with spaces and pages based on the Horizon visual theme for SAP Fiori. Many customers and partners have been waiting for this functionality, now they are enabled to leverage pages with a flexible grid-based layout and populating them with UI Integration cards, app tiles, and out-of-the-box business content from SAP solutions on-premise and cloud. For more information, read my announcement blog post from July 2023.

There are still some limitations, in Q4 two limitations will be removed: translation/multi language support for pages and spaces, as well as export and import of pages and spaces will be supported, see roadmap Q4, 2023.

Support for External Facing Scenarios

Business to Business (B2B) relationship and scenarios are a key factor to business success. Knowing this we already started in Q1 this year with providing supportive features for external facing scenarios (allowing for example the implementation of supplier use cases with SAP Build Work Zone). New commercial options were made available. Typically external stakeholders are infrequent users. For this reason, we have introduced connection based pricing (for standard and advanced edition). In this way, customers only pay for the actual logins, they don’t have to pay for each user individually. This allows thousands of users to access the system in a cost effective way. See also Commercial Models and Metering.

In addition there are new features to provide administrators and workspace owners more flexibility for defining access controls on homepages/workspaces content (see section on SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition in this blog below), more features are planned on the roadmap for Q4:

Extending workspace access control concept to allow role-based visibility for workspaces

Provide an option to define role-based access control for cards

By leveraging those access control features, admins can define in a more flexible way which external users can see which content on pages and workspaces and also which entries on the site menu of SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition are visible for external users.

Have a look at this image taken from one of our SAP TechEd demo systems showcasing a supplier dashboard with widgets for Invoice Status, Purchasing Trends, Unacknowledged POs and more:

SAP Build Work Zone, Advanced Edition

Check out the following news summary for the advanced edition:

Enhanced and flexible site menu (add apps to menu, show/hide bar, define access control: some entries only visible for a certain group of users);

Enhanced search experience including role-assigned business apps (users can only find the apps for which they have permissions);

Site-level preview release mechanism which allows customers to define some sub-accounts as test accounts and these will make the preview available. New features come earlier into these accounts than into the productive accounts and can be tested extensively.

Show workspace tasks in SAP Task Center (see also section below for more details)

Site admins can add an announcement to the top of all the screens in the site to communicate important news or events

Dynamic Visibility & Support for Workspace Types:

The following widgets across homepages/workpages now also support private & external workspaces as content source (in addition to homepage/menu content & public workspaces): Content, Forum, Knowledge Base & Event.

If a user does not have permission to view the widget content because of missing access to the widget source, this will be shown in a message.

Workpage creators can also chose to show/hide empty widgets, in which case widgets (for instance knowledge base or content) without access or content to display, will be hidden. This also applies to empty UI Integration Cards.

The features for dynamic visibility support an improved user experience by surfacing only relevant content & hide empty sections. They expand the flexibility for page designers to surface information from different sources, without having to create redundant pages.

Integration with SAP Build Process Automation

With the price list update in July 2023, SAP Build Process Automation was added to SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone service bundle replacing SAP Workflow service.
Customers using the booster to onboard to SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition, or to SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone, can choose whether to include SAP Build Process Automation in their onboarding. See also Commercial Models and Metering and this blog post.

If you already onboarded to SAP Build WZ, advanced edition, you can also add "Process Automation" later by re-running the booster, see also on SAP Help Portal.

Integration with SAP Task Center

Until now it was already possible to create a Task Center tile on SAP Build Work Zone advanced and standard edition as well as as on SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone. For more information, see SAP Help Portal.

Now the integration with Task Center is working bi-directional. SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition (and SAP Successfactors Work Zone) can now serve as task providers for SAP Task Center. The integration with SAP Task Center allows users to see any task that is created in a workspace in the central SAP Task Center UI. For more information, see here.

SAP Start

Mobile Start as mobile client for SAP Start

While SAP Start is designed for the web, there’s a native mobile counterpart to it with SAP Mobile Start, available for iOS and Android devices.

Extended availability for selected SAP Cloud solutions

SAP Start is generally available since July 2023, and its scope and reach are constantly increasing. While it already includes To Dos from all major SAP cloud business solutions, the business content in terms of Interest Cards is limited to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, and SAP SuccessFactors only. This will change over the next releases, and all remaining major SAP cloud business solutions will add relevant content for SAP Start. Check out the SAP Start roadmap for that.

For more information on SAP Start, check out the blog post from michael.maier: 7 Things You Need to Know About SAP Start.

What is coming next? Outlook and Key Investments Areas

Build Guided Experiences Using the Wizard Layout
Coming in Q4: Enable content managers to create and configure UI card-based, interactive experiences to guide business users through a process flow (for SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition, see Q4 roadmap).

A Glimpse into Key Investments areas in 2024 (note this can be subject to change without any further notice):

Site Experience in the standard edition:

Harmonized support for content packages as content channel incl. UI Integration cards

Streamlined experience for locally created space and pages in the content manager

Support of SAP’s Central Entry Point Vision: Aligned native mobile entry point across all editions using SAP Mobile Start

Integration of AI Capabilities: integrating SAP Joule into SAP Build Work Zone, standard and advanced edition. SAP Joule is already integrated into SAP Start, there you can use it for example as an AI assistant, that knows your unique role and acts as your work copilot across SAP applications

LoB Integration and Content Packages: Additional content packages across LoBs and industries are planned to be made available.

Learn more

SAP Build Work Zone on: sap.com / SAP Community
Discovery Center missions: standard / advanced edition
SAP Build Work Zone on SAP PartnerEdge

Learning Journeys

Getting Started Learning Journey for SAP Build: providing you the fundamentals of SAP Build and first hands-on experience with SAP Build Apps, SAP Build Process Automation & SAP Build Work Zone.

Check out the dedicated unit for SAP Build Work Zone in the learning journey “Utilize SAP Build for Low-Code/No-Code Applications and Automations for Citizen Developers“. The unit guides you through the main concepts and features of SAP Build Work Zone standard and advanced edition. After completing the complete learning journey, learners have the chance to take a 3-hr proctored exam to earn a certificate and become a certified Citizen Developer Associate.

For more deep dive technical information, we recommend our new learning journey “Implement and Administer SAP Build Work Zone“, targeted to partners, consultants and administrators. This learning journey will guide you through the process and considerations of implementing SAP Build Work Zone, from initial deployment and system administration to integration setups and extensibility options. A certification is also included

Follow SAP Build on Social Media and Join the SAP Builders Group

Twitter (hashtag #SAPBuild)

Join also our SAP Builders group and engage with a community of peers to unleash innovation by building apps, process automations, and creating business sites.

Setting up SAP Start with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition

2023-11-27T15:39:02+01:00

SAP has introduced SAP Start, our new default central entry point, designed to easily engage with all cloud business solutions across the SAP portfolio. It is included out-of-the-box, at no additional cost, with all integrated SAP cloud business solutions.

If you want to learn more about SAP Start in general, have a look at our recent “7 Things You Need to Know About SAP Start” blog post.

Today, we want to show you how easy it is to set up SAP Start seamlessly integrated with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition. Please note that there is also the possibility to integrate SAP SuccessFactors already today, and more SAP cloud business solutions in the future, which we will cover in subsequent blog entries.

Prerequisites

To follow along with this blog entry, please make sure you already fulfill the following requirements:

You have an existing Global Account on the SAP Business Technology Platform

Your Global Account has these entitlements assigned
Service Plan Required Quota
Cloud Management Service local 1
SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition foundation 1
SAP Task Center standard 1

You have admin access to your SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition tenant

You have an Identity Authentication Service available in your global account

Connecting SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition to your SAP BTP Account

To start the setup of SAP Start you need to connect your SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition tenant to your BTP global account. Start by opening the overview page of the global account in the BTP cockpit. You should see a navigation item called “System Landscape” which you can open.SAP BTP Global Account overview page

To connect your SAP S/4HANA Cloud tenant, press the “Add System” button and select the system type “SAP S/4HANA Cloud”. Name the system according to your guidelines, and click "Add".

Add system screen

Now the wizard will ask you for which type of communication scenario groups you want to authorize this system. For SAP Start you at least need to select “Integration with SAP Start”. If you also want to use the system in other integration scenarios, you can select others or “All Communication Scenarios”.

After continuing with the wizard, you will get a registration token that you need to copy.

Copy the registration token

Head to your SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition tenant and open the app called “Maintain Extensions on SAP BTP”.

Maintain BTP extensions in S/4HANA Cloud, public edition

Create a new extension by using the “New” button above the table. It will open a wizard where you can enter your integration token that you copied in the BTP cockpit.

Create new BTP extension wizard

After clicking create the extension will display “Enabling”. Wait a moment until the extension appears as “Enabled”. Now your integration with the BTP Global Account is done.

Setting up SAP Start with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition

Head back to your SAP BTP Global Account and use the navigation item “Boosters”. Find the booster named “Set Up SAP Start”.Starting the SAP Start booster

Use the “Start” button to begin the setup of SAP Start. As a starting point the booster will do a quick pre-flight check to ensure all the prerequisites are met. When successful, all checks should be green, and you can continue with the next step. Otherwise, go back to the previous chapter.Positive prerequisites check

Now you are asked to provide details like the data center, subaccount and subdomain you want to setup SAP Start in. Make sure you select a datacenter where SAP Start is available and enter an easy to remember subdomain name.

In the next wizard step, select your Identity Authentication Service and your S/4HANA system that we created the connection to.Creating the SAP Start formation

Now you can run the booster, which will setup SAP Start for you. After a few minutes, you should see the success screen indicating that everything went well.

SAP Start booster finished

Now you are done setting up SAP Start with an SAP S/4HANA Cloud integration!

Accessing SAP Start

In your BTP Global Account you should now see a newly created subaccount. Open it and navigate to “Instances and Subscriptions”. There should be a subscription to “SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition”.SAP BTP Cockpit subaccounts

Click on the link and you will be redirected to the Site Manager in SAP Build Work Zone. There will only be one site called SAP Start available.

SAP Build Work Zone site manager with SAP Start site settings.

Click to "Go to site" button to start SAP Start.
The just created SAP Start page

That is it!

The setup of SAP Start, integrated with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, was done completely automated.

There might be some additional steps that you need to take to ensure a seamless integration between our products. For all information, please refer to our Post-Setup Tasks.

For S/4 cards to appear on SAP Start the user first needs to add them to the Insights section on the My Home page in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Please check out the S/4HANA My Home documentation for how to add cards. It might take some time after adding the cards to S/4HANA My Home until they appear in SAP Start as well.

Let us know what you think. We are happy to answer any questions!

Setting up SAP Start with SAP SuccessFactors

2023-12-11T12:19:28+01:00

SAP has introduced SAP Start, our new default central entry point, that is designed to easily engage with all cloud business solutions across the SAP portfolio. It is included out-of-the-box, at no additional cost, with all integrated SAP cloud business solutions.

If you want to learn more about SAP Start in general, have a look at our recent “7 Things You Need to Know About SAP Start” blog post.

Today, we want to show you how to set up SAP Start to seamlessly integrate with SuccessFactors. Please note that you will also be able to integrate with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, as well as with more SAP cloud business solutions in the future. We will cover those in subsequent blog entries.

Prerequisites

To follow along with this how-to, please make sure you already fulfill the following prerequisites:

You have an existing global account on the SAP Business Technology Platform
Your global account has these entitlements assigned
Service Plan Required Quota
Cloud Management Service Local 1
SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition foundation 1
SAP Task Center standard 1
You have admin access to your SAP SuccessFactors tenant
You have an Identity Authentication Service available in your global account

Setting up SAP Start with SuccessFactors

You first need to create a new subaccount in your BTP global account. Open the Account Explorer page of your global account in the BTP cockpit. You should see a dropdown menu called Create where you select Subaccount. Follow the wizard and enter all required fields.
Create new BTP Subaccount

In your created subaccount, go to the Entitlements for the subaccount and entitle the subaccount for
- Service: SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition (Plan: foundation)
  Entitlements for SAP Build Work Zone
- Service: SAP Task Center (Plan: standard)
  
  Entitlements for SAP Task Center
Expand Services to select Instances and Subscriptions for the subaccount and create a subscription for SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition
Go to the Overview of the subaccount and Enable Cloud Foundry in the subaccount
Go to the Overview of the subaccount and click Create SpaceCreate new Cloud Foundry Space
In your created space, expand Services to select Instances and Subscriptions for the space and create a service instance and a service key for SAP Task Center
- This blog article only covers the creation of the Task Center service instance. For all necessary steps to set up SAP Task Center, please check their documentation.
In your subaccount, expand Connectivity to navigate to the Destinations of your subaccount and create a new destination based on the service instance of the Task CenterCreate the Task Center Destination
In your global account, select System Landscape from the left panel, and select the Formations tab
Click Create Formation (in the top right corner)
Enter the Formation Name and select Integration with SAP Start as the Formation Type and click Next Step
Select the SAP Start system that reflects your SAP Build Work Zone subscription which you created in step 3 and click Next Step
Double check on the review page, that everything looks correct and click Create

Integrating with SAP Start Using SAP SuccessFactors as a Cloud Content Provider

Navigate in your subaccount to Connectivity > Destinations in the left panel
Click on Create Destination and create a design-time destination with the following settings
- The SAP SuccessFactors user you enter in the design-time destination must have the Administrator > Manage Integration Tools > Allow Admin to Access OData API through Basic AuthenticationSuccessFactors Permission Role Details - Allow Admin to Access OData API through Basic Authentication
- Name: SAP_Start_SFSF_CDM_DT
- Type: HTTP
- URL: The SAP SuccessFactors CDM content API endpoint: https://<api-server>/rest/servicesfoundation/sfcdmcontentservice/v1/SFCDMContent To look up the API server of your SAP SuccessFactors instance, go to List of SAP SuccessFactors API Servers
- Proxy Type: Internet
- Authentication: BasicAuthentication
- User: Enter your SAP SuccessFactors username and company in the format of username@COMPANY.
- Password: Enter the password.
  Design Time Destination for SuccessFactors
Click on Create Destination and create a runtime-time destination with the following settings
- Name: SAP_Start_SFSF_CDM_RT
- Type: HTTP
- URL: The domain URL of your SAP SuccessFactors.
- Proxy Type: Internet
- Authentication: NoAuthentication
- Add the following Additional Properties:
  - sfsf.companyID: Enter SAP SuccessFactors company.
  - sap-start: true
  - Use default JDK truststore: Enable this option.
  SuccessFactors runtime-destination
Click on Create Destination and create a destination for the Interest Card Service with the following settings
- For this destination we need to create an OAuth Client in SAP SuccessFactors to obtain an API key
  - Click on Download TrustDownload trust from destination service
  - Open your SuccessFactors instance as an administrator and open the Manage OAuth2 Client Applications applicationSearch for Manage OAuth2 Client Application in SuccessFactors+
  - Click on Register Client ApplicationSuccessFactors OAuth2 Client Applications
  - Use the following value in the form
    - Company: The company id (should be prefilled)
    - Application URL:
    - Bind to User: leave it disabled
    - User IDs: leave it blank
    - 509 Certificate: Paste the content of the certificate file previously download from the SAP BTP Destination Service without the -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- and -----END CERTIFICATE----- markers
  - Click on Register then click on View for the newly registered OAuth2 Client application and copy the API Key
  SuccessFactors Register OAuth2 Client Application Form
- Name: Must be SuccessFactors_API and must not be named differently
- Type: HTTP
- URL: Enter the API server endpoint of your SAP SuccessFactors instance in the format of https://<api-server>. To look it up, go to List of SAP SuccessFactors API Servers
- Proxy Type: Internet
- Authentication: OAuth2SAMLBearerAssertion
- Audience: www.successfactors.com
- AuthnContextClassRef: urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PreviousSession
- Use mTLS for token retrieval: Unchecked
- Client Key: Enter the API key of your previously registered OAuth2 Client application
- Token Service URL Type: Dedicated
- Token Service URL: Enter the OAuth token endpoint of your SAP SuccessFactors instance: https://<api-server>/oauth/token. To look up the API server of your SAP SuccessFactors instance, go to List of SAP SuccessFactors API Servers.
- Token Service User: Leave blank
- Token Service Password: Leave blank
- Add the following additional attributes:
  - apiKey: Enter the API key of your previously registered OAuth2 Client application
  - companyId: Enter the SAP SuccessFactors company ID
  - HTML5.DynamicDestination: true
  - nameIdFormat: urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.1:nameid-format:unspecified
  - sap-card-nominations-path: /rest/experience/cardservice/v1/nominations?nominationType=sapStart
  - sap-company: Enter the SAP SuccessFactors company ID
  - sfsf.companyID: Enter the SAP SuccessFactors company ID
  - tokenService.body.primaryemployment: true
  - Use default JDK truststore: Enable this option
  - sap-start: true
  SuccessFactors Runtime Destination for the Interest Card Service
Navigate to your subaccount, expand Services to select Instances and Subscriptions for the subaccount, and open the subscription for SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition, to open the Site Manager
- Your user needs the role collection Launchpad_Admin which you can assign in your SAP BTP subaccount in the left panel under Security > Role CollectionsSAP BTP Cockpit subaccounts
Click on the Channel Manager in the left panelSAP Build Work Zone Site Manager
Click on New > Content ProviderSAP Build Work Zone Channel Manager
Fill out the form as follows
- Title: Enter a name for the content provider.
- ID: Automatically generated from the title.
- Design-Time Destination: Select the design time destination you created previously
- Runtime Destination: Select the runtime destination you created previously
- Runtime Destination for Dynamic Data: Select the Interest Card Service destination you created previously.
SAP Build Work Zone Register Content Provider for SuccessFactors
For synchronization of necessary roles between your SuccessFactors tenant and SAP Build Work Zone you need to follow
- the guide to set up SuccessFactors as a source system for the Identity Provisioning Service
- the guide to set up SAP SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition as a target system for the Identity Provisioning Service
Now you are done setting up SAP Start with a SuccessFactors integration!For more detailed information have a look at the Integrating with SAP Start Using SAP SuccessFactors as a Cloud Content Provider documentation

Accessing SAP Start

In your subaccount, expand Services to select Instances and Subscriptions for the subaccount where you can find your subscription to SAP Build Work Zone, standard editionSAP BTP Cockpit subaccounts
Click on the subscription link to reach the Site Manager in SAP Build Work Zone where only one site will be called SAP StartSite Manager showing SAP Start site
Click the Go to site button (bottom right inside the tile for the site) to reach SAP StartThe just created SAP Start page

That is it!

You have completed the setup of SAP Start and successfully integrated it with SuccessFactors.

There might be some additional steps that you need to take to ensure seamless integration between our products. For all information, please refer to our Post-Setup Tasks.

If you do not see any interest cards, you might need to configure them in your SuccessFactors tenant. Please check out the UI Integration Cards documentation for more information.

Let us know what you think. We are happy to answer any questions!

What is New for SAP Build Work Zone in Q4 2023?

2023-12-18T16:46:54+01:00

Welcome to my last product update of the year. This blog post will provide you with the product news and highlights for SAP Build Work Zone in Q4 2023. If you are still interested: I also included an SAP TechEd recap.

You might know what SAP Build Work Zone is? If not, here is a short introduction: SAP Build Work Zone empowers IT professionals and line of business experts to easily build and design engaging business sites for employees, partners and customers with intuitive drag-and-drop functionality. It connects to all systems (SAP and non-SAP) by creating a single access point to applications, processes, information and data on any device, from desktop or mobile, and it maximize team productivity by enabling guided experiences and knowledge sharing.
SAP Build Work Zone is coming with two editions: SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition and SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition. The latest addition to the SAP Build Work Zone family is SAP Start, which became generally available in July 2023. If you have more questions on SAP Build Work Zone, visit our FAQ page on SAP Community.

Features and Enhancements for SAP Build Work Zone in Q4

This section describes some of the product highlights in Q4, 2023.

Admin Experience

New Site Experience for SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition: content managers can enable end users to view their sites in selected language, and they can support the translation of spaces and pages:

Please note, that this feature was postponed to Q1, 2024.

Advanced edition: Import and Export of Site Menu
Site administrators can transport a site menu including workpages, that are referenced from the site menu from one environment to another using the import and export feature. This feature is already available in the preview systems. More information on SAP Help Portal: Transporting the Site Menu.

Business User Experience

Advanced edition:
Guided Experiences with wizard layout: by providing a flexible framework for defining process steps and by enabling content managers to create and configure UI card-based, interactive experiences, business users can be guided through a wizard-like predefined process:

Please note that this innovation is available as preview release in Q4, 2023. It is planned to be fully available in January, 2024.

Read-Only Access and Visibility of Workspaces: A non-member visibility is now available for workspaces to give non-members access to the workspace content. Workspace admins have the choice: (1) to give non-members the same collaboration settings as members or (2) to use a new read-only mode for non-members. This will hide the different membership & collaboration related features for the non-members across the workspace and its content. This is only available for public workspace as a first step.

Please note that this innovation is available as preview release in Q4, 2023. It is planned to be fully available in January, 2024.

Support of Privat Folders in Workspaces: In the content section of workspaces private folders can be created by workspace members, they can be access-restricted to different users and/or user lists.

More information on new features and functions:

Check out the roadmap for standard & advanced edition.

You can find more information on the new features on the SAP Help Portal What's New Viewer.

The availability date of the new features on the preview systems and the information about how to use them can be found in the What's New on Preview Systems.

Additional product highlights are also described in the blog post Product Highlights for SAP Build Work Zone at SAP TechEd 2023.

SAP Start Updates

The scope of SAP Start is constantly increasing. It already includes the To Dos from all major SAP cloud business solutions. The business content in terms of Interest Cards is available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition and SAP SuccessFactors. Over the next releases, all remaining major SAP cloud business solutions will add relevant content for SAP Start. Check out the SAP Start roadmap for more information.

Joule (SAP’s new generative AI assistant) is integrated into SAP Start (available as a beta version), and it can be used as an AI assistant:

You would like to know more about SAP Start? Then read the blog post "Seven Things you need to know about SAP Start".

SAP TechEd Recap

We are looking back to an exciting SAP TechEd event containing an in-person event in Bangalore along with a companion virtual event. In Bangalore we had a great selection of sessions showcasing the power of SAP Build Work Zone and SAP Start, roadmap, demo and hands-on sessions.
For the people who could not make it to the event in Bangalore, I can recommend watching the replay of SAP TechEd virtual session “What’s New with SAP Build Work Zone – Innovation Meets Productivity – AD102v" on YouTube:

I also recommend to read the blog post "Product Highlights for SAP Build Work Zone at SAP TechEd 2023 – Get to Know Our Modular Offering for SAP’s Central Entry Point", which gives you an overview on the product news, that were presented about SAP Build Work Zone at SAP TechEd.

For developers, perhaps the most exciting news was SAP Build Code, a new solution for professional developers. SAP Build Code, which runs on BTP, includes SAP Business Application Studio, SAPUI5, SAP Fiori elements, and SAP Fiori tools. It also introduces AI capabilities through Joule, SAP’s new generative AI assistant. See also the SAP TechEd News Guide.

What is coming next for SAP Build Work Zone? A Glimpse into 2024

Take a glimpse into Key Investments areas in 2024 (note this can be subject to change without any further notice):

Site Experience with pages and spaces in the standard edition:

Harmonized support for content packages as content channel incl. UI Integration cards

Streamlined experience for locally created space and pages in the content manager

Support of SAP’s Central Entry Point Vision: Aligned native mobile entry point across all editions using SAP Mobile Start

Integration of AI Capabilities: Integration of Joule into SAP Build Work Zone, standard and advanced edition.

LoB Integration and Content Packages: additional content packages across LoBs and industries are planned to be made available.

Learn more

SAP Build Work Zone on: sap.com / SAP Community
Discovery Center missions: standard / advanced edition
SAP Build Work Zone on SAP PartnerEdge

Follow SAP Build on Social Media and Join the SAP Builders Group

Twitter (hashtag #SAPBuild)

Join also our SAP Builders group and engage with a community of peers to unleash innovation by building apps, process automations, and creating business sites.

User-Centered Design & Development: The Role of User Research in Shaping SAP Mobile Start

2024-01-29T14:19:32.759000+01:00

By Dominic Norcross (UX Research Associate)

At SAP, one of our main goals is to create apps that delight our customers and offer a seamless user experience. One key pillar to achieve this goal is user centricity – making sure the user’s voice is heard and considered in the design and development of new features. This is exactly why User Research plays a vital role in app design and development, including SAP Mobile Start.

What is User Research?
User Research (UR) is tasked with studying users’ behaviors, perceptions, needs, and pain points. The starting point of every research is the research question. SAP Mobile Start’s designers and researchers are in constant exchange to expose problems and design opportunities that require user insights. User Research ensures both high usability (easy and intuitive usage of the app) and great user experience (usage experience, including aesthetic and emotional factors). The questions that are answered can range from high-level aspects such as personalization concepts to specific details such as visual KPI representations in ‘interest cards’.

User Research Methods
To answer questions like these, User Research can rely on a spectrum – and often a combination of – different methods depending on the questions at hand. Most basically, they can be differentiated by whether activities are moderated or unmoderated.

Moderated User Research
In formats such as interviews or usability tests, users are guided through the session by a researcher. The researcher acts as a moderator. Also, a trained note-taker is present. In this 1:1 setting, each individual user’s insights can be collected on a deep level as the moderator can directly observe unexpected behaviors and ask as many follow-up questions as arise.

Whether in person or remotely, users are often asked to interact with first mockups or low-fidelity prototypes directly on their mobile phone. They can be given a range of different tasks related to the research topic, e.g.: “Personalize the Start screen by hiding the news section from the Start screen.” During the interview, the users’ expectations, their behavior while performing the task, but also their thoughts after completing the task are noted systematically for later analysis.

In a typical setup for a remote usability test, the user shares his mobile screen, but also shows his interactions via the camera.

Above you can see an example of a low-fi mockups and sketch and a high-fidelity prototype
(please note: the designs shown are merely early design explorations and do not represent concrete features of the app).

Unmoderated User Research
To complement moderated User Research insights, of course also quantitative methods of collecting user feedback/behavior are deployed.

User Research is leveraging online tools to get insights from a statistically significant number of users in even smaller timeframes, as no live moderation is required. In so-called unmoderated studies, users can provide feedback easily and quickly whenever and wherever they are. In addition to answering survey-like questions to help understand their wishes and pain points, they also interact with mobile screens, low-fi mockups, and prototypes in different task types.

In a click task, the users are asked to click on a mobile screen (typically just once). This shows the researcher their intuitive starting point to tackle a specific task and correlates highly with the expected overall task success rate.

In interactive prototype tasks, the users are asked to fulfil a certain task by using a high-fidelity prototype that offers many different logical branches and alternative paths. Importantly, all interactions with the prototype are recorded for later analysis. In certain scenarios, users are also asked to “think out loud (TOL)” while they are completing these tasks. The recorded ‘TOL’ audio in combination with the screen recording further helps User Researchers to understand which issues users are experiencing. Of course, these are merely examples of the diverse set of methods employed to create meaningful user insights.

By the way: There is another unmoderated way in which SAP Mobile Start gathers feedback, the so-called ‘In-App Feedback’. Every live user of SAP Mobile Start can click on the settings and use the ‘leave feedback’ button. Where possible, users are also given the opportunity to give feedback directly in the app while using specific features. Of course, we try to ensure this is configured in a way that is minimal and non-disruptive to the usage experience.

User Research Data and Insights
The data created from User Research still must be analyzed, understood, and mapped to concrete insights for designers and developers to improve the app. There is a range of ways in which data can be aggregated and visualized dependent on the chosen method. To name a couple of examples, Heat Maps provide us with a clear overview of where the users spontaneously clicked to achieve a specific goal, whereas Click Paths show the exact path of all individual users going through a prototype. Furthermore, data such as task success rates, task completion times, but also time spent in certain parts of the prototype are considered. Thanks to insights like these, the SAP Mobile Start team can identify improvement opportunities to optimize the future user experience.

Heat Maps help visualize the users’ most used sections on certain screens.

Click Paths show how users navigated through a prototype, illustrating which turns or possible workarounds
they took to achieve a task in the tested system, instead of staying on the ‘golden path’. (Above is an excerpt of a Click Path.)

Putting the User in User Research
Hopefully, these insights into User Research for SAP Mobile Start were interesting for you. As you have learned, User Research relies both on objective user behavior observations as well as subjective user feedback that can be provided flexibly in different ways. No matter how feedback is provided, it reaches our team directly and helps shape the future of the app to reach its full potential of user centricity.

Feel free to post your questions or feedback about User Research and SAP Mobile Start in the Q&A area. Start by visiting your SAP Mobile Applications community page and click “Follow”. We’ll be publishing more informative blog posts.

Apple Vision Pro is available – SAP Mobile Start V1.10 is ready

2024-02-02T13:32:33.708000+01:00

With the latest release of SAP Mobile Start (Version 1.10), the app does not only run natively on your phone, tablet, or watch, but is now also available as a dedicated optimised Apple Vision Pro app.

Day-one support for the new Apple Vision Pro was the clear focus of SAP Mobile Start version 1.10, and version 1.10 is a pure Apple update. Besides the support of Apple Vision Pro, the release also provides some enhancements for iPhone and iPad, which are outlined towards the end of the blog.

Based on the iPad version of SAP Mobile Start, version 1.10 was optimised for the new Apple Vision Pro by advancing the navigation concept, navigation patterns, and visual effects.

When you open SAP Mobile Start on the Apple Vision Pro, you immediately access your most important business content on the Start screen - like your business workflows, situations, apps, and insight cards. That’s how SAP Mobile Start helps you to stay on top of your business and execute important workflows and tasks without delay.

Like on the phone and tablet app, you always have your notifications in sight, in the upper right corner of the app. Using the navigation bar on the left, you can easily navigate to your Apps screen and the To-Dos screen.

The app beautifully blends with your physical surroundings and provides a top-notch new experience and even react to lighting and cast shadows.

Screenshot – Start Screen

Screenshot – App Screen

Screenshot – To Dos Screen

Navigation is super easy: You can use your eyes, your hands, or just your voice.

When you tap on any app, the app opens in a new window outside the SAP Mobile Start app. With visionOS, you can use the space around you and move apps anywhere, rearrange and scale them to the perfect fit. This allows you to work with several apps at the same time. Basically, you can define your own individual workspace.

On the Start screen, tap on a task to get to the task details with all information you require to directly accept or decline the task, or if you want to add a comment.

Screenshot – Task Details

To search within SAP Mobile Start, you can use the virtual keyboard or an external Bluetooth-connected keyboard.

Functionality-wise, the Apple Vision Pro version is more or less on par with the phone and tablet version. It also comes with an offline demo mode that you can use to familiarise yourself with the app after downloading it from the Apple Vision Pro app store.

Now, we will get to the non-Apple Vision Pro features of Version 1.10. Inspired by our work for the Apple Vision Pro, we enhanced the iPad layout with a new sidebar and full-screen views for to-dos, news list, and cards. With the collapsible sidebar, you get more space.

Screenshot: SAP Mobile Start iPad

We also improved the Profile & Settings screen (iPad and iPhone) and added structural elements to make it even more intuitive.

I hope you like our latest enhancements and new features.

For further information on the new topics, please check our SAP Mobile Start documentation on SAP Help.

SAP Mobile Experience offers intelligent native mobile solutions that help businesses build more efficient, resilient and sustainable end-to-end processes, improving people’s work life wherever they are.

Visit SAP Mobile Experience Community Page and click “follow” to get the latest development and innovation of our solutions. We look forward to hearing your experience with setting up the solution in your landscape; please do share your thoughts and comments below. Enter here for additional questions regarding SAP Mobile Experience Applications. Want to be notified? Check your profile settings to ensure you have your settings activated.

SAP UX Innovations in Public Cloud Products, Joule, AI, Entry Points, Apple Vision Pro and more

2024-02-06T08:57:14.943000+01:00

As well as executing our strategy to provide a seamless user experience for the Intelligent Suite, we are looking at how to help users work better, together: getting more done with better outcomes, individually and in teams. This update showcases how our major cloud products, such as SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (to name a few) are improving their user experience, how they are embedding generative AI (GenAI), Joule and machine learning as well as providing powerful collaboration capabilities, with live data. Another highlight is SAP Mobile Start running on Apple Vision Pro! The details continue to matter, you’ll see a whole lot of improvements for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402 and the underlying UI technology.

This last half year has been transformational, with AI allowing us to help users work better in completely new ways. In particular, generative AI (GenAI) is a huge enabler for a conversational user experience: we introduced Joule, your AI-powered copilot, as well as some GenAI use cases embedded in applications. These initial shipments and features are only just the beginning of what will be a marvelous journey over the next years towards far more intuitive interactions with business systems, enabling users to work far more productively and effectively – doing more, with better business outcomes.

In addition to the various Joule examples below, you can see examples of embedded AI in the sections on SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, and Industry Cloud: Retail.

While AI is stealing the headlines, we have continued to execute our user experience strategy to provide users of our products with an intuitive, seamless user experience, by:

improving the SAP Design System and its enabling UI technologies, which includes user-feedback-based fine-tuning of the Horizon visual theme;
making it easy to see what is important and take immediate action via web and mobile entry points;
improving the user experience for our cloud products, with yet more products adopting the Horizon theme and providing new or update applications with great usability, and
supporting collaboration with colleagues on live data in the system.

I’ve collected examples from our latest releases to show how we are doing this (unfortunately hyperlinks to sections are currently not supported in the Community; once they are I will add them):

Central entry points, Joule and Apple Vision Pro
SAP SuccessFactors
SAP Fieldglass
SAP Ariba (procurement)
SAP Business Network
SAP Business Technology Platform
SAP Analytics Cloud
SAP Customer Experience
Industry Cloud: Retail
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402 and SAP Fiori launchpad
UI Design and Technology news - web and mobile

We’ve got so much good news to share… so this blog post has grown and grown! I’d love your feedback whether this format is still good for you, my readers, or whether you’d prefer a series of smaller posts covering the same content.

Central entry points, Joule and Apple Vision Pro

This section covers our web central entry points SAP Start and SAP Work Zone, along with central services such as SAP Task Center and Joule, as well as our native mobile entry point SAP Mobile Start, which now also runs on Apple Vision Pro.

The SAP Fiori launchpad is covered in the section “SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP Fiori launchpad”.

SAP Start

The purpose of SAP Start is to bring together all truly relevant business information for each user in one central place, and also to provide the one place to go to start your SAP applications in the cloud, no matter which product you want to use. SAP Start:

Gives you quick access to all your applications via the simple yet powerful search field;
Proactively informs you about your to-dos from all products which are connected to the SAP Task Center;
Gives you key insights via insight cards from products connected to SAP Start,
Assists you with Joule, your copilot for working with SAP.

As a result: SAP Start will be the best place to start, to simplify your access to multiple SAP cloud products.

Figure 1: SAP Start, now with Joule as your copilot for working with SAP.

Today, SAP Start has Search and Insights integrated with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, and SAP SuccessFactors. Next up, we plan SAP Fieldglass integration, later in Q1/2024 (as always with forward looking statements, our plans are subject to change).

Joule

Using natural language to ask for something is… natural! In other words: a very powerful way to interact with systems. With Joule, we are using the power of GenAI to give you a copilot for your interactions with SAP. It is generally available already today with SAP Start as well as with SAP SuccessFactors, providing an initial set of capabilities, and is available for selected customers of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402 via an Early Adopter Care program. For more details on Joule for SAP SuccessFactors and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, look at the respective product sections below.

Wherever you use Joule, you can benefit from what we call the “informational pattern”, which allows you to ask how to do something, with Joule responding with an answer culled from the SAP Help Portal. Joule uses GenAI to summarize the information nicely for you and (very cool!), provides you with the three most relevant search results as links for you to dig deeper. This sounds almost too good to be true, but have a look for yourself in this 30 second video showing an example of someone asking what a spot award is (something folks in human resources will probably have heard of):

Video showing examples of Joule informational pattern available today in SAP SuccessFactors.

With over 200 million help topics, the SAP Help Portal is a key source of knowledge for users, and we reckon you can save up to 10 minutes for an inquiry using Joule rather than searching through the portal yourself. Find out more in this blog post:

Joule Delivers Seamless Access to SAP’s Product Enablement Content with Generative AI

The informational pattern is one of three Joule patterns, the other two being the navigational pattern and the transactional pattern:

Informational Pattern: Joule provides concise summaries of help content to effectively address user inquiries expressed in natural language.

Navigational Pattern: Joule recommends relevant applications and facilitates seamless navigation to empower users in executing their business processes.

Transactional Pattern: Joule offers insightful information about business objects, eliminating the necessity of opening the corresponding application.

You can see some examples from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (for early adopters) in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Examples of each of the three interaction patterns for Joule: informational, navigational and transactional, from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (for early adopters).

Watch the videos in the SAP SuccessFactors section further below to see examples of navigational and transactional patterns available already today.

This presentation about Joule in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition contains more details on these patterns as well as information about our AI approach in general, and a high-level description of the Joule technology stack:

Joule, the AI copilot in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

SAP Task Center

The SAP Task Center integrates twelve SAP products today, with more to come. These include our major products such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Fieldglass, SAP Ariba, SAP Concur, and SAP Cloud for Customer. You can find the up-to-date list in the SAP Help Portal:

Supported Solutions.

You’ll see there that SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition, as well as SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone, are now also available as a deeply integrated task provider. They now include more approval scenarios, along with support for comments / attachments from workspace-level tasks.

Figure 3: An example showing the SAP Task Center integrated with seven different SAP products, and it’s adoption of the Horizon theme. You can filter on those from one of the products by clicking on the name at the top. In this case you see the products SAP Ariba, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Fieldglass, SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP S/4HANA, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and SAP Build Process Automation are integrated, with details of the third task in the list shown on the right (an approval request for a purchase order from SAP S/4HANA).

SAP Build Work Zone

SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition

If users also need to access on-premise solutions or third-party solutions, and/or you want to give your users dedicated spaces and pages for accessing their applications, then SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition, is the next step up from SAP Start, providing these capabilities on top of those which come with SAP Start. These new features, which were previously in beta, were launched in the second half of last year:

Customers can define the navigation menu of spaces and pages for accessing remote pages, such as those provided via SAP S/4HANA content exposure, as well as pages defined locally within SAP Build Work Zone.
Customers can use the flexible page builder to define spaces and pages. This allows you to embed the To Dos section and the Insights section from SAP Start into a page of your choice.
Custom applications and UI cards can be integrated directly onto pages defined in SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition.

Find out more here, and have a look for yourself:

SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition

Customers can now define wizards to guide users through specific processes step-by-step. We provide a flexible framework for defining the process steps and enabling content managers to create and configure UI card-based interactive experiences. Figure 4 shows what such a wizard can look like – as you can see, you can define wizards with more than one tab, for example for preparing a new hire’s first day at a company and then for what to do on their first day there.

Figure 4: An example showing the kind of wizards you can create with SAP Work Zone, advanced edition. The wizard has two tabs: “Before Your First Day”, which is shown, but also “Your First Day”.

Here you can find out more:

SAP Mobile Start, including Apple Vision Pro support

SAP Mobile Start 1.9, released in September 2023, brought some great new features, such as support for Intelligent Situation Handling from SAP S/4HANA, insight cards and some exciting new iOS 17 features. Figure 5 shows how situations and insight cards from SAP Start are visualized.

Figure 5: Situations from SAP S/4HANA are now supported, shown on the left, as are insight cards from SAP Start, shown on the right. Both examples shown here originate from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

The new 1.10 release, which came out on February 2, 2024, focuses on enabling SAP Mobile Start with Apple Vision Pro, and hence is an iOS-only update. It is optimized for the new Apple Vision Pro by advancing the navigation concept, navigation patterns, and visual effects. The iPad design has also benefited from these advances. In addition, there are also some updates for iPhone as well as for the iPad.

When you open SAP Mobile Start on the Apple Vision Pro, you can immediately access your most important business content on the Start screen - like your business workflows, situations, apps, and insight cards, as you can see in Figure 6. You always have your notifications in sight, in the upper right corner of the app. Using the navigation bar on the left, you can easily navigate to your Apps screen and the To-Dos screen – using your eyes, your hands or just your voice!

The app beautifully blends with your physical surroundings, even reacting to lighting and shadows, giving you an amazing new experience.

Figure 6: An example of the Start screen of SAP Mobile Start on Apple Vision Pro.

When you tap on any app, the app opens a new window, which visionOS lets you move and resize as you wish, as you can see in Figure 7.

Figure 7: SAP Mobile Start along with two open application windows, running on Apple Vision Pro.

The iPad layout has benefited from our work for the Apple Vision Pro, with a new collapsible sidebar along with full-screen views for to-dos, news list, and cards.

For both iPad and iPhone, we also improved the Profile & Settings screen.

These blog post give you more details about these latest improvements in SAP Mobile Start user experience:

SAP SuccessFactors

I am happy to say that SAP SuccessFactors has now completed the adoption of the Horizon visual theme – and it certainly looks good! But of course the “look”, though important, is not everything – and SAP SuccessFactors has introduced a whole load of new innovations directly aimed at making a user’s life easier.

I’m also happy to say that SAP SuccessFactors is at the forefront of utilizing latest technologies such as generative AI (GenAI), our Joule copilot, as well as newest collaboration technologies with Microsoft Teams.

I have picked these highlights today; you’ll find links to further innovations at the end of the section:

The re-imagined recruiter experience:
- Scheduling made easier and looking good with Horizon.
- GenAI helping to write better job descriptions.
- GenAI and Microsoft Teams integration helping to recommend relevant interview questions, collaboratively in the team.
Joule giving you a conversational user experience to perform selected activities quicker and more conveniently than before.
More self-service tasks integrated in Microsoft Teams.
Learning experience – as an example of the modern SAP SuccessFactors mobile app with the Horizon visual theme.

Note that when we use GenAI, we use models which are fed with your company’s data to ensure that the answers fit with your context without hallucinations (this is called “grounding the models” in AI-parlance).

Recruiting – with GenAI and Horizon

Let’s first look at the new recruiter experience, in Figure 8.

Figure 8: Three screens for interview scheduling from the re-imagined recruiter experience, showcasing the Horizon visual theme. Top left you see the overview of job requisitions; in the middle, the UI for scheduling an interview including other interviewers; on the right, the interview assessment of the interviewed candidates.

Before you get to schedule interviews, you need to post the vacancies, and for that you need compelling job descriptions. Even for experienced recruiters, it can take time to go from an initial draft description to a polished and compelling final version. This is where GenAI can help, saving time and effort. Figure 9 shows how SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting and SAP Business AI does this now. Based on your initial draft ideas for a job description, SAP SuccessFactors can generate a more comprehensive one for you, at the press of a button. Users can accept or reject each section, and once accepted, can continue to edit as needed.

Figure 9: SuccessFactors generated the more comprehensive job description shown on the right, based on the user’s initially proposed headings and text on the left. The user can accept or reject each section.

Once you have the job posted, some applicants lined up and you’ve scheduled your interviews, you will need some good interview questions. SAP SuccessFactors can also help here, leveraging GenAI to help you create relevant interview questions. But it doesn’t stop there: hiring is typically a collaborative process, with an HR (Human Resources) employee supporting the hiring manager, so SAP SuccessFactors provides integration via Microsoft Teams. The hiring manager can be reminded about the upcoming interview, directly trigger the creation of good interview questions within the Microsoft Teams chat, or get additional information, and share this with other interviewers. You can see what this looks like in figures 10 and 11 below.

Figure 10: This shows a Microsoft Teams chat created by SAP SuccessFactors to remind the interviewer about the upcoming interview and their need to prepare for it. It contains two embedded interactive cards, connected directly to SAP SuccessFactors: the top one with in-place buttons to generate interview questions using GenAI and to view the applicant profile; the bottom one giving the user the option to view the skills and competencies that are used to evaluate the applicant.

Figure 11: This shows the suggested questions proposed by SuccessFactors, using GenAI, after the interviewer pressed the “Generate Interview Questions” button shown in the previous figure.

Joule in SAP SuccessFactors

Joule is your copilot for working with SAP, using natural language to get things done easily and quickly. SAP SuccessFactors is one of the first products to use it, providing an initial set of tasks users may complete, such as viewing job data, displaying or updating your name, and requesting feedback, as you can see in Figure 12.

Figure 12: Joule for SAP SuccessFactors, available by clicking on the Joule icon in the shell header bar.

In addition to these capabilities, Joule can also help you review pending requests for time off, promoting an employee, or changing your location.

As mentioned in the general section on Joule above, if Joule cannot find a concrete action that can be done directly in SAP SuccessFactors, it can search through the SAP Help Portal and use GenAI to provide a summary for the user. Also, Joule displays links to the top three search results, which bring users directly to the topic in the help portal.

Conversational AI is best looked at in action rather than just looking at a screenshot, because of the whole interaction flow, with users typing in requests and Joule responding.

These videos give some examples of interacting with Joule in SAP SuccessFactors:

To dig deeper, here is the documentation from the SAP Help Portal:

Talent Intelligence Hub

I would also like to highlight the talent intelligence hub, which became generally available with the 2H 2023 release. This release brings an extensive integration of the skills library and growth portfolio data within talent management. Within the growth portfolio, we provide a team portfolio view that allows managers to view skills and attributes across their direct reports to understand proficiency gaps versus expectations for job roles, as you can see in Figure 13.

Figure 13: The team portfolio view in the SAP Success Factors talent intelligence hub.

Learning – With AI Embedded

The new integrated learning experience is another example for where we have looked at our users’ needs and designed it by placing the learner at the center. With a guided experience and AI-driven recommendations, organizations can prioritize training to keep employees compliant while encouraging continuous learning for employee skills growth. There is so much I could show here, but this time I will only highlight the mobile app. Watch this video for an overview of some of the key capabilities we have delivered, such as the ability to bookmark a course or receive personalized recommendations from your colleagues:

You can read all about this new learning experience in this blog post:

Exciting news for SAP SuccessFactors Learning in 2H2023: the new integrated learning experience is now generally available!

More Information About SAP SuccessFactors Latest Innovations

For a fun one-minute video showing many of the above SAP SuccessFactors UX and AI innovations in action, watch this:

Video: SAP Business AI in Human Resources (1:24).

And watch this for some concrete examples of SAP Business AI helping transform HR:

Video: Examples of SAP Business AI for SAP SuccessFactors (1:13).

To dig deeper, have a look at these:

SAP Fieldglass

SAP Fieldglass supports companies in managing their contingent workforce, i.e. staff hired from external suppliers for specific projects. A definite highlight is the new Statement of Work Centric View, which is now available to selected early adopters and is planned to become generally available in Q2 this year. As you can see in Figure 14, it gives users a comprehensive overview of all their statements of work at a glance.

It is designed to empower program and operation managers by giving them critical insights into the performance and health of their projects, enabling proactive management of project timelines and budgets.

Figure 14: The Statement of Work Centric View provided by SAP Fieldglass to selected early adopters.

The intuitive dashboard places key actions just 1 or 2 clicks away, streamlining the process of accessing information and facilitating faster decision-making. With this enhanced visibility, managers can swiftly identify areas requiring attention and implement corrective measures, significantly reducing cycle times and driving project efficiency.

SAP Ariba (Procurement)

Category Management – Now With GenAI-Enhanced Content Recommendations

Introduced in August last year, this new solution helps digitalize and streamline the development, execution, and monitoring of category strategies. The latest 2402 release comes with GenAI-based dynamic content recommendations, described further below.

As you can see in Figure 15, this new application gives purchasing category managers a bird’s eye view of the procurement strategy for a selected purchasing category – and looks great thanks to the Horizon visual theme! It is a nice example of how we are transforming user experience at SAP, focusing on the user and their needs: the navigation shows users the high-level content structure and gives quick access to data, and the attractive format and layout inspires confidence and encourages adoption. At the same time, it provides flexible and customizable workflow, allowing it to fit businesses of all sizes across industries.

Figure 15: SAP Ariba Category Management, showing the bird’s eye view of a purchasing category’s procurement strategy, with the Horizon visual theme.

It is also easy for category managers to monitor their strategy execution, with Strategy Execution Monitoring in SAP Ariba Category Management. You can see in Figure 16 how you can track goals and the progress of initiatives, and how it integrates market alerts from external sources.

Figure 16: Strategy Execution Monitoring in SAP Ariba Category Management.

Accelerating Enterprise Category Strategy Development with GenAI

With the 2402 release, we bring you Dynamic Content Recommendations. By using GenAI, this is a real game-changer within our Category Management Application. Empowering category managers, this Large Language Model-integrated feature fills the Market Dynamics, Category Segmentation, and Cost Structures tools with context-aware insights. Say goodbye to laborious research as these tools can now be kick-started with preloaded content.

A new button, “Generate with AI” is now available within the tools Category Segmentation, Market Dynamics, and Cost Structure. Category managers can click the Generate with AI button to generate data for the segmentation scores, Porters Five Forces scores or cost structure component percentages within the respective tools. Furthermore, the content within Notes, Summary and Additional Resources are prefilled based on content retrieved via artificial intelligence.

Figure 17: AI-generated Porters Five Forces scores and notes for each score in SAP Ariba Category Management.

Watch this video to see it in action, and read more about SAP Ariba Category Management:

Further SAP Ariba innovations

One further innovation I would like to call out with the 2402 release is the new supplier profile summary, with an enhanced user experience, offering a new Operational Score panel with data from integrated S/4 HANA operational KPIs, providing a comprehensive view of your suppliers. Have a look, and learn more about the 2311 and 2402 releases in these blog posts:

SAP Business Network

SAP Business Network has adopted the Horizon visual theme in many areas, as well as providing numerous improvements in user experience. Below I have highlighted one for procurement, from the SAP Business Network Catalog, and also picked a few further highlights to mention.

SAP Business Network for Procurement

SAP Business Network Catalog

The new SAP Business Network Catalog functionality allows suppliers to easily maintain a master catalog of all their products. All the buyers on SAP Business Network can easily search and view these products and send a request for information, which results in possible new business for buyers and suppliers. Suppliers will have all the tools needed to upload, publish, and maintain their catalogs, inclusive of approvals and editing flows. Suppliers will now be able to find new buyers for their products and hence open up new business opportunities through the network.

Figure 18: SAP Business Network Catalog.

Further Innovations for SAP Business Network

Of the many new innovations which came with the 2311 release, I’d like to highlight these ones briefly:

For procurement: Intelligent invoice conversion expedites invoice automation for suppliers on SAP Business Network, using invoice conversion templates and machine learning, and provides an intuitive document user interface for supplier so define the powerful rules for extracting complex invoice data.
For supply chain: Summary invoices allow suppliers to create a single summary invoice that references multiple purchase orders and ship notices. With an intuitive UI, they can group orders based on their chosen criteria, as well as selecting individual orders manually.
For logistics: Managing disputes is now easier and more efficient for users.

Find out more about these and further innovations:

SAP Business Network 2311 Release – What’s new?

SAP Business Technology Platform

First impressions are important, and for our customers using the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), the SAP Discovery Center is the first place to go for technical users to turn their company’s data into business value with SAP BTP. Now, with the Horizon visual theme, as well as continuous improvements in usability, we give users a great first experience, as you can see in Figure 19. It doesn’t stop there though, also SAP HANA Cloud Central has adopted Horizon, as you can see below, as have the SAP BTP Cockpit and SAP Build Process Automation (not shown).

Figure 19 – The SAP Discovery Center for SAP Business Technology Platform with the Horizon theme.

Figure 20 – SAP HANA Cloud Central with the Horizon theme – showing the UI for creating an instance.

Figure 21 – SAP HANA Cloud Central with the Horizon theme – showing the UI for viewing an instance.

SAP Analytics Cloud

SAP Analytics Cloud now supports Horizon for embedded scenarios. Figure 22 gives an example of an embedded story in view time.

Figure 22: An SAP Analytics Cloud view embedded in another application (in this case a test application), both with the Horizon visual theme.

To improve user assistance by providing real-time, continuous learning opportunities for the users, SAP Analytics Cloud introduced SAP Companion. Released for selected customers only, it is planned to become generally available soon.

SAP Customer Experience

SAP Service Cloud

The new Contract Account Central provides agents with a graphical representation of the key financial data and allows them to get quick access to all they need to know at first glance, such as recent cases, contracts, payments and invoices, as you can see in Figure 23. And all this with the fresh new look of the Horizon visual theme.

Figure 23: SAP Service Cloud, showing Contract Account Central, giving users a holistic overview of the contract account.

SAP Commerce Cloud

A new highlight of SAP Commerce Cloud is the “private link” feature, which brings better performance and better security to the overall solution. A customer’s system administrator is able to set up services that expose endpoints for consumption in a specific system and consume endpoints from a different system easily, as you can see in Figure 24. The feature provides assured regulatory compliance and increased security by preventing sensitive data from traversing the public internet.

Private links enable customers to call CCv2 endpoints from their own Microsoft Azure instance and vice versa (CCv2 calling the instance). This is faster than VPN, less complex to set up, and never exposed to the internet since the communication stays inside Microsoft Azure.

Figure 24: SAP Commerce Cloud enables administrators to set up private links, using these UIs with the Horizon visual theme. When using it for the first time, there are no links set up yet, as shown on the left; once links have been defined, they are visualized in the easy to read and easy to consume list shown on the right.

Industry Cloud: Retail

SAP Predictive Replenishment

The Manage Order Proposal application leverages AI to efficiently and accurately manage inventory for an optimized multi-level supply chain. It takes into account business targets, constraints and cost to auto-determine order quantities with lowest expected costs. Furthermore, it uses machine learning forecasts and provides user-centric alert driven applications to efficiently manage high data volumes.

Figure 25: The overview UI for managing order proposals. The cards shown in the “Order Proposal Overview” section allow users to filter the list further.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP Fiori Launchpad

The 2402 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition brings you numerous user experience innovations, which I will group into these areas:

My Home.
SAP Fiori launchpad.
Collaboration: new capabilities, built-in and with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Loop.
AI and Joule.
Improvements in details.

If you'd like to see the main new features presented in a short video, have a look at Maria Silipo's overview video, which is included in her blog post which also covers the main new features:

SAP User Experience in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402

My Home

Our users love using the new My Home start page, but they also identified some smaller areas where usability could be improved. We’ve listened and made a few improvements in the details – and as you know, the details matter for a great user experience!

We’ve improved the user experience for managing sections, pages and insight cards (see Figure 26).
You can trigger a refresh of all the tiles or cards in an Insights section directly from the section’s menu (see Figure 26).
Creating groups of favorite apps is easier now, and also creation via drag and drop has the same experience now as via the other options.

Figure 26: My Home now offers the menu for managing sections, pages, and insight cards directly next to the respective title, and now offers a refresh option for insight sections.

To see these and a few more improvements in action, watch this:

Video: My Home in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402 (2:49).

Collaboration: In addition to these improvements in details, we’ve also introduced a new collaboration feature: you can directly start a Microsoft Teams chat or call with the person who created a task shown in the To-Dos section:

Figure 27: Chat, start a video call or a voice-only call with the creator of a task, via Microsoft Teams.

Sharing your layout: Our users have also asked whether they can share their My Home personalization with colleagues, in other words the favorites, the groups, the choice of Insight tiles and cards and the overall layout: with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402, this is now possible, via exporting to and importing from a local file.

SAP Fiori Launchpad

Important! As an SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition customer, you will need to move from the Classic Home page, with its many groups of tiles, to Spaces and Pages by June 2024! Have a look at this SAP Note for more information, or also look at these:

SAP Fiori Launchpad: Merging Spaces, Pages and Sections

Since the 2302 release, customers can use the SAP-defined spaces and pages out-of-the-box, giving users access to their main applications without any set-up effort.

Now, customers can go a step further and choose to merge spaces, pages and even sections: you can merge those from SAP as well as your own custom ones. Why would you want to do that? Basically, if a user has a few spaces which don’t contain many pages, or pages which don’t have many sections, you can optimize their navigation by merging them. Also, in some cases users can end up with pages or sections with the same name, so it would make sense for users to have these merged into just one page or section.

The layout is automatically adjusted, so this can be done with low effort. Figure 28 shows an example, where two spaces (“Billing” and “Customer Returns”), each with only one page, have been merged into one space (“Billing”), and where the two pages have been merged into one page. The two sections “Customer Returns” and “Flexible Analysis” from the “Customer Returns” page are automatically added behind the section “Billing Documents and Billing Document Requests” from the ”Billing” page.

Figure 28: Merging spaces and pages.

Here is a link to the documentation for this:

Calendar Week Handling in User Settings

Users can now choose how they want dates to be displayed in calendars, for example when choosing a date via value-help. In addition to using the default format from your system, you can now select between ISO_8601 format, Middle Eastern and Western Traditional, as you can see in Figure 29.

Figure 29: Calendar week handling via the SAP Fiori launchpad user settings.

User ID Displayed in User Settings

I’m glad to say that we now support one of our main customer requests: users can see their technical user ID in the SAP Fiori launchpad settings section, on the tab User Account. This helps in cases where support is needed, since the technical ID is logged rather than the user’s name.

Collaboration: New Capabilities, Built-in and with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Loop

To make it easier for users to collaborate with colleagues, we are introducing further capabilities with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402.

Collaborative Draft

Some selected applications support collaborative draft handling of business objects. This means that more than one user can edit a business object, such as a payment advice, at the same time, and see changes made by others before the object is finally saved.

Within the object page, the object header shows the avatars of those who are editing; you also get the avatar shown next to fields which they are editing. Also, we have extended the grid table to indicate which entries are currently in a draft state, as well as showing those currently being edited by someone else (see Figure 30); this is also available in the responsive tables.

You can invite other users to join you in working on an object, as you can also see in Figure 30.

Figure 30: Collaborative draft. On the top left you see how you can invite colleagues to edit the draft with you. The image on the right shows how you can see who else is editing the object, in this case “Payment Advice”, and which field they are currently editing. On the bottom left you can see the new indicators in grid tables.

Collaborative draft utilizes the latest SAP Fiori elements for OData V4 technology.

SAP Collaboration Manager enhancements

SAP Collaboration Manager allows you to chat directly with colleagues, right from where you are in the application. Whenever someone chats with you, you’ll get a notification in the SAP Fiori launchpad.

We’ve added a feature which allows you to mark your favorite chats. You can also use this as a way to take notes on specific objects or applications if you don’t invite anyone else to the chat. You can easily see all your favorites thanks to the new “Favorites” tab, which also shows how many you have.

Another useful feature is the “mark as unread”. Both of these features are shown in Figure 31, on the left.

You can now add insight cards to a chat directly, as shown in Figure 31 on the right. This is in addition to the existing capability of adding a screenshot from the clipboard or uploading an image file.

Figure 31: SAP Collaboration Manager’s new features: users can mark their favorites and set chats to unread (shown on the left); they can also now add insight cards, shown on the right.

Collaborate Based On Contact Cards

Wherever a user name or e-mail address on the UI provides a contact card with details when a user hovers over it, users can now directly trigger collaboration via Microsoft Teams, with three options: chat, video call or voice call. Figure 27 above in the section on My Home shows an example. To see it in action, have a look at this:

Video: Collaborative ERP: Collabore based on Contact Cards (0:44).

Share as Card with Microsoft Teams Collaborative Stage View

You can already share a link to an application in a Microsoft Teams chat, but now you can go a step further and share the application as a card in the chat. When the recipient opens the card by clicking on the “open” button, the shared application is opened within Microsoft Teams as a new chat window, which Microsoft calls the collaborative stage view. Users can work with the application and chat with colleagues in the same chat window. Figures 32, 33 and 34 show some of these steps, but to get the best impression, watch this:

Video: Collaborative ERP: Share as Card based on Collaborative Stage View (1:49).

Figure 32: Share as Card – showing how the user Jim selects this for his sales order.

Figure 33: Share as Card – this is what it looks like for the recipient, Alice, after Jim shared the card and later added in the chat “Hey Alice, can you please remove the delivery block? It’s urgent! Thanks.”

Figure 34: Share as Card – after Alice clicked on “Open” in the card, she sees the application in the Microsoft Teams collaborative stage view, next to the chat. In this example, she has already interacted with the app in-place and removed the delivery block, and is about to send off her reply in the chat to Jim.

Share as Card with Authenticated Cards (Microsoft Loop Component)

Available with the 2402 release to customers who participate in the Early Adopter Care program SAP S/4HANA Cloud - MS Teams Integration (you can register using via the link).

We are taking collaboration one step further by providing interactive cards which can be shared with colleagues via Microsoft Teams chat, as well as by including them in an e-mail for example. Technically, these cards use an adaptive card-based Microsoft Loop component. Because the cards show live data from the system directly within the card, and allow users to interact directly, the user is fully authenticated before displaying the card, to ensure that they are authorized to see and interact with the data.

Figure 35: Share as Card with authenticated cards (Microsoft Loop component): the card is embedded in the Microsoft Teams chat, showing live information from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, and providing in this example two buttons for interacting with the system.

Again, this kind of collaboration is best witnessed in a demo, here is a preview:

Video: Preview of SAP S/4HANA Cloud - Share as Adaptive Card-based Loop component (1:25)

Once we have incorporated feedback from the Early Adopter Care program we plan to make this generally available.

AI and Joule

AI-Assisted Object Creation Accelerates Data Entry

With the 2402 release, we provide AI-assisted auto-suggestions for completing incomplete sales orders after a successful pilot phase. We are now piloting it for creation of returns orders, via the Early Adopter Care program. This solution uses machine learning to analyze a customer’s historical data, for example from the last six months, and learns the typically occurring relationships between the values entered in the main input fields and the values entered into other related fields. As a result, when a user enters a value in one of the main input fields, the system can make proposals for values to use for the related fields, as you can see in Figure 36. The machine learning uses the Data Attribute Recommendation Service on SAP Business Technology Platform, which is hooked up to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

Our design approach to AI is to always let the user be in control. In this case, we highlight those fields which have proposed values in blue. Users can click on the field to see further recommendations, as well as the history of values they have entered in the past. They are in charge and can confirm the main recommendation or select or enter the value they want. The user can also proceed to create the business object and accept all of them with one click in a pop-up.

Figure 36: AI-assisted object creation for a sales order.

Joule in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition

As explained above in the section Entry Points, Joule and Apple Vision Pro, Joule is your copilot for working with SAP, leveraging generative AI (GenAI).

We are starting a phased roll-out with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402 for selected customers via this Early Adopter Care campaign. Do sign up if you are interested, we plan to contact registered customers and partners in early March.

The initial scope covers:

Navigational pattern for apps in Finance, Procurement, Professional Services and Sales.
Transactional pattern, role-based for three personas: operational purchaser, cost center owner and shipping specialist.
Informational pattern providing quick and seamless access to user enablement content summarized in a crisp answer.

This presentation explains these three types of patterns as well as providing an overview of our AI approach in general, and a high-level description of the Joule technology stack:

Joule, the AI copilot in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

Video: examples of the three navigational patterns for Joule in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

SAPUI5 Adaptation Projects enabled for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition

Customers and partners can now use SAP Business Application Studio to develop variants of standard SAP Fiori apps from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, as a modification-free adaptation of existing apps. The resulting variant is treated as a new application, with a new application ID and hence a new tile, but it reuses the standard app and adds custom changes. This means that developers can focus on developing the value add, without having to copy or modify the code from the standard app. This also has the advantage that the app variant benefits from future enhancements to the standard application. Watch this video to get an overview, and read more in the documentation:

Improvements in Details

Copy and Paste in SAPUI5 Tables

Users can easily select areas in SAPUI5-based tables now and copy the contents from the clipboard and then paste into other applications, such as an e-mail or a spreadsheet. The copy action can be triggered by a new button added to the table, as demonstrated in Figure 37, or via the keyboard.

Figure 37: Copy and Paste from SAPUI5 tables.

Sorting in Tables by Name, Not Just by ID

In tables, we often show the ID and the name of an entity in one column, as “ID (Name)”, rather than in two separate columns. With this release, the table sorting feature offers you the option to sort by name and not just by ID. Technically, this is a feature of the Smart Table in SAPUI5.

Figure 38: Table columns can now be sorted by name in addition to ID. In this example, the Company Code column contains values with ID “0001” and name “SAP DEMO Company”; you can now sort by either of these.

Enhanced Type Ahead for (Multi) Combo Boxes

When entering data in the system, users want to do this as quickly as possible. Being able to very quickly select an entry from a drop-down combo box or multi-combo box helps this a lot, and we have now made this easier by selecting all entries which have a match anywhere with what you have typed – and not just matching the first letters. Figure 39 shows two examples for the field Credit Check Rule: the entry is selected which matches the input somewhere – and the part which matches is highlighted in bold text.

Figure 39: Enhanced type ahead functionality for combo boxes and multi-combo boxes.

Save as Tile Supports Dynamic Date Ranges

You can now create dynamic tiles for your selected SAP Fiori launchpad pages which include dynamic date ranges in the selection. Figure 40 shows an example where the date range “This Year (01.01.2023 – 31.12.2023)” has been used to filter the list. From there, the user has called up the “Save as Tile” feature, resulting in a tile which always shows the values for “This Year”.

Figure 40: Save as Tile supports dynamic date ranges.

Select All in Tables

Users can now select all the visible entries in a list report, using the select all checkbox in the table header. Since users might think that all entries in the database have been selected, when in fact only the entries which have been loaded to the UI are selected, a warning pop-up is shown – as you can see in Figure 41.

Figure 41: Select all enabled by default for list reports.

Further Improvements

I would also like to mention these improvements:

Tree tables in list reports and object pages which are built using SAPUI5 with OData V4 now support edit operations.
Users can now create My Home Insight Cards from applications built with SAP Fiori elements for OData V4, providing a consolidated view of the application’s content.
Creation rows in tables indicate to users immediately if mandatory values are missing.
Creation rows in tables allow developers to disable fields which should not be open for entering data due to missing entries in other fields.

UI Design and Technology News – Web and Mobile

Design Improvements to the Horizon Visual Theme for SAP Fiori

The improvements to the Horizon visual theme which I announced back in September are now available, in UI technologies as well as applications such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402. In the interest of space, I haven’t included explanatory images here; you can get an overview in my blog post:

Improvements Coming to the Horizon Visual Theme for SAP Fiori

Design Guidelines for SAP Fiori Updated: GenAI and SAP Web Components

We have revamped the design guidelines for SAP Fiori for web, with a first set of guidelines in the new subsection for designing for Generative AI in the Designing Intelligent Systems section. It covers:

We are releasing this early version of our generative AI design guidelines to share our discoveries early on with our broader SAP and UX community. The design guidelines in this section will evolve iteratively based on research, input from the community, and feedback from stakeholders.

Coming soon:

Designing Safety into Generative AI
Designing Sustainable Generative AI Experiences
Designing Effective AI Prompts

In 2H2023 we also provided a new beta section UI Elements – SAP Web Components, where you can interact directly with each web component, since they have been embedded into the respective guideline page.

Design Research: Gathering User Feedback

We continue to invest in gathering more feedback from our users. Most of our major products now have built-in surveys to gather direct feedback from a user on how they rate the usability and satisfaction with the product.

Beyond that, in order to get more qualitative feedback, we introduced the SAP User Research Panel in October, where any user can sign up to help optimize SAP’s product user experience. Find out more and sign-up here:

Your voice matters! Join the SAP User Research Panel.

SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori Elements

Most of the UI innovations mentioned above in the section on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition are provided by the underlying UI framework SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori elements.

Some of these are exclusively available with the OData V4 version, namely:

Collaborative draft (mentioned above).
Editable tree table, where data can be edited directly, and also the structure of the table can be edited via drag and drop.

For the sake of completeness: these features are now supported for OData V4, which were already available for OData V2:

List Report / Object Page: Support for the history of recently entered values
List Report: Support for Copy & Paste in the Filter Bar
Value Help: provide type ahead support in Define Conditions
Object Page: Runtime Adaptation: Allow removal of sections and subsections

This blog post summarizes the major new features of SAP Fiori elements:

SAP Fiori Elements in 2023: AI, collaboration, and consistency combine for a better user experience.

Mobile Design and SDKs: Watches, Cards and Many New Components

Following our release of the respective design guidelines mid-2023 for smart watches, the technology became available in November with the introduction of the SDKs for SAP Fiori for Android 7.0 and SAP Fiori for iOS 9.2, along with the first release of SAP Fiori for Wear OS and SAP Fiori for watchOS.

Figure 42: SAP Fiori for Wear OS

Figure 43: SAP Fiori for watchOS.

End of 2023, we introduced the 7.1 and 10.0 releases of the SDKs for Android and iOS respectively, which featured numerous new components.

Also, we have enhanced the mobile design system by introducing the mobile card system for SAP Fiori for Android and for SAP Fiori for iOS. This means that designers and developers building cards now have guidance on how to do that for SAP Fiori on mobile devices.

The new card system for native applications revolutionizes the way cards are used, providing a convenient way to display content from different sources. It consists of a toolkit of nested components that allow you to create a variety of cards that meet SAP product requirements.  Whether you need list items, KPIs, or a data table, each card’s flexible header, body, and footer seamlessly transform a single container into various card types.

Figure 44: Variety of cards in the mobile card system, all based on one card container.

Find out more in these blog posts:

Final Words

As you can see, we have great momentum in bringing forward SAP’s user experience. I hope you as a reader had enough momentum to get to the end of this very long post! I’d love to hear from you about whether you like this format, of putting everything into one long post, or whether you’d prefer this split up into a series of smaller posts.

Do keep posting your experiences and recommendations yourself in the SAP Community, with the SAP Fiori and/or the User Experience tag! In case you are wondering how to get a list of the most recent blog posts on SAP Fiori and User Experience in our new SAP Community, use these links:

For general information on design and SAP Fiori, check out:

March 12-13 Workshop: SAP Mobile Experience Hands-On Workshop for Partners in Walldorf, Germany

2024-02-09T15:57:32.820000+01:00

In today's hybrid work environment, knowledge and frontline workers need access to critical tasks and data especially when they're away from their desks and out in the field. Companies are looking to enhance their operational resilience by enabling their workforce to stay informed and act promptly, all while on-the-go and in various work environments.

Like SAP, top businesses today recognize the value of tackling these challenges by enabling their employees to work anytime, anywhere using mobile technologies. Mobile Experience from SAP is our powerful suite of mobile applications, design system, cloud platform services and tools which keeps your business moving forward across any industry and line of business. Whether you’re at the shop counter, on a service assignment, in the warehouse, or somewhere in between, you can continue project activities on the go.

Learn directly from product experts in this interactive, hands-on workshop how to setup and configure the central entry point on mobile SAP Mobile Start, based on SAP Build Work Zone, create and embed content to it, like with SAP Task Center and SAP Build Apps, and how to build your own mobile application with SAP Build Code - all on the SAP Business Technology Platform.

With in-depth topic overviews and practical exercises, you will gain knowledge and valuable experience in end-to-end mobile application development. Expand your network and gather insights from your peers working in other companies.

Registration is now open: sap.to/61106pk5rO

Content is Key – SAP Mobile Start now supports SAP Analytics Cloud KPIs on Tiles & Widgets

2024-03-07T14:38:04.247000+01:00

Accessing the right content at the right time is crucial for mobile users. We all know the situation – you are away from your desk but need to urgently look up some information, complete a business process, need to work on an urgent task or need to monitor an important KPI. With SAP Mobile Start, you can do this easily, as the app provides you with the right content like business workflows, apps and news - based on your business role/ your persona.

With the latest SAP Analytics Cloud release 2024.04, we add another important new content category: analytical KPIs. Now, You can see your SAP Analytics Cloud business KPIs in SAP Mobile Start as well.

The KPIs are shown on the respective tile or widget, and you can easily navigate to the details (analytical story) by tapping on them. Based on the configuration, analytical stories can be opened within the native SAP Analytics Cloud app or within the embedded web view of SAP Mobile Start.

SAP Mobile Start – SAP Analytics Cloud KPIs

So, how does this work? It is quite straight forward: Each KPI in SAP Analytics Cloud can be retrieved with its ID via an URL, each analytical story can be opened via an URL. Those two URLs can be used to create the needed tile in SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition, which then can be made available within SAP Mobile Start. To show KPI information like color coding or trend indicators, we do leverage the well know concept of the advanced monitoring tiles.

In the following example, we do the configuration to open the SAP Analytics Cloud story within the SAP Mobile Start embedded web view.

For the following steps, you need to have admin or report designer rights for SAP Analytics Cloud and admin rights for SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition. Please also check the SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition SAP Help documentation.

Step 1
Get the analytical story URL from SAP Analytics Cloud via the story sharing feature. In your SAP Analytics Cloud story, go to the File Menu and select the share button. Then copy the default link, the URL that points to the SAP Analytics Cloud story.

SAP Analytics Cloud - Share story pop-up

Step 2
In the SAP Build Work Zone, standard Edition site manager, create a new app with the following parameters:

Open app: In new tab
System: No system
App UI technology: URL
URL: Add the URL to the SAP Analytics Cloud story (step 1)

Certainly, you should also assign a good name and icon to the tile.

As always, you do need to assign navigation parameters on the navigation tab. You should use something that clearly describes the target, if possible in a unique way:

Semantic Object: sacstory<Story ID>
Action: open

SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition – Content Manager

Step 3
In SAP Analytics Cloud, get the KPI ID by clicking on the respective context menu and select “More Options” and then just “Copy Widget ID”.
Remark: The context menu option in edit mode needs to be enabled. Please also have a look at the respective SAP Analytics Cloud SAP Help documentation and the SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition SAP Help documentation.

SAP Analytics Cloud – Retrieving KPI widget ID

Step 4
Finally, go to the Visualisation Tab in the site manager and add the KPI ID at the end of the respective service URL in your site manager app.

Maintain the following information:

Visualisation Type: Select "Dynamic App Launcher"
Title: auto filled
Subtitle: Generally, the subtitle will be fetched from SAC.
Supported Devices: Check "Tablet" & "Mobile" – certainly, you can also show the tile on the desktop.
System: Select the SAP Analytics Cloud system.
Service URL: The relative API URL which returns the data structure needed for the advanced monitoring tiles. The service URL looks like below: "/dynamic_dest/SAC/widgetquery/getWidgetData?storyId=4E182586C29ECA5EA35767AA45F13BC4&widgetId=Chart_1&type=kpiTile"
This consists of the System (red), Story ID (blue) and WidgetID (green) which need to be configured by you.
- The system is the same as selected above.
- The Story ID can be fetched from the corresponding SAC tenant URL where you see the story board. For more information check the additional information section above.
- The Widget ID (called ID in SAC) can be fetched when editing the KPI in the SAC tenant. For more information check the additional information section above

Once all data is maintained as shown, press Save to create the app.

SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition – Content Manager

After assigning the app to the respective role and group/ section, users should get the tile, with the updated KPI. By tapping on the tile, the SAP Analytics Cloud story opens.

I hope you like our new analytical KPI content type within SAP Mobile Start, we will certainly continue to add more attractive content types.

For further information on the new topics, please check our SAP Mobile Start documentation.

Visit SAP Mobile Experience Community Page and click “follow” to get the latest development and innovation of our solutions. We look forward hearing about your experience with setting up the solution in your landscape; please do share your thoughts and comments below. Enter here for additional questions regarding SAP Mobile Experience Applications.

Want to be notified? Check your profile settings to ensure you have your settings activated.

How to Connect a S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition System to SAP Start

2024-03-14T15:22:07.784000+01:00

If you want to learn more about SAP Start in general, have a look at our recent "Things You Need to Know About SAP Start” blog post.

Today, we want to show you how easy it is to set up SAP Start seamlessly integrated with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition. Please note that there is also the possibility to integrate SAP SuccessFactors already today, and more SAP cloud business solutions in the future, which we are covered in blog entries. (see links at the end of this blog post)

Prerequisites

To follow along with this how-to, please make sure you already fulfill the following prerequisites:

You have an existing global account on the SAP Business Technology Platform
Your global account has these entitlements assigned
Service Plan Required Quota
Cloud Management Service Local 1
SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition foundation 1
SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition foundation (Application) 1
SAP Task Center standard 1
Cloud Identity Services connectivity 1
You have (admin) access to your S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition system with minimum required version 2023 FPS1
You have an Identity Authentication Service available in your global account
You have set up a SAP Cloud Connector as outlined by the SAP Cloud Connector documentation

Setting up SAP Start with S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition

You first need to create a new subaccount in your BTP global account. Open the Account Explorer page of your global account in the BTP cockpit. You should see a dropdown menu called Create where you select Subaccount. Follow the wizard and enter all required fields.

Create Subaccount
In your created subaccount, go to the Entitlements section and entitle the subaccount for:
- SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition (plan: foundation & foundation (Application))
  
  Configure Workzone Entitlement
- SAP Task Center (plan: standard)
  
  Configure Task Center Entitlement
Expand the Services section to open the Instances and Subscriptions section for the subaccount and create a subscription for SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition

SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition plan foundation subscription form
Go to the Overview section of the subaccount and Enable Cloud Foundry in the subaccount
Go to the Overview section of the subaccount and click Create Space
- Add your user as Space Developer, Space Manager, and Space Auditor
  
  Create Space
In your created space, expand the Services section to open the Instances section for the space and create a service instance for SAP Task Center
Create a service key for your created service instance of SAP Task Center
- This blog article only covers the creation of the Task Center service instance. For all necessary steps please follow the SAP Task Center Initial Setup guide.
In your subaccount, expand the Connectivity section to navigate to the Destinations section of your subaccount and create a new destination based on the service instance of Task Center

Create Task Center Destination
In your global account, select System Landscape from the left panel, and select the Formations tab
Click Create Formation (in the top right corner)
Enter a Formation Name and select Integration with SAP Start as the Formation Type and click Next Step
Select the SAP Start system that reflects your SAP Build Work Zone subscription which you created in step 3 and click Next Step
Double check on the review page that everything looks correct and click Create

Set Up S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition as a Content Provider for SAP Start

Important: SAP Build Workzone automatically proxies a system connected to it via the SAP Cloud Connector. All paths that you configure in your cloud connector will be reachable via the public internet. Please make sure that you only configure necessary paths and that your S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition system is properly secured to prevent unauthorized access.

Follow the SAP Cloud Connector documentation to establish trust between your created subaccount and your S/4 Private Cloud System
- Please pay attention to the Setup Principal Propagation part of the documentation
- Ensure to disable System Certificate for Logon (if no Principal is received from Cloud) to enable principal propagation and basic authentication via the SAP Cloud Connector
Open the Cloud To On-Premise tab in your SAP Cloud Connector Administration UI
Create a new mapping for the SAP Build Work Zone with SAP Start integration following the Workzone SAP Cloud Connector Setup documentation
- Expose the following paths for protocol HTTPS
  - The path to fetch card manifests and i18n files (/sap/bc/lrep/)
  - The path to fetch the UI5 App Index (/sap/bc/ui2/app_index/)
  - The path to fetch CDM3 content (/sap/bc/ui2/cdm3/)
  - The path for fetching data from OData services (/sap/opu/odata/)
  - The path for fetching data from OData V4 services (/sap/opu/odata4/)
Expose Paths in SAP Cloud Connector
NOTE: This is a default configuration with the purpose to cover most use cases. From a security perspective it is recommended to investigate which services are really used in your use case and restrict the paths further.
Create a new mapping for the integration with the Identity Provisioning Service (IPS)
- Back-end Type: ABAP System
- Protocol: RFC or RFC SNC
- Connection Type: With load balancing (system ID and message server)
- Message Server: <Your S/4HANA message server host e.g. ldcsuct>
- System ID: <Your S/4HANA system id e.g. UCT>
- SAProuter: leave empty
- Virtual Message Server: ldcsuct
- Virtual System ID: UCT
With these example properties you would get ldcsuct:sapmsUCT as internal host
Allow access to the following resources with Naming Policy Exact Name as outlined by the IPS documentation for SAP Application Server ABAP
- BAPI_USER_GETLIST
- BAPI_USER_GET_DETAIL
- PRGN_ACTIVITY_GROUPS_LOAD_RFC
- PRGN_ROLE_GETLIST
Allowed RFC Resources
Open your S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition system and follow the Manage Launchpad Content for Exposure documentation to preview and expose your content. Pay attention to select Version 2 as the Exposure Version. The Result should look like this:

Setup Launchpad Content Exposure
- To check that your content exposure was successful you can use the SAP Gateway Client (transaction /IWFND/GW_CLIENT)
  
  Test Content Exposure in SAP Gateway Client
Create a technical service user that fulfills the Prerequisites for Launchpad Content Exposure
- Open transaction SU01 to create a technical service user
- Select Service as User Type
  
  S/4HANA Service User From
Ensure the business users have Insights Cards assigned in the MyHome Settings of your S/4 HANA Private Cloud system

Insights Cards in MyHome Settings

Configure BTP Destinations

In your subaccount, expand the Connectivity section and navigate to the Destinations section.
Follow the Configure Destinations section to create the Design-Time and Runtime destinations.

S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition Design-Time Destination

S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition Runtime-Time Destination
Create a destination for retrieving nominations via the SAP Cloud Connector
- Set the following additional properties
  - HTML5.DynamicDestination: true
  - nameIdFormat: urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.1:nameid-format:emailAddress
  - sap-card-nominations-path: /sap/opu/odata4/ui2/insights_srv/srvd/ui2/insights_cards_read_srv/0001/CEP_Cards?$expand=DescriptorResources
- Make sure to set the Location ID if you have configured a location ID in your SAP Cloud Connector
- Note that for principal propagation to work, the BTP users for your IAS identity provider (Subaccount > Security > Users) have to set the correct user name i.e. the identifier that is accepted by your S4 private cloud system
  - When a user authenticates for the first time with the subaccount’s authentication url and the IAS identity provider, a new BTP user will be created automatically.
  - The value of the user name for automatically created users is determined by how you Configure the Subject Name Identifier Sent to the Application in your IAS.
Navigate to the Channel Manager section in SAP Build Work Zone and add a new Content Provider with the following properties:
Content Provider Creation

Create a PFCG Role to Maintain the Global User ID

Open transaction PFCG in your S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition system to create a new role MAINTAIN_USER_GLOBAL_ID
Enter the following authorization values
- Object class AAAB (Cross-application Authorization Objects)
  - Authorization Object S_RFC (Authorization Check for RFC Access)
    - Authorizat. 00 (Authorization Check for RFC Access)
      - RFC_TYPE: Function Module (Type of RFC object to which access is to be allowed)
      - RFC_NAME: BAPI_USER_CHANGE, BAPI_USER_GETLIST, BAPI_USER_GET_DETAIL (Name (Allowlist) of RFC object to which access is allowed)
      - ACTVT: Execute (Activity)
    - Authorizat. 01 (Authorization Check for RFC Access)
      - RFC_TYPE: Function group (Type of RFC object to which access is to be allowed)
      - RFC_NAME: SU_USER (Name (Allowlist) of RFC object to which access is allowed)
      - ACTVT: Execute (Activity)
- Object class BC_A (Maintained Basis: Administration)
  - Authorization Object S_USER_ATT (Standard User Attributes Assignment)
    - Authorizat. 00 (User Attributes Assignment)
  - Authorization Object S_USER_GRP (Maintained User Master Maintenance: User Groups)
    - Authorizat. 01 (User Master Maintenance: User Groups)
      - CLASS: <Groups of the users that should be maintained> (User Group)
      - ACTVT: Add or Create, Change, Display, Lock, Extended maintenance, Move, Set Productive (Activity)
  - Authorization Object S_USER_UID (Maintained User Master Maintenance: Assignment of External UID)
    - Authorizat. 00 (User Master Maintenance: Assignment of External UID)
      - ACTVT: Display, Enter, Include, Assign (Activity)
      - CLASS: <Groups of the users that should be maintained> (User Group)
      - EXTUID_TYP: Global User ID (Type of the External User ID (UID))
Save and generate the role

NOTE: The role MAINTAIN_USER_GLOBAL_ID is required by IPS to synchronize the Global User ID. The Global User ID is required for the Task Center integration to display the tasks of the business users.

Configure Identity Provisioning Service (IPS)

Open your S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition system
Open transaction SU01 to add the role SAP_BC_JSF_COMMUNICATION_RO to the technical service user used for reading the CDM content
Open your subaccount and navigate to your created Cloud Foundry space, expand the Services section to select Instances for the space and create a service instance for SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition
Create a service key for the service instance of SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition
Open your subaccount, expand the Security section to open the Trust Configuration section
Click on the Establish Trust button and select your IAS tenant
- Ensure your IAS Tenant is connected using Open ID Connect (OIDC)
Navigate to the Instances and Subscriptions section
Subscribe to Cloud Identity Services with plan connectivity
Expand the Connectivity section to navigate to the Destinations section and create a new destination for the IPS integration as outlined by the IPS documentation for SAP Application Server ABAP
An example for a connection with load balancing:
- Location ID: <Location ID of your SAP Cloud Connector e.g. DLM_MAIL>
  - Only required if your SAP Cloud Connector is configured with a location ID
- Type: RFC
- ProxyType: OnPremise
- User: <Username of your technical S/4HANA service user>
- Password: <Password of your technical S/4HANA service user>
- Additional Properties
  - jco.client.client: <The client of you S/4HANA system e.g. 950>
  - jco.client.mshost: <Virtual host of your SAP Cloud Connector configuration for IPS integration until the colon e.g. uctclnt950rfc>
  - jco.client.r3name: <System ID of your S/4HANA system e.g. UCT>
IPS Source System RFC Destination
Open your IAS administrator console at <IAS domain>/admin
Navigate to the Identity Provisioning section and open the Source Systems section

Click on + Add to add a new Source System

Select SAP Application Server ABAP as type
Give the source system a meaningful name

IPS Source System Form

Open the Transformations tab, click on Edit and switch into the JSON mode to paste the following standard transformation

{
    "user": {
        "mappings": [
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.USERNAME",
                "targetVariable": "entityIdSourceSystem"
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.USERNAME",
                "targetPath": "$.userName",
                "correlationAttribute": true
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.ALIAS.USERALIAS",
                "targetPath": "$.externalId",
                "optional": true,
                "correlationAttribute": true
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.SAPUSER_UUID.SAP_UID",
                "targetPath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:sap:2.0:User']['userUuid']",
                "optional": true
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.schemas[0]",
                "constant": "urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:core:2.0:User"
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.ADDRESS.E_MAIL",
                "targetPath": "$.emails[0].value",
                "optional": true,
                "correlationAttribute": true
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.emails[0].primary",
                "condition": "$.ADDRESS.E_MAIL EMPTY false",
                "constant": true
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.emails[0].type",
                "condition": "$.ADDRESS.E_MAIL EMPTY false",
                "constant": "work"
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.ADDRESS.FIRSTNAME",
                "targetPath": "$.name.givenName",
                "optional": true
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.ADDRESS.LASTNAME",
                "targetPath": "$.name.familyName"
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.ADDRESS.MIDDLENAME",
                "targetPath": "$.name.middleName",
                "optional": true
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.ADDRESS.NICKNAME",
                "targetPath": "$.nickName",
                "optional": true
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.ADDRESS.TITLE_P",
                "targetPath": "$.name.honorificPrefix",
                "optional": true
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.ADDRESS.COUNTRY",
                "targetPath": "$.addresses[0].country",
                "optional": true
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.addresses[0].primary",
                "condition": "$.ADDRESS.COUNTRY EMPTY false",
                "constant": true
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.addresses[0].type",
                "condition": "$.ADDRESS.COUNTRY EMPTY false",
                "constant": "work"
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.ADDRESS.TEL1_NUMBR",
                "targetPath": "$.phoneNumbers[0].value",
                "optional": true
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.phoneNumbers[0].primary",
                "condition": "$.ADDRESS.TEL1_NUMBR EMPTY false",
                "constant": true
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.phoneNumbers[0].type",
                "condition": "$.ADDRESS.TEL1_NUMBR EMPTY false",
                "constant": "work"
            },
            {
                "sourcePaths": [
                    "$.DEFAULTS.LANGU"
                ],
                "targetPath": "$.locale",
                "valueMappings": [
                    {
                        "key": [
                            "W"
                        ],
                        "mappedValue": "bg"
                    }
                ],
                "optional": true,
                "type": "valueMapping",
                "defaultValue": "en"
            },
            {
                "sourcePaths": [
                    "$.ADDRESS.LANGUP_ISO"
                ],
                "targetPath": "$.preferredLanguage",
                "optional": true,
                "type": "valueMapping",
                "functions": [
                    {
                        "function": "toLowerCaseString"
                    }
                ]
            },
            {
                "sourcePaths": [
                    "$.LOGONDATA.TZONE"
                ],
                "targetPath": "$.timezone",
                "valueMappings": [
                    {
                        "key": [
                            "EET"
                        ],
                        "mappedValue": "Europe/Sofia"
                    }
                ],
                "optional": true,
                "type": "valueMapping",
                "defaultValue": "Europe/Berlin"
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.active",
                "constant": false
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.active",
                "condition": "($.ISLOCKED.LOCAL_LOCK != 'L') && ($.ISLOCKED.GLOB_LOCK != 'L') && ($.ISLOCKED.WRNG_LOGON != 'L')",
                "constant": true
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.ACTIVITYGROUPS[*].AGR_NAME",
                "targetPath": "$.groups[?(@.value)]",
                "optional": true,
                "preserveArrayWithSingleElement": true
            }
        ]
    },
    "group": {
        "mappings": [
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.ROLE_NAME",
                "targetVariable": "entityIdSourceSystem"
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.ROLE_NAME",
                "targetPath": "$.displayName",
                "functions": [
                    {
                        "function": "concatString",
                        "condition": "'%abap.role.prefix%' !== 'null'",
                        "prefix": "%abap.role.prefix%"
                    }
                ]
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.schemas[0]",
                "constant": "urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:core:2.0:Group"
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.USERLIST[*].USERNAME",
                "targetPath": "$.members[?(@.value)]",
                "optional": true,
                "preserveArrayWithSingleElement": true
            }
        ]
    }
}

IPS Source System Transformations Form

Navigate to the Identity Provisioning section and open the Target Systems section

Click on + Add to add a new Target System

Select SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition as type
Give the target system a meaningful name
Select your created source system for S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition as the source system

IPS Traget System Form

Open the Transformations tab, click on Edit and switch into the JSON mode to paste the following standard transformation

{
    "user": {
        "condition": "($.emails EMPTY false) && ($['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:sap:2.0:User'].userUuid EMPTY false)",
        "skipOperations": [
            "update"
        ],
        "mappings": [
            {
                "targetPath": "$.id",
                "sourceVariable": "entityIdTargetSystem"
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.schemas[0]",
                "constant": "urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:core:2.0:User"
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:2.0:mapping']['providerId']",
                "constant": "%cflp.providerId%"
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.emails[0].value",
                "targetPath": "$.emails[0].value",
                "condition": "$.emails[?(@.primary == true)].value == []",
                "optional": true
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.emails[?(@.primary == true)].value",
                "targetPath": "$.emails[0].value",
                "condition": "$.emails[?(@.primary == true)].value != []",
                "optional": true,
                "preserveArrayWithSingleElement": true,
                "functions": [
                    {
                        "function": "elementAt",
                        "index": 0
                    }
                ]
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.emails[0].primary",
                "condition": "$.emails[0].length() > 0",
                "constant": true
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:sap:2.0:User']['userUuid']",
                "targetPath": "$.externalId",
                "optional": true
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.groups[*].value",
                "targetPath": "$.groups[?(@.value)]",
                "optional": true,
                "preserveArrayWithSingleElement": true,
                "functions": [
                    {
                        "function": "resolveEntityIds",
                        "entityType": "group"
                    }
                ]
            }
        ]
    },
    "group": {
        "mappings": [
            {
                "targetPath": "$.id",
                "sourceVariable": "entityIdTargetSystem"
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:2.0:mapping']['providerId']",
                "constant": "%cflp.providerId%"
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.schemas[0]",
                "constant": "urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:core:2.0:Group"
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.schemas[1]",
                "constant": "urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:core:2.0:mapping",
                "optional": true
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.displayName",
                "targetPath": "$.externalId"
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.externalId",
                "targetPath": "$.externalId",
                "optional": true,
                "functions": [
                    {
                        "function": "replaceAllString",
                        "regex": "(?i)(^pcd:)",
                        "replacement": ""
                    },
                    {
                        "function": "replaceString",
                        "target": "/",
                        "replacement": ":"
                    },
                    {
                        "function": "replaceString",
                        "target": "(",
                        "replacement": "@"
                    },
                    {
                        "function": "replaceString",
                        "target": ")",
                        "replacement": "+"
                    }
                ]
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.members[*].value",
                "targetPath": "$.members[?(@.value)]",
                "optional": true,
                "preserveArrayWithSingleElement": true,
                "functions": [
                    {
                        "function": "resolveEntityIds"
                    }
                ]
            }
        ]
    }
}

IPS Target System Transformations Form

Open the Properties tab and add the following properties
- Authentication: BasicAuthentication
- cflp.group.unique.attribute: externalId,['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:2.0:mapping']['providerId']
- cflp.patch.group.members.above.threshold: 5000
- cflp.providerId: <ID of the created content provider in your SAP Build Work Zone tenant e.g. S4_PC_UCT950>
- cflp.user.unique.attribute: emails[0].value,['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:2.0:mapping']['providerId'],externalId
- ips.trace.failed.entity.content: false
- OAuth2TokenServiceURL: <Value of the url property of your created SAP Build Work Zone service key + /oauth/token>
- Password: <Value of the clientsecret property of your created SAP Build Work Zone service key>
- ProxyType: Internet
- Type: HTTP
- URL: <Value of the portal-service property of your created SAP Build Work Zone service key>
- User: <Value of the clientid property of your created SAP Build Work Zone service key>
IPS Target System Properties Form

Navigate to the Identity Provisioning section and open the Source Systems section
Select your created source system for your S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition tenant
Open on the Jobs tab
Click on Run Now for the Read Job to start the synchronization of your S/4HANA users and roles into your SAP Build Work Zone tenant
Navigate to the Identity Provisioning section and open the Provisioning Logs section to see the logs and status of your synchronization jobs

Final Result

You should now have a working setup of SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition with SAP Start and S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. For the blog post copy and adjust the section Accessing SAP Start and That is it! from one of the following existing blog posts instead of this Final Result section.

SAP Mobile Start V1.11 - Release Update

2024-03-25T09:47:10.630000+01:00

With the latest release of SAP Mobile Start, you get some nice features for end users, and also for administrators. Further more, we support a new language: Turkish.

Before we go into the new app features, I want to mention a new content type that we support with SAP Mobile Start: SAP Analytics Cloud KPIs as monitoring tiles and widgets. Now, you can see your SAP Analytics Cloud business KPIs in SAP Mobile Start as well. The KPIs are shown on the respective tile or widget, and you can easily navigate to the details (analytical story) by tapping on them. Based on the configuration, analytical stories can be opened within the native SAP Analytics Cloud app or within the embedded web view of SAP Mobile Start.

SAP Mobile Start – SAP Analytics Cloud KPIs

Please check my latest blog Content is Key – SAP Mobile Start now supports SAP Analytics Cloud KPIs on Tiles & Widgets.

Now, let´s have a look at the new features. With the latest release, you can now search/ filter the list of your to-dos for faster access to the respective tasks or SAP S/4HANA situations.

Search and Filter for To-Dos

You also can share your to-dos with your colleagues now, for instance a SAP S/4HANA situation. Just tab on the action menu of a to-do and select share. Then you can chose from the standard device sharing options how to share it.

Sharing of To-Dos for easy collaboration

With the new release, system administrators can apply additional settings in the Mobile Settings Exchange menu of SAP Mobile Services:

Require to passcode-protect the watch before being able to use SAP Mobile Start on it
Disable the download or upload of files (like attachments) from the app, via the embedded web-view

SAP Mobile Services - New features

I hope you like this new feature within SAP Mobile Start, we will certainly continue to add more attractive content types.

For further information on the new topics, please check our SAP Mobile Start documentation.

Visit SAP Mobile Experience Community Page and click “follow” to get the latest development and innovation of our solutions. We look forward to hearing about your experience with setting up the solution in your landscape; please do share your thoughts and comments below. Enter here for additional questions regarding SAP Mobile Experience Applications.

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Design of the new Apple Vision Pro App for SAP Mobile Start

2024-04-02T12:48:50.763000+02:00

The new Apple Vision Pro App for SAP Mobile Start is officially out! 🎉

Screenshot – SAP Mobile Start for Apple Vision Pro

3 months ago, around mid of October, we began designing and building SAP Mobile Start for a completely new and innovative platform: Apple Vision Pro. We made the first steps in the snow and explored the next era of spatial computing together with Apple.

From a design point of view, the past few months were super exciting and filled with new learnings. We had dived into a completely new design system consisting of translucent materials that needed to work against real-world environments with different light and background conditions. Apple Vision Pro offered new ways of navigating a UI by only using your eyes, hands, and voice.

Gestures in visionOS - Apple WWDC 2023, Designing for spatial input

Before we could design our own app on Apple Vision Pro, we first needed to understand the foundations of spatial design by researching best practices for this new territory. For that, we studied the deep dive sessions from Apple’s WWDC Vision Pro announcement, their first human interface guidelines for visionOS, the UIKit for visionOS and the headset’s hardware capabilities in general.

UI Kit for visionOS

Screenshot – Apple’s visionOS guidelines

Now you could ask “Why not just port the existing iPad app to visionOS?”. In theory, this would have probably been the easiest way to publish an app for Apple Vision Pro. We soon learned that even though visionOS and iPadOS have many similarities, visionOS has unique needs when it comes to interaction and visual design. To create a visionOS app with the best user experience, you must consider platform specifics and follow the respective patterns for that environment.

WWDC 2023, Principles of spatial design & Design for spatial input

visionOS Design – Best Practices

For us, that meant challenging some of the concepts we already had on the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch and re-think them for Apple Vision Pro. One example for this was the whole re-organization of the top-level app navigation and secondary navigation targets. We experimented with ornaments, three-pane layouts, extra windows, dialogs, and lastly the sidebar to optimize the experience of SAP Mobile Start for the Infinite Canvas of Apple Vision Pro. The introduction of the sidebar required a re-design of several patterns like to-do details or insight card details. It also had an impact on our existing iPad app.

Screenshot – To-Do Details Screen

Old draft – To-Do Details as separate window

With the help of dedicated concept review sessions with our developer support contacts at Apple, hands-on test sessions, and peer reviews with our design experts from the mobile design systems team, we managed to nudge our concept into the right direction and finalize it in a very short time.

To finish the app for the launch of Apple Vision Pro, we needed a small team that was able to take fast decisions and quickly react. During this time, our core team – consisting of our two lead iOS developers and myself as the lead UX designer – collaborated very closely and synced daily or even sat together in one meeting room. We designed and developed in real-time and discussed new ideas together. This short feedback-loop helped us detect technical limitations and unfeasible designs at a very early stage.

After the app development was finished and visuals for featuring the app had been provided, the SAP Mobile Start app for Apple Vision Pro was ready to be shipped to the App Store on Feb 2nd.

Mockup – SAP Mobile Start in the App Store

But as we all know: A good product is never finished. Stay tuned for updates to SAP Mobile Start for visionOS in the future!

If you want to know more about our 1.10 release, have a look at our release article here.

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For further information on the new topics, please check our SAP Mobile Start documentation on SAP Help.

SAP Mobile Start leverages Google Chrome's latest Picture-in-Picture (PiP) Mode

2024-04-12T12:05:19.722000+02:00

By Aditya Arora (SAP Development Expert)

We're thrilled to share some exciting news that will enhance your SAP Mobile Start experience on Android! Google Chrome has just unveiled its newest feature, Picture-in-Picture (PiP ) mode, and it's generating quite some excitement among Android users. This development opens a world of possibilities, offering greater flexibility and multitasking capabilities from your Chrome browser.

Here's a quick breakdown of what this means for all of you, using SAP Mobile Start:

Enhanced Multitasking: Gone are the days of being confined to a single tab! With PiP mode, you can seamlessly switch between different web apps without losing your place. Whether you're checking various KPIs or handling different tasks within SAP Mobile Start, multitasking just got a whole lot easier.

Streamlined User Interface: The UI has received a facelift with the addition of a handy minimize button in the top left corner. A simple tap on this button transforms your web page into a floating PiP window, giving you the freedom to move it around your screen as you please.

Enhanced Control and Convenience: Take control of your browsing experience like never before. With the ability to easily close or reopen the PiP window, you have the power to customize your workflow according to your preferences. Enjoy a smoother, more personalized experience tailored to your needs.

As of today, this feature is available on select Android phones running Chrome 122 or above. While it may not be universally available just yet, you can enable it by toggling the Picture-in-Picture option within Chrome settings.

Chrome settings

To give you a firsthand look at how this feature can elevate your SAP Mobile Start experience, I've shared below screenshots showcasing its functionality with Chrome's Custom Chrome Tabs (CCT) integration. Watch as the PiP mode seamlessly integrates with SAP Mobile Start, featuring the app icon, page name, and domain.

SAP Mobile Start – Picture-in-Picture in action

We hope that providing this new feature enhances your mobile experience on Android!

For further information on the new topics, please check our SAP Mobile Start documentation.

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Demystifying the Common Super Domain for SAP Mobile Start

2024-04-24T10:34:47.592000+02:00

Refresher: The Problem with Third-Party Cookies

The web is heavily based on a technology called cookies. In a nutshell, cookies are a small set of information stored in your browser for later use by a website you visited. Cookies are for instance used to temporarily persist your session after you have logged in to a website or service using your browser – usually until you close your browser window. Cookies are also used when ticking the small check-box whenever a login page offered you to "Keep me signed in" or "Remember me", just settings its validity to a defined timeframe. On the other hand, the web is leveraging cookies also for tracking purposes. We speak of third-party cookies whenever a website, let's say example.com, is integrating some form of content (scripts, images, iFrames, etc.) that is running under a different domain (for example sap.com) and this content or domain is using cookies.

Some time back, all major browser vendors or their underlying browser engines did announce to heavily restrict the usage of third-party cookies with different rollout strategies and timelines (see WebKit, Google/Chrome, Mozilla). This brings us basically to the point, that web applications will only function correctly by default in the future (and partially already today), if they do not rely on third-party cookie scenarios.

SAP Mobile Start and SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition

SAP Mobile Start is a native mobile application serving as the native mobile entry point for the Intelligent Enterprise (read more). Besides bringing relevant business data to the app by leveraging native features like Widgets, Complications, Push Notifications and more, relevant business transactions and processes for mobile scenarios can be executed using the exposed & configured apps. These can be other native apps (like SAP SuccessFactors on iOS and Android) or mobile-optimized web apps – for example SAP Fiori apps exposed from SAP S/4HANA. From a content perspective, SAP Mobile Start is based on SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition (alternatively you can also use SAP Start). SAP Start is the central entry point for the browser into (selected) SAP Cloud Solutions. It allows users to search for applications, see all their tasks in one place via SAP Task Center and get recommended interest cards that are relevant to their role. SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition is an application-centric central entry point which supports more systems than just selected SAP Cloud Solutions and provides you more configuration flexibility.

A typical (and recommended) integration approach for web apps, especially for SAP Fiori apps, is to launch these embedded into the central shell. This approach is often also referred to as the "in-place" mode. On a technical level this means, that the actual app is running inside an iFrame within the surrounding shell of SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition. This holds true for both launching embedded / in-place apps in SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition on your regular desktop browser as well as when launching these via SAP Mobile Start. The latter is instantiating an in-app browser window provided by the mobile operating system where the web app is launched using its unique target URL. The following figure shows the same business app (in our case "Manage Purchase Orders") both started on the left with a laptop device using SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition and on the right side using the native mobile app SAP Mobile Start.

SAP Fiori App launched in SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition and SAP Mobile Start

Example: Problematic Landscape Configuration

Let's look at an imaginary landscape configuration where third-party cookie restrictions may be causing issues. Such an example will help us to illustrate potential issues during your system landscape setup and segue to the next section where we will focus on how to overcome these issues. In the following scenario we have provisioned the following resources:

A new SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition tenant that is available under the imaginary URL my000000.s4hana.cloud.sap
The SAP S/4HANA system is trusted with an SAP Cloud Identity Services – Identity Authentication tenant using the URL example.accounts.cloud.sap
Your SAP BTP subaccount is trusted with same SAP Cloud Identity Services – Identity Authentication tenant, but using the URL example.accounts.ondemand.com
On the SAP BTP subaccount, SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition is subscribed
SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition is used by your end-users with the URL example.launchpad.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand.com and SAP Mobile Start is onboarded on this environment with the same URL
Content from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition is exposed with in in-place integration mode

When your purchaser employee is now launching the "Manage Purchase Order" application exposed from the SAP S/4HANA system via SAP Mobile Start, the following technical steps happen during the launch:

SAP Mobile Start is instantiating the in-app browser view and passes the URL which points to the tapped application on SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition.
SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition running on the SAP BTP will most likely not have an active browser session, thus redirecting to the connected Identity Provider.
Ideally the session on the Identity Provider is still valid from the initial onboarding of SAP Mobile Start, otherwise re-established by the configured authentication abilities. (Note: A session cookie on the SAP Cloud Identity Services – Identity Authentication tenant will be set in the context of ondemand.com)
SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition is now loading the context including the information of the targeted application
The in-place app is being loaded in an iFrame on the page, pointing to my000000.s4hana.cloud.sap
Since there is no active session, a redirect is being triggered to the connected Identity Provider of the SAP S/4HANA system (example.accounts.cloud.sap)
The iFrame connected to example.accounts.cloud.sap can neither access cookies of the same SAP Cloud Identity Services – Identity Authentication tenant set in the context of example.accounts.ondemand.com nor use cookies under the context of example.accounts.cloud.sap

The iFrame connected to example.accounts.cloud.sap can neither access cookies of the same SAP Cloud Identity Services – Identity Authentication tenant set in the context of example.accounts.ondemand.com nor use any cookies, since the main window is operated under ondemand.com and an iFrame running under cloud.sap is considered a third-party cookie scenario. The second aspect holds true if the browser is restricting the usage of third-party cookies. As an example, this holds true already for SAP Mobile Start on iOS, since the browser is based on WebKit.

Schematic illustration of issues with the third-party cookie restrictions

As a conclusion, the observed issues are caused by the fact that multiple cloud solution are operated under different super domains. When integrating these technically using an iFrame, which is the case for SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition with the "in-place" mode, browsers will run – depending on their (default) settings – into third-party cookie restrictions. In the worst scenario, this makes the integrated business application unusable for some or all users.

Correcting the Configuration

To avoid any of such cross-domain scenarios leading to possible third-party cookie restrictions, it is key that all integrated cloud solutions – especially those running in an iFrame – are operated under the same root domain. This fact is often referred to as "having a Common Super Domain". Since SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition as a product is supporting the Common Super Domain of SAP, it is recommend to operate it in this case under cloud.sap – matching the root domain of the integrated SAP S/4HANA content.

In our example case this means, we should consume our SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition Site, where the content is exposed to via the URL example.eu10.workzone.cloud.sap instead of the other one mentioned above. This holds true as well for the onboarding configuration of SAP Mobile Start, which can be done either via the QR Code shown in the User Settings when opened with the desired URL or with a Managed App Configuration, where Administrators can push this config using an MDM system to enrolled mobile devices. Please note: In case you were already using SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition with the URL based on ondemand.com, you need to inform your users to use the desired URL going forward. Same applies for previously onboarded users to SAP Mobile Start.

In addition, adjust the SAP Cloud Identity Services – Identity Authentication tenant used by SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition to use the accounts.cloud.sap domain. This will allow that the Identity Provider session (and generally cookies) being established for the main page of SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition can be reused by the app iFrame.

Pro tip: We strongly recommend to leverage the "Identity Authentication" feature of SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition. This procedure will establish a direct trust using Open ID Connect to SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition and it will result in an own "Application" entry within your SAP Cloud Identity Services – Identity Authentication tenant. This also enables you to maintain dedicated configuration settings, separately from your general trust to the SAP BTP. At the time of writing this blog post, this feature is optional. It is very likely that it will get much more relevance in the future – hence our strong recommendation already today.

Schematic illustration of a configuration to avoid third-party cookie scenarios

Summary – Key Take-Aways

Integrating Cloud Solutions that are operated under different super domains can cause issues due to third-party cookie restrictions in modern browsers. (read more)
Going forward, such issues can be solved by leveraging the Common Super Domain cloud.sap
This also holds true for the configured Identity Provider, that is capable of creating and holding a user session.
SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition can be used with the Common Super Domain following the logical schema <subdomain>.<datacenter>.workzone.cloud.sap (read more)
SAP Start can be used with the Common Super Domain following the logical schema <subdomain>.<datacenter>.start.cloud.sap
Make sure to onboard SAP Mobile Start with the correct URL using the QR Code or an MDM solution. Make sure to roll it out correctly to all of your end-users.

Thanks to @florian_buech for co-authoring this article.

How to Connect a Fieldglass System to SAP Start

2024-05-15T10:19:39.651000+02:00

If you want to learn more about SAP Start in general, have a look at our recent "Things You Need to Know About SAP Start” blog post.

Today, we want to show you how easy it is to set up SAP Start seamlessly integrated with SAP Fieldglass. Please note that there is also the possibility to integrate SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition already today, and more SAP cloud business solutions in the future, which we are covered in blog entries. (see links at the end of this blog post)

Prerequisites

To follow along with this how-to, please make sure you already fulfill the following prerequisites:

You have an existing global account on the SAP Business Technology Platform
Your global account has these entitlements assigned
Service Plan Required Quota
SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition foundation 1
SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition foundation (Application) 1
SAP Task Center standard 1
You have (admin) access to your SAP Fieldglass system with the role “Configuration Manager”
You have Contact to your SAP Fieldglass representative
You have an Identity Authentication Service available in your global account

Prepare Business Technology Platform Account

You first need to create a new subaccount in your BTP global account. Open the Account Explorer page of your global account in the BTP cockpit. You should see a dropdown menu called Create where you select Subaccount. Follow the wizard and fill out all the required fields.
Create Subaccount
In your created subaccount, go to the Entitlements section and entitle the subaccount for:
- SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition (plan: foundation & foundation (Application))
  Configure Workzone Entitlement
Expand the Services section to open the Instances and Subscriptions section for the subaccount and create a subscription for SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition
SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition plan foundation subscription form
Go to the Overview section of the subaccount and Enable Cloud Foundry in the subaccount
Go to the Overview section of the subaccount and click Create Space
Create Space
In your created space, expand the Services section to open the Instances section for the space and create a service instance for SAP Task Center
Create a service key for your created service instance of SAP Task Center
- This blog article only covers the creation of the Task Center service instance. For all necessary steps please follow the SAP Task Center Initial Setup guide.
In your subaccount, expand the Connectivity section to navigate to the Destinations section of your subaccount and create a new destination based on the service instance of Task Center
Create Task Center Destination
In your global account, select System Landscape from the left panel, and select the Formations tab
Click Create Formation (in the top right corner)
Enter a Formation Name and select Integration with SAP Start as the Formation Type and click Next Step
Select the SAP Start system that reflects your SAP Build Work Zone subscription which you created in step 3 and click Next Step
Double check on the review page that everything looks correct and click Create

Set Up Fieldglass as a Content Provider for SAP Start

Fieldglass Web Service

For this process it’s recommended to create a new user before you continue. For more information please refer to the Fieldglass User Documentation.

Open your fieldglass instance and navigate to “API Application Keys” within the “Configuration Tools” section. Fieldglass Configuration Tools
Click on “New” to create a new API Key Create new API Key
Fill out the Form with the following values:
- Application Name: SAP Start Integration
- Description: API Key for SAP Start Integration
Create new API Key Form
Click on “Create” to create the API Key
Once the API Key is created, copy the “Client ID” and “Client Secret” values to a secure place. You will need them later. Please ensure that you don’t leave the page.
Underneath the newly created API key click on “New” within the “Setup Webservice Section”. Fieldglass Configuration Tools The visible key is not valid and was only used for demo purposes
Fill out the Form with the following values:
- Application Name: SAP Start Integration
- Virtual Person Name (Username): Select a user which should be used the webservice
- Status: enabled
Create new Webservice Form
Click on “Save” to create the webservice.

Create Destinations in SAP Business Technology Platform

Establish Trust between Fieldglass and SAP Business Technology Platform

Before we can create the required destinations for the Fieldglass connection, you need to establish trust between the destination service and Fieldglass.

Open the Destinations page within the Connectivity section of your subaccount in the BTP cockpit.
On the right-hand side click “Download Trust Configuration” and save the file to your local machine.
Contact your SAP Fieldglass representative to upload this certificate in the SAP Fieldglass tenant trust store.

Create Destinations

You need to create three destinations in your subaccount in the BTP cockpit.

Open the Destinations page within the Connectivity section of your subaccount in the BTP cockpit.

Click New Destination and enter the following values: Fieldglass Designtime Destination

Field Name Value

Name	Fieldglass-<Company Code>_DT
Type	HTTP
Description	Fieldglass <Company Code> Design Time
URL	<Your Fieldglass url>/api/v1/cdm/entities
Proxy Type	Internet
Authentication	OAuth2ClientCredentials
Client ID:	Value of Virtual Person Name (Username)
Client Secret:	Password of the username selected as Virtual Person Name (Username)
Token Service URL Type	Dedicated
Token Service URL	<Your Fieldglass url>/api/oauth2/v2.0/token
Token Service User	Value of Virtual Person Name (Username)
Token Service Password	Password of the username select as Virtual Person Name (Username)

Add the following values as “additional properties” by clicking the “New Property” button on the right-hand side.
Property Name Value
nameIdFormat urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.1:nameid-format:unspecified
URL.headers.X-ApplicationKey Value of API Application Key e.g. DQe20IMhQZd4m46FA43qwIZcb8C
Click Save to create the destination.
Create the second destination by clicking New Destination and enter the following values: Fieldglass Runtime Default Destination
Field Name Value
Name Fieldglass-<Company Code>_RT
Type HTTP
Description Fieldglass <Company Code> Runtime Default
URL <Your Fieldglass url>
Proxy Type Internet
Authentication NoAuthentication
Click Save to create the destination.

Create the third destination by clicking New Destination and enter the following values: Fieldglass RT Data Destination

Field Name Value

Name	Fieldglass-<Company Code>_RT_DATA
Type	HTTP
Description	Fieldglass <Company Code> Runtime
URL	<Your Fieldglass url>/api/v1/cdm
Proxy Type	Internet
Authentication	OAuth2SAMLBearerAssertion
Key Store Location	Leave empty
Key Store Passwort	Leave empty or set an explicit password
Audience	<Your fieldglass URL> e.g. fieldglass.net
AuthnContextClassRef	urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PreviousSession
Client Key:	Value of API Application Key e.g. DQe20IMhQZd4m46FA43qwIZcb8C
Token Service URL Type	Dedicated
Token Service URL	<Your Fieldglass url>/api/oauth2/v2.0/token
Token Service User	Value of Virtual Person Name (Username)
Token Service Password	Password of the username select as Virtual Person Name

Add the following values as “additional properties” by clicking the “New Property” button on the right-hand side.

Property Name Value

nameIdFormat	urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.1:nameid-format:unspecified
URL.headers.X-ApplicationKey	Value of API Application Key e.g. DQe20IMhQZd4m46FA43qwIZcb8C
HTML5.DynamicDestination	true
sap-card-nominations-path	/api/v1/cdm/nominations

Click Save to create the destination.

Navigate to the Channel Manager section in SAP Build Work Zone and add a new Content Provider with the following properties:

Content Provider Creation
Field Name Value

Title	Fieldglass <Company Code>
Description	Enter a meaningful description
ID	Fieldglass_<Company code>
Designtime Destination	Fieldglass_<Company code>_DT
Runtime Destination	Fieldglass_<Company code>_RT
Runtime Destination for Dynamic Data	Fieldglass_<Company code>_RT_DATA
Automatically add all content items to subaccount.	enabled
Use the Identity Provisioning service to provision user authorizations.	enabled

Save the Content Provider

Identity Provisioning

Open your subaccount and navigate to your created Cloud Foundry space, expand the Services section to select Instances for the space and create a service instance for SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition
Create a service key for the service instance of SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition
Open your subaccount, expand the Security section to open the Trust Configuration section
Click on the Establish Trust button and select your IAS tenant
- Ensure your IAS tenant is connected using Open ID Connect (OIDC)
Open your IAS administrator console at <IAS domain>/admin
Navigate to the Identity Provisioning section and open the Source Systems section

Click on + Add to add a new Source System

Select SAP Fieldglass as type

Give the source system a meaningful name

IPS Source System Form

Open the Transformations tab, click on Edit and switch into the JSON mode to paste the following standard transformation

{
    "user": {
        "mappings": [
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.id",
            "targetPath": "$.id",
            "targetVariable": "entityIdSourceSystem"
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.userName",
            "targetPath": "$.userName",
            "correlationAttribute": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.name",
            "targetPath": "$.name",
            "optional": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.displayName",
            "targetPath": "$.displayName",
            "optional": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.active",
            "targetPath": "$.active",
            "optional": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.title",
            "targetPath": "$.title",
            "optional": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.locale",
            "targetPath": "$.locale",
            "optional": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.emails",
            "targetPath": "$.emails",
            "preserveArrayWithSingleElement": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.emails[?(@.primary== true)].value",
            "correlationAttribute": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.timezone",
            "targetPath": "$.timezone",
            "optional": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.addresses",
            "targetPath": "$.addresses",
            "optional": true,
            "preserveArrayWithSingleElement": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.groups",
            "targetPath": "$.groups",
            "optional": true,
            "preserveArrayWithSingleElement": true,
            "functions": [
            {
                "function": "concatString",
                "condition": "'%fg.group.prefix%' !== 'null'",
                "applyOnElements": true,
                "applyOnAttribute": "value",
                "prefix": "%fg.group.prefix%"
            }
            ]
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.schemas",
            "targetPath": "$.schemas",
            "preserveArrayWithSingleElement": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$['resourceExtensions']['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User']['employeeNumber']",
            "targetPath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User']['employeeNumber']",
            "optional": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$['resourceExtensions']['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User']['costCenter']",
            "targetPath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User']['costCenter']",
            "optional": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$['resourceExtensions']['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User']['organization']",
            "targetPath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User']['organization']",
            "optional": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$['resourceExtensions']['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User']['division']",
            "targetPath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User']['division']",
            "optional": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$['resourceExtensions']['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User']['department']",
            "targetPath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User']['department']",
            "optional": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$['resourceExtensions']['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User']['manager']['value']",
            "targetPath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User']['manager']['value']",
            "optional": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$['resourceExtensions']['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User']['manager']['displayName']",
            "targetPath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User']['manager']['displayName']",
            "optional": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$['resourceExtensions']['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User']['organization']",
            "targetPath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User']['organization']",
            "optional": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:sap:2.0:User']['userUuid']",
            "targetPath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:sap:2.0:User']['userUuid']",
            "optional": true
        }
        ]
    },
    "group": {
        "ignore": false,
        "mappings": [
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.id",
            "targetPath": "$.id",
            "targetVariable": "entityIdSourceSystem"
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.displayName",
            "targetPath": "$.displayName",
            "functions": [
            {
                "function": "concatString",
                "condition": "'%fg.group.prefix%' !== 'null'",
                "prefix": "%fg.group.prefix%"
            }
            ]
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.members",
            "targetPath": "$.members",
            "optional": true,
            "preserveArrayWithSingleElement": true
        },
        {
            "sourcePath": "$.schemas",
            "targetPath": "$.schemas",
            "preserveArrayWithSingleElement": true
        }
        ]
    }
    }

IPS Source System Transformations Form

Open the Properties tab and add the following properties
- Authentication: BasicAuthentication
- OAuth2TokenServiceURL: <URL of your your fieldglass instance with path /api/oauth2/v2.0/token e.g. https://fieldglass.net/api/oauth2/v2.0/token>
- ips.trace.failed.entity.content: false
- Password: <Password of the username select as Virtual Person Name (Username)>
- ProxyType: Internet
- Type: HTTP
- URL: <URL of your your fieldglass instance e.g. https://fieldglass.net>
- User: <Value of Virtual Person Name (Username)>
IPS Source System Properties

Navigate to the Identity Provisioning section and open the Target Systems section

Click on + Add to add a new Target System

Select SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition as type
Give the target system a meaningful name
Select your created source system for Fieldglass as the source system
IPS Target System Form

Open the Transformations tab, click on Edit and switch into the JSON mode to paste the following standard transformation

{
    "user": {
        "skipOperations": [
            "update"
        ],
        "mappings": [
            {
                "targetPath": "$.id",
                "sourceVariable": "entityIdTargetSystem"
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.schemas[0]",
                "constant": "urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:core:2.0:User"
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:2.0:mapping']['providerId']",
                "constant": "%cflp.providerId%"
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.emails[0].value",
                "targetPath": "$.emails[0].value",
                "condition": "$.emails[?(@.primary == true)].value == []",
                "optional": true
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.emails[?(@.primary == true)].value",
                "targetPath": "$.emails[0].value",
                "condition": "$.emails[?(@.primary == true)].value != []",
                "optional": true,
                "preserveArrayWithSingleElement": true,
                "functions": [
                    {
                        "function": "elementAt",
                        "index": 0
                    }
                ]
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.emails[0].primary",
                "condition": "$.emails[0].length() > 0",
                "constant": true
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:sap:2.0:User']['userUuid']",
                "targetPath": "$.externalId",
                "optional": true
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.groups[*].value",
                "targetPath": "$.groups[?(@.value)]",
                "optional": true,
                "preserveArrayWithSingleElement": true,
                "functions": [
                    {
                        "function": "resolveEntityIds",
                        "entityType": "group"
                    }
                ]
            }
        ]
    },
    "group": {
        "mappings": [
            {
                "targetPath": "$.id",
                "sourceVariable": "entityIdTargetSystem"
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:2.0:mapping']['providerId']",
                "constant": "%cflp.providerId%"
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.schemas[0]",
                "constant": "urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:core:2.0:Group"
            },
            {
                "targetPath": "$.schemas[1]",
                "constant": "urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:core:2.0:mapping",
                "optional": true
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.id",
                "targetPath": "$.externalId",
                "optional": true
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.id",
                "targetPath": "$.externalId",
                "optional": true,
                "functions": [
                    {
                        "function": "replaceAllString",
                        "regex": "(?i)(^pcd:)",
                        "replacement": ""
                    },
                    {
                        "function": "replaceString",
                        "target": "/",
                        "replacement": ":"
                    },
                    {
                        "function": "replaceString",
                        "target": "(",
                        "replacement": "@"
                    },
                    {
                        "function": "replaceString",
                        "target": ")",
                        "replacement": "+"
                    }
                ]
            },
            {
                "sourcePath": "$.members[*].value",
                "targetPath": "$.members[?(@.value)]",
                "optional": true,
                "preserveArrayWithSingleElement": true,
                "functions": [
                    {
                        "function": "resolveEntityIds"
                    }
                ]
            }
        ]
    }
}

IPS Target System Transformations Form

Open the Properties tab and add the following properties
- Authentication: BasicAuthentication
- cflp.group.unique.attribute: externalId,['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:2.0:mapping']['providerId']
- cflp.patch.group.members.above.threshold: 5000
- cflp.providerId: <ID of the created content provider in your SAP Build Work Zone tenant e.g. Fieldglass_IE1>
- cflp.user.unique.attribute: emails[0].value,['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:2.0:mapping']['providerId'],externalId
- ips.trace.failed.entity.content: false
- OAuth2TokenServiceURL: <Value of the url property of your created SAP Build Work Zone service key + /oauth/token>
- Password: <Value of the clientsecret property of your created SAP Build Work Zone service key>
- ProxyType: Internet
- Type: HTTP
- URL: <Value of the portal-service property of your created SAP Build Work Zone service key>
- User: <Value of the clientid property of your created SAP Build Work Zone service key>
IPS Target System Properties Form

Navigate to the Identity Provisioning section and open the Source Systems section
Select your created source system of your Fieldglass tenant
Open on the Jobs tab
Click on Run Now for the Read Job to start the synchronization of your S/4HANA users and roles into your SAP Build Work Zone tenant
Navigate to the Identity Provisioning section and open the Provisioning Logs section to see the logs and status of your synchronization jobs
As the last step, you need to configure the Fieldglass system to use the SAP Identity Authentication Service (IAS) as the Identity Provider (IdP) for Single Sign-On (SSO). Please follow the Fieldglass SSO Documentation to configure the SSO settings in your Fieldglass system.

Final Result

You should now have a working setup of SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition with SAP Start and SAP Fieldglass. For the blog post copy and adjust the section Accessing SAP Start and That is it! from one of the following existing blog posts instead of this Final Result section.

Service	Plan	Required Quota
Cloud Management Service	local	1
SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition	foundation	1
SAP Task Center	standard	1

Name	Fieldglass-<Company Code>_RT
Type	HTTP
Description	Fieldglass <Company Code> Runtime Default
URL	<Your Fieldglass url>
Proxy Type	Internet
Authentication	NoAuthentication