SAP Community - SAP Mobile Start

SAP Mobile Start V2.0 - Release Update

2024-10-15T08:28:09.290000+02:00

With the latest release of SAP Mobile Start, you get significant enhancements that will make your usage of SAP Mobile Start even more enjoyable and efficient. Besides Spaces & Pages and declarative integration cards from SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition, you will also get some nice enhancements for tasks.

Spaces & Pages – New Experience
Introduced for the web some time back, we now support Spaces & Pages also in SAP Mobile Start. This comes with several advantages for you, like an improved organization and categorization of your content - as you do know already from the web. You get a more structured view of your applications and information, making it easier to locate and access your relevant resources quickly.
If you use groups to structure your apps, your groups will also be shown on sub-pages on the Apps screen in the future, what significantly improves user experience.

Screenshot: Spaces & Pages

Cards
So far, SAP Mobile Start has supported insight cards from SAP Start. With the release 2.0, we do support the “New Experience” of SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition and you will get your declarative integration cards, embedded in the respective pages on the Apps screen. By tapping on the card, you navigate into the card details. Depending on the functional scope of a card, actions can be directly triggered from it. If you do use cards in SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition already, then they will automatically appear for you within the SAP Mobile Start version 2.0.

Screenshot: Cards from SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition

SAP S/4HANA Situations Handling
Situation Handling informs you about situations that need your attention. This includes for example upcoming deadlines, delays, expiring contracts, and so on. With SAP Mobile Start version 2.0, we now also support the standard framework capabilities of Situation Handling. You always find your latest situations in your Latest To-Dos section on the Start screen and all situations on the To-Dos screen.

Tasks
Tasks are one key element of SAP Mobile Start as they ensure that you are always on top of your relevant business workflows. Task-based notifications and widgets help to ensure that you never oversee or forget an important task. With the latest version of SAP Mobile Start, you can see URL attachments for tasks in the new links section within the attachments on the task details screen. By tapping on the link, the respective link is opened in a new window. Typical links are a link to a document stored on a file server or a link to an ISO document.

With version 2.0, the app also supports non-finalising actions for tasks. Those are mainly relevant for tasks that come from partner solutions. With a non-finalizing task action you can update the task without complete it. Typical non-finalising actions are to increase a task priority or change the task status.

Screenshot: Non-finalising actions for tasks

Finally, you get a new To-Dos detail page layout for Android! It was specifically designed for larger screens like tablets and foldable devices. With the booming market for foldables and tablets on Android, there's a growing need to optimize our layouts for larger screens.

Screenshot: Task details large screen on Android

I hope you will enjoy those new features in SAP Mobile Start.

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

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 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.

Large Screen Design and Implementation at SAP Mobile Start

2024-10-23T10:13:31.140000+02:00

We are very excited to announce the introduction of our new to-do details page layout for Android in our latest 2.0 release! 🎉 It was specifically designed for larger screens like tablets and foldable devices. With the booming market for foldables and tablets on Android, there's a growing need to optimize our layouts for larger screens.

Google recently released new guidelines on canonical layouts with recommendations on how to best make use of the additional space on larger screens. In addition to these guidelines, new APIs have been introduced by Google to seamlessly implement the new patterns.

In this blog post, we will explore the business value, design, and implementation of large screen patterns.

Business Value of Large Screen Optimization

New to-do details page for Android with 2.0 release

At SAP Mobile Start, we began optimizing our large screen layouts by introducing a supporting pane to the to-do details screen. The comments section now appears as an individual pane that can be toggled on and off. This allows you to read and write comments while browsing through to-do details and navigating attachments simultaneously, reducing the need for full-screen navigation and making better use of the additional space.

For SAP’s business applications, the adoption of adaptive large screen user interfaces results in a meaningful improvement to the end user’s productivity on mobile devices. The larger screen real estate can improve daily tasks like:

Data entry and form filling: Provide extra space for on-screen keyboards and data entry fields to minimize scrolling, reduce errors, and expedite the process.
Data visualization and analysis: Enhance readability and interactivity of complex data sets, such as charts and spreadsheets, for quicker and more effective analysis.
Document editing and review: Simplify editing with full-page views of texts, images, or presentations, facilitate side-by-side comparisons, and offer stylus support for precise input.
Navigation and control: Making menus and controls easily accessible next to the workspace and incorporating intuitive gesture-based navigation.

Large Screen Design

Google’s canonical layout guidelines have reshaped the way we design for large screens. Instead of thinking about specific devices like phones, foldables, or tablets, the focus shifts more towards window size classes that require the layout to be more flexible and adapt to defined breakpoints.

Here is an overview on the window size classes defined by Google:

Window size classes by Google

For large screen design, Google advises to think in "panes" rather than screens. A pane is a semantic container that helps structure content into multiple columns. To design for all size classes, it is crucial to analyze the app’s structure and understand the relationships between screens to define the needed panes. On Compact, users navigate hierarchically through full-screen panes. On Large though, multiple panes are displayed side by side which is a fundamental difference between the size classes. For more information, check out Google’s guide for designing across window size classes.

Google suggests a few standard layouts that can be used for structuring large screens: List-Detail, Supporting Pane, and Feed. Depending on the app’s use cases, any of these patterns can be applied. You can find more information in the M3 Guidelines.

Material Design 3 Guidelines, Canonical layouts - Overview

Design Best Practices

Defining the interaction and visual design for the panes is the tricky part. How do you visualize the relation between panes and ensure that the visual hierarchy is easily understood? How can you organize the screen layout so users can intuitively navigate the UI, even in more complex, information-dense layouts?

Here are some best practices we learned through our collaboration with Google:

Optimize Layouts: Rather than stretching content across the full screen, try to use multiple panes, multi-column layouts, letterboxing, or dialogs, if reasonable.

Options for full-screen layouts

Navigational Elements: Aim for 5-7 navigation targets in rails and drawers. A drawer can contain more navigation targets than a rail, as it can also offer secondary navigation targets next to primary navigation. Drawers can be expanded or collapsed as needed by using the toggle button. When switching between size classes, keep the order of navigation targets consistent.

Nav Rail vs. Nav Drawer

Layout Changes: Avoid re-flowing content within panes during layout changes, as this can cause users to lose context. Instead, reduce non-relevant elements to free up space (e.g. collapse nav drawer to nav rail).

Layout changes

Unique Pane Information: Each pane should offer unique, relevant information to users without repetition. Special attention should be paid to scenarios with an overview pane and a details pane.

Unique panes

Pane Background Styling: Style pane backgrounds are based on current focus and priority so that it helps to guide user attention. Ensure a consistent use of background colors for panes across size classes. Using a color system based on the M3 color scheme helps provide sufficient contrast between fore- and background elements.

Pane background styling

Contextual Use of Top-App Bar: Use the top app bar globally for the whole screen or locally within individual panes - or even both, depending on the use case. But avoid blocking too much vertical space, many layouts work well without a headline for each area.

Top-app bar usage

Supporting Panes: For temporary actions like filtering or pickers, use the floating option. Don’t use a supporting pane in a list-detail manner (use list-detail pattern instead) and don’t put multiple supporting panes next to each other. Limit hierarchical navigation in supporting panes to one level deep, with back and close buttons appropriately placed.
Dialog Use: Only use dialogs when minimal sub-navigation is required. List-detail patterns or supporting panes are often better alternatives. Never show a dialog on top of another dialog.

Integration into SAP Design System

UX Guidelines for Large Screen Patterns

SAP‘s Fiori Design System team is working on business use case specific UX guidelines and UI patterns to unify and enhance the large screen experience across SAP mobile apps. This includes patterns like “Profile and Settings”, “Sort and Filter”, or “Create” and enhancing the Horizon color system utilizing the Android M3 color capability. Additional how-to guidance will be provided for product teams to fully adopt the adaptive layouts.

For more information on the design system, check out the SAP Fiori for Android design guideline.

Implementation of Large Screen Patterns

Building on the design principles and guidelines, let's delve into the practical aspects of implementing large screen patterns.

Android has introduced a suite of powerful APIs to facilitate the creation of engaging and efficient user experiences on larger screens. These tools provide developers with the flexibility to adapt their applications to various screen sizes and orientations, ensuring optimal user satisfaction.

WindowSizeClass: Adapting Your UI to Any Screen

WindowSizeClasses are a cornerstone of adaptive UI design. This API provides essential insights into the available screen space, empowering developers to create layouts that effortlessly transition across multiple devices. By classifying the display area available to your app as compact, medium, and expanded, WindowSizeClass simplifies the creation of UIs that seamlessly adapt to changing screen conditions.

It is crucial to remember that the screen space available to your app can differ from the screen size of the device for several reasons. For instance, split-screen mode on mobile devices can partition the screen between multiple apps. On ChromeOS, Android apps often reside in resizable free-form windows. Foldable devices offer distinct screen sizes depending on their folded or unfolded state.

Moreover, the window size class can dynamically change throughout your app's lifecycle due to factors like device orientation changes, multitasking, and device folding. To ensure a seamless user experience, your app's UI must adapt accordingly.

Compose Material 3 Adaptive library: A modern, declarative approach to building Adaptive apps

The new Compose Material 3 Adaptive library introduces a modern, declarative way to build adaptive apps. It simplifies the process by eliminating the need for custom UI logic, reducing code duplication, and easing the maintenance of multiple layout files.

This library offers below 3 composables that handle window size classes, navigation components, multi-pane layouts, and support for foldable devices, including hinge locations and postures all out of the box.

NavigationSuiteScaffold: Automatically switches between navigation bar and navigation rail depending on app window size class and device posture.
ListDetailPaneScaffold: Implements the list-detail canonical layout. It displays a list and the detail of a selected item side-by-side on larger windows, while showing only the list or the detail on compact and medium-sized windows.
SupportingPaneScaffold: Implements the supporting pane canonical layout. It shows the main content pane alongside a supporting pane on larger windows, but only the main content pane on compact and medium-sized windows.

Integrating M3 Adaptive components into SAP Mobile Start

At SAP Mobile Start, we were able to integrate NavigationSuiteScaffold in just 5 minutes, swiftly adapting our navigation UI to different window sizes. It eliminated the need for custom logic, which previously determined the navigation component based on various window size classes.

*With just few lines of code, Navigation UI logic is handled via NavigationSuiteScaffold

Adopting the NavigationSuiteScaffold significantly reduced the codebase dedicated to custom navigation UI logic by 59%, decreasing lines of code from 379 to 156.

Integrating SupportingPaneScaffold to optimize to-do details

We integrated the SupportingPaneScaffold to optimize our to-do details screen for large displays and foldable devices. Although integrating SupportingPaneScaffold required a refactoring of our existing logic, the process was effortless and quick. This integration allows us to efficiently organize primary and secondary content in the to-do details. The supporting pane automatically adjusts the UI based on the window size class, eliminating the need for additional custom logic.

*SupportingPaneScaffold showcasing to-do details in the main pane and a comments section in the supporting pane

Spoiler

*Some details have been removed to avoid revealing internal implementation specifics.

A complete guide to integrating M3 Adaptive Components can be found here.

Large screen app quality guidelines

Google has established large screen app quality guidelines to ensure that your adaptive app performs optimally on tablets, foldable devices, and ChromeOS. These guidelines include tests that help you verify the functionality of your app for essential user journeys.

Learn More About Large Screen Design and Implementation

For those interested in diving deeper into the topic, here are some valuable resources:

We are currently also looking into other canonical layouts to further improve the user experience for large screen devices. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to enhance SAP Mobile Start! 🚀

By Laura Bergmann (Lead UX Designer) and Aditya Arora (Lead Android Developer)

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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 Mobile Start, versão 2.0

2024-10-24T11:47:48.795000+02:00

A versão mais recente traz várias melhorias que tornam o uso do aplicativo ainda mais agradável e eficiente proporcionando novas experiências do usuário.

Agora, o suporte ao Spaces & Pages está disponível no SAP Mobile Start, proporcionando uma melhor organização e categorização do conteúdo. Isso facilita a localização e o acesso rápido aos recursos relevantes.
Grupos: Se você usa grupos para estruturar seus aplicativos, esses grupos serão exibidos em subpáginas na tela de Aplicativos, melhorando significativamente a experiência.
SAP Build Work Zone: Os cartões de integração declarativa são incorporados nas respectivas páginas na tela de Aplicativos. Ao tocar no cartão, você navega até os detalhes do cartão e pode acionar ações diretamente a partir dele.
Aprimoramentos nas Tarefas: A versão mais recente também traz melhorias para as tarefas, incluindo notificações baseadas em tarefas e widgets que ajudam a garantir que você nunca perca ou esqueça uma tarefa importante.
Notificações: O Tratamento de Situações informa sobre eventos que precisam de sua atenção, como prazos futuros, atrasos e contratos expirados. Com a versão 2.0, esses recursos são suportados no SAP Mobile Start, permitindo que você veja as situações mais recentes na seção Tarefas Pendentes na tela inicial.
Widgets: As tarefas são essenciais para manter seus fluxos de trabalho em dia. A versão mais recente permite ver anexos de URL para tarefas, que podem ser abertos em uma nova janela.
Ações Não Finalizadas: Agora é possível realizar ações em tarefas sem concluí-las, como aumentar a prioridade ou alterar o status da tarefa.
Novo Layout para Android: Um novo layout de página de detalhes de tarefas pendentes foi projetado para telas maiores, como tablets e dispositivos dobráveis, otimizando a experiência de uso.

Essas melhorias visam proporcionar uma experiência de usuário mais estruturada e eficiente, facilitando a gestão de aplicativos e tarefas no SAP Mobile Start.

O SAP Mobile Experience oferece soluções móveis nativas inteligentes que ajudam as empresas a criarem processos de ponta a ponta mais eficientes, resilientes e sustentáveis, melhorando a vida profissional das pessoas onde quer que estejam.

Visite a página da comunidade SAP Mobile Experience

Fontes

Joule on Mobile & Start Screen Personalization: SAP Mobile Start V2.1 - Release Update

2024-12-05T07:12:58.497000+01:00

Just recently, Joule - our generative AI copilot turned 1!
In this one year, Joule has revolutionized the way how users interact with their business solutions, be it HR, Sales, Procurement or IT – but there was one significant piece missing: mobile access.

With our latest releases of SAP Mobile Start, you can now use Joule while being mobile. Instead of searching for the right app, opening it, and then looking for the info, you can now ask Joule in natural language.

While our teams add more and more business content/ scenarios and functions to Joule, we also plan to embed Joule into further mobile apps, like SAP SuccessFactors or SAP Service and Asset Manager.

But now, let´s have a look at how Joule within SAP Mobile Start helps you work faster, get smarter insights when you need them, and interact more smoothly with your business systems while being mobile.

The Joule mobile client is embedded within the SAP Mobile Start header bar and can be opened with a single tap from any main screen. It provides the same main functionality and content as the desktop client if the content is enabled for mobile usage.

Screenshot: SAP Mobile Start with embedded Joule

After opening the Joule client, you just enter your commands in natural language and Joule provides you with the respective answer.

Let´s have a look at three concrete examples:
Imagine you are in a meeting and need to check on your sales orders that have not been delivered so far. With Joule in SAP Mobile Start, you just ask “Show sales orders with delivery status not completed” and Joule will provide you the respective list.

Screenshot: Joule – Example open orders (SAP S/4HANA)

Or you are a consultant who is new to the role, and a customer asks you how to customize a sales order in SAP S/4HANA. With Joule in SAP Mobile Start, you just pull out your phone and ask Joule, and you will get immediately the right SAP Help pages listed.

Screenshot: Joule – Example documentation (SAP Help)

Finally, imagine you have a new team member, Maria, who has just joined from another team, and you want to quickly check when she has initially joined the company. Just ask Joule.

Screenshot: Joule – Example hiring date (SAP SuccessFactors)

Joule also allows you to navigate to other apps to get further details. Those could be web apps or native apps like the native SAP SuccessFactors app. So, if you want to learn more about Maria and her career so far, you just tap the “Profile” button and Joule will open Maria´s profile in the native SAP SuccessFactors app on your phone, with all the information about your new team member.

Screenshot: Example native app integration

To initiate a Joule conversation, you're not limited to type in the request. You can now use Siri and Siri Shortcuts to seamlessly interact with Joule - which even works better with Apple Intelligence. Simply say "Hey Siri, ask SAP. Show my sales orders with delivery status not completed" and Joule will provide you with the respective content within the app.

Joule truly changes the way you interact with your business systems – it becomes much more natural. You can articulate your business needs in natural language and Joule responds by swiftly providing seamless access to your enablement content what will help you to execute your tasks faster and in a far more convenient way.

As of today, not all your prompts and web apps are supported on the phone; but more and more Joule business skills and scenarios are added. We are also working on adding some valuable mobile-specific Joule capabilities, so stay tuned for more.

If you have enabled Joule in SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition, or SAP Start, the mobile Joule client will automatically be available in SAP Mobile Start. No additional steps are needed.

Do not miss our brand new Joule in SAP Mobile Start video: “Bring Joule Everywhere! SAP's AI Copilot is Now Available on Mobile”.

Besides bringing Joule to mobile, we have added more helpful features to further enhance your experience with SAP Mobile Start, like Personalization of the Start Screen. With the new release, you can easily move the Start Screen sections such as Insights or News up or down as they work best for you – and hide sections if you do not need them. As always, it is super easy and intuitive and will boost your productivity as you can adjust the Start Screen now, based on your preferences.

Screenshot: SAP Start Screen personalization

Finally, we have enhanced the Apps and To-Dos Screen. Now you can expand and collapse your spaces and pages section on the app screen, and we have provided an enhanced filtering experience on the To-Do screen that allows you to set multiple filters.

Screenshot: To-Dos Screen with filtering option

I hope you will enjoy those new features in SAP Mobile Start.

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

Joule is Now Integrated into SAP Build Work Zone!

2024-12-11T14:19:37.970000+01:00

We’re thrilled to announce that Joule, SAP’s generative AI assistant, is now integrated into SAP Build Work Zone standard edition, SAP Start, and SAP Mobile Start. This marks a significant step in empowering users to work faster and smarter, with seamless access to insights and information at their fingertips.

Integrating Joule into SAP Build Work Zone brings a unique value to users by effortlessly connecting data from multiple backend systems into a single interface. By providing answers and insights from any supported system, Joule eliminates the need to switch between tools. This empowers users to stay informed with all relevant information and applications in one place.

What is Joule?

Joule is SAP’s cutting-edge generative AI assistant, designed to bring intelligence and efficiency to every aspect of work. Joule helps users can interact naturally, ask questions, and get precise answers related to their business processes. For instance, end users can inquire about the status of a purchase order and be guided directly to it, streamlining their workflow and saving valuable time.

Joule isn’t just a productivity tool; it’s a game-changer for decision making and operational efficiency. It makes everyday tasks easier and more intuitive for end users.

Very recently, Joule turned 1! Learn more about Joule here.

BIG NEWS: Joule in SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition

With our latest release, Joule is now integrated into SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition. This enables end users to interact with Joule and get answers from all connected systems.

This boosts productivity by leveraging Joule intuitive capabilities with SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition. Users can navigate quickly to the functionality needed for their next task, receive precise answers on how to use SAP applications, and complete tasks effortlessly using natural language requests. It can help navigate to relevant applications and perform transactions. Additionally, Joule empowers more informed decision making with answers derived directly from your business document.

Joule can also serve as your personal guide within SAP Build Work Zone, helping you navigate and make the most of your site. Whether you need assistance with managing content or accessing specific features, Joule provides step-by-step guidance.

Here is an example of how you can use Joule within your Work Zone site: Imagine you're trying to track the status of a purchase order. Instead of navigating through multiple screens, you simply ask Joule, “Has my purchase order been approved?”. Joule instantly provides the status and key details directly within its window in SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition. This seamless interaction eliminates the need to switch between applications, saving time and effort.

Prerequisites for Using Joule in SAP Build Work Zone

To begin leveraging Joule in your SAP Build Work Zone environment, ensure the following prerequisites are met:

Joule requires Identity Authentication for user login. If you haven’t already switched to SAP Cloud Identity Services - Identity Authentication, this step must be completed beforehand. For further guidance, see Switching to SAP Cloud Identity Services - Identity Authentication.
Before completing the Joule onboarding tasks, it should be ensured that he required prerequisites for both SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition and for Joule have been completed.
Run the Joule booster to activate the integration and complete the setup process as seen in the steps below.

Set up subaccount by selecting the subaccount that should be used for Joule provisioning and configurations.

Selecting the SAP solutions where Joule should be enabled.

Selecting the SAP solutions whose capability packages should be provisioned in Joule.

How to Get Started with the Integration

Integrating Joule into your SAP Build Work Zone is straightforward. After successfully running the Joule booster and completing the integration between SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition and Joule, a new setting becomes available in the Site Setting screen of your site.

As an administrator, navigate to the Site Settings screen and enable the Joule option under the Services section. Once enabled, the Joule icon will appear in the header of your runtime site, giving users instant access to the AI-powered assistant for enhanced productivity and elevated outcomes across business.

For further details on prerequisites and setup, check out this blog post.

Please note that Joule is not available in SAP BTP trial account.

Looking Ahead: What’s Next?

The integration of Joule into SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition is on the horizon and is coming in 2025. It will bring the Gen AI-powered experiences to an even broader set of users. The advanced edition will offer a wider scope with additional capabilities, tailored to meet diverse business needs. This expansion ensures that every end user can fully harness generative AI for greater efficiency and smarter decision-making.

Joule’s integration into SAP Build Work Zone is more than an enhancement—it's a transformation. It combines the power of SAP Build Work Zone with Joule's intelligence, letting users focus on what matters most. While the complexities of business processes are handled by a trusted AI assistant.

Stay tuned for latest updates as we bring even more innovation to your SAP Build experience.

***

Learn more:

➤ Announcement blog for Joule in SAP Mobile Start

➤ SAP Build Work Zone on: sap.com / SAP Community

➤ SAP Builders Community Group

➤ More information on new product features: Roadmap

SAP Fiori for Android and iOS 24.12 – New Enhancements and Branching for Design Kits

2025-02-05T06:27:36.309000+01:00

Wrapping up 2024 and starting into 2025, we keep continuously refining and advancing our mobile design system to empower mobile business app creation at scale. Thanks to insightful feedback from app teams, we've updated existing UI components and rolled out new ones to take mobile app experiences to the next level. We've also aimed for feature parity between SAP Fiori for Android and iOS to ensure a seamless experience and simplified application development across the platforms.

New Design Kits on Figma Community

The Figma Design Kits for Android, iOS, WatchOS and Wear OS are now available on the Figma Community. We’ve also improved the kits providing a better user experience, added more helpful information, and fixed bugs to make designing enterprise apps smoother than ever.

SAP Fiori Design Kits available on Figma Community

In our new Design Kits, your can find comprehensive information cards that provides details on usage, technical names, updates, and the component description now links directly to the SAP Design Guidelines. Besides this, we have Improved component properties, providing a more structured layout and consistent naming along Variables for styles - to include color modes, accent colors, semantic colors, and icon sizes.

You can find the latest SAP Design Kits on Figma.com/community

Introducing Branching Approach in Design Kit

No more creating new design kit versions – from release 24.12 onwards, our Design Kit is updated through a Figma branch, making it easier to update and maintain the library. Simply click on "See all branches" to view details about each update.

Design Kit Versioning with Branches

Major updates to the Design Kit and SDK are identified by release numbers such as 24.12 and include an overview of the updated components. Minor updates, identified by release numbers such as 24.12.1, include bug fixes as well as an overview of the affected components.

New in SAP Fiori for Android 24.12

Check out the latest UI enhancements and additions that our team has been working on for this release.

Avatars

The avatar component that is used to display user profiles, initials, placeholders, icons, or business-related images can now be used in an avatar group with an optional label.

See Avatars to find out more.

Avatar and avatar group variations on compact (left) and expanded screens (right)

Document Scanner

The document scanner leverages Google’s ML Kit, allowing users to digitize physical documents with an on-device flow. Users can select automatic or manual capture and easily edit, retake, or delete specific or all scanned documents.

For more information, check out the Document Scanner article in the SAP Fiori for Android Design Guidelines.

Document scanner using Google’s ML Kit

Loading State Button

The loading state button is a new button variant featuring a circular progress indicator that appears inside a button when a user-triggered, non-disruptive progress is being processed. It supports various layouts, including a left-aligned button, right-aligned button, two opposite buttons, and text only, with flexible positioning to adapt to different use cases.

See Loading State Button for more details.

From top to bottom: contained loading state button, tonal loading state button, text and icon loading state button

Object Cell

The object cell has been enhanced to provide a more flexible object cell structure and supports nested components such as the rating control and KPI. On top of that, nested components can be easily swapped as needed.

Refer to Object Cell for more details.

Object cells with single actions on the right

Section Header/Footer

The section header can now also be used as a section footer. It supports various layouts, including a left-aligned button, right-aligned button, two opposite buttons, and text only, with flexible positioning to adapt to different use cases.

Find out more about the Section Footer.

Section footer with left-aligned button and header (top) and right-aligned button and header (bottom)

Chip Form Cell

The chip form cell has been enhanced with a mandatory field indicator (*) that can be placed next to the label above the chip.

See Chips to learn more about this component.

Single selection chips

Attachment Form Cell

The attachment form cell also supports adding a mandatory field indicator as well as a helper text and an error state.

Check out the Attachent Form Cell article to learn more.

Attachment form cell as a mandatory field before validation (left) and after validation in error state (right)

Date and Range Picker

The date and range pickers are dialogs used to select a single date or a range of dates. For view-based picker dialogs, it is now possible to add a disabled state for dates and ranges, minimum/maximum selectable dates, and status indicator decorations for dates.

Selecting a range in the range picker

For more information, refer to Date & Time Pickers.

New in SAP Fiori for iOS 24.12

Next, let’s check out the SAP Fiori for iOS enhancements and additions.

Avatar/Avatar Group

The avatar/avatar group is a new standalone component that is customizable in terms of size, shape, color, and layout.

See Avatars and Images to find out more.

Examples of Avatars and Profile Images

Document Scanner

The new document scanner leverages Apple’s VisionKit, allowing users to digitize physical documents with an on-device flow. Users can select automatic or manual capture and easily edit, retake, or delete specific or all scanned documents.

Refer to Document Scanner for more details.

Document scanner

Object Cell

The object cell has been enhanced to provide more flexibility, which mirrors the modular structure of the card component including swappable nested elements such as the rating control.

Check out the Object Cell guideline article for more details.

Object cell single action variation

Form Cells

The form cell components have been updated with the option to add an asterisk to indicate mandatory fields.

See Attachment Form Cell, Filter Form Cell, Segmented Control Form Cell

Form cells with mandatory field indicator

Rating Control

The rating control now includes the option to display half stars for read-only ratings. You can also add optional leading and trailing text, and users benefit from improved accessibility features.

For more information, check out the Rating Control article in the SAP Fiori for iOS guidelines.

Rating control with label

Step Progress Indicator

The step progress indicator is a progress indicator for tracking and displaying a user’s state in a user flow. With the latest update, you can now choose to use icon nodes as an alternative to numeric and alphabetical nodes.

See Step Progress Indicator for more information.

Step progress indicator on compact (left) and expanded screens (right)

Multi-Message Handling

When a screen contains multiple messages, the banner can show an overview of the type and number of messages with an action link to open a multi-message handling detail view. In the multi-message detail view, it is possible to: filter for a specific message type, clear a single message or all messages of one type, and navigate to the location of the cell with the link.

For further details, see Multi-Message Handling.

Multi-message handling detail view on compact screen (left) and regular screen (right)

Resources

Design Guidelines

SAP Fiori Mobile Design Guidelines for Android and iOS

A detailed documentation on component anatomy, behavior, and interactions allows you to use components that match your use case. Crosslinks to Google’s Material Design Guidelines for Android and Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for iOS, as well as links to development documentation, help you navigate to these resources. Additionally, you can find a feedback function on each guideline article that allows you to provide feedback.

SAP Fiori for Android Design Guidelines | SAP Fiori for iOS Design Guidelines

Design Kits for Figma

SAP Fiori for Android and iOS Design Kit

With the updated SAP Fiori for Android and iOS Design Kits, it’s now easier than ever to use the latest components and patterns in your mobile design. By using the Design Kits, you can quickly create a consistent user experience that enables app implementations at scale.

SAP Fiori for Android 24.12 Design Kits | SAP Fiori for iOS 24.12 Design Kits

SAP User Experience Q1/2025 Update – Part 1: Many New Innovations Available (AI, Joule and More)

2025-02-10T19:24:47.116000+01:00

This series of posts gives an overview of user experience innovations in the cloud from the last six months, covering our whole portfolio, in particular SAP SuccessFactors and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2502. It also gives an overview of innovations in our UI technologies, making it ever easier to build and integrate UIs.

AI is revolutionizing user experience, giving users capabilities unheard of just a few years ago. SAP is harnessing the power of AI to help business users work more effectively: Joule is your copilot for seamless access to a variety of products a user needs, now covering 80% of the most-used transactions. Generative AI embedded in business applications gives users unprecedented insights and convenience. Beyond that, we continue to provide new applications with a great user experience, as well as UX-enhancing features.

How is AI, and especially generative AI, changing user experience for business users? Essentially via one or more of these patterns:

Summarizing business data in an easy to understand way – in text or graphical form.
Guiding and Recommending options or actions based on the current business context.
Creating proposals for texts or business data and entities such as assignments, performance goals with milestones etc., often based on natural language input.
Helping you write texts to people internally and externally, with our AI writing assistant.
Interacting via natural language with your application, e.g. search, filtering, analytical queries – as an alternative to established UI interactions.
Assisting you with all of the above, wherever you are, for all our cloud products – via Joule, your copilot for SAP systems.

Our overarching goal is to provide a great user experience everywhere. AI is a powerful means for achieving that, but of course you can also have a great user experience in applications without embedded AI.

A good user experience also needs to address teamwork, not just the experience of each individual – in other words, helping SAP users collaborate and work together.

I’ve collected examples from our latest releases to show how we are doing this – starting with our cross-product UX innovations in Joule and central entry points before looking at product UX innovations. Here is what the series will cover; as each part becomes available in the next couple of weeks I will update this list with links to each post:

Central UX Services (this post)
- Joule – latest UX innovations
- Central entry points and services:
  - SAP Start / SAP Build Work Zone
  - SAP Task Center
  - SAP Mobile Start
ERP: SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2502 and SAP Fiori launchpad (AI, Joule and More).
HR: SAP SuccessFactors (AI, Joule and More).
Spend: SAP Ariba and SAP Fieldglass.
Selling: SAP Customer Experience and SAP Industry Cloud – Retail.
Analytics and Platform: SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Business Technology Platform.
UI Design and Technology for web and mobile.

Before we get started: if you haven’t already seen them, do have a look at the overview of public cloud UX innovations I posted in February and July 2024:

This series of posts includes Joule and AI UX highlights from the above products, but for a more comprehensive overview of our recent AI innovations and SAP’s Business AI strategy, with many UX examples, have a look at:

SAP Business AI: Release Highlights Q4 2024
White Paper: SAP Business AI.

Joule User Experience Innovations

Joule is the AI-powered copilot for SAP systems, offering a powerful new user experience, using natural language to access our cloud products and providing a seamless flow for the user.

Now, Joule is generally available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2502, as well as for our central entry points in the web SAP Start and SAP Build Work Zone (both standard and advanced editions). You can find examples in the respective product sections in this series; this section focusses on generic capabilities recently introduced or coming soon for Joule. If you want an overview of what’s new, or want to set up Joule in your landscape, have a look at the documentation:

Joule already covers 80% of the most-used transactions in SAP systems and 1,200+ skills, tailored to business roles across SAP’s cloud portfolio such as hiring manager, billing specialist, procurement manager etc.

Joule Available on Mobile

Joule is also now generally available for mobile, running natively with SAP Mobile Start. Figure 1 shows examples of Joule running on a mobile phone.

Figure 1: Examples showing Joule integrated in SAP Mobile Start, showing from left to right: the start page, the informational pattern accessing SAP Help Portal, and the transactional pattern used to interact with SAP S/4HANA Cloud and then with SAP SuccessFactors. ALT Text: Four images are shown: the start page shows a “How can I help you” text, followed by some suggested prompts as buttons; the informational pattern shows the prompt “How can I customize a sales order”. Below that, the sixteen-line written answer is shown, followed by a “Search results” selector and three top search results. The navigational pattern shows the prompt “Show sales orders with delivery status not completed”, below that, the reply from Joule “Here’s what I’ve found” is followed by a card containing three lines and an “Open” button. A second transactional example with the prompt “Show profile of Maria Alvares”, followed by the result and a button for navigating to her profile.

On Apple devices you can now use Siri and Siri Shortcuts to seamlessly interact with Joule - which works even better with Apple Intelligence. Simply say "Hey Siri, ask SAP. Show my sales orders with delivery status not completed" and Joule will provide you with the respective content within the app.

Note that as of today, not all your prompts and web apps are supported on the phone; however, we are continuously adding further Joule business skills and scenarios.

Find out more here:

Joule on Mobile & Start Screen Personalization: SAP Mobile Start V2.1 - Release Update

Joule Analytical Pattern coming soon

In Q1/2025 we plan to provide a controlled release of the new analytical pattern for Joule, for those products listed above for which Joule is available. General availability currently planned for Q2/2025 (as usual for forward-looking statements, our plans are subject to change). It is powered by SAP Analytics Cloud, with data from models that are indexed by the Just Ask feature of SAP Analytics Cloud.

This means that Joule will soon support four interaction patterns, as shown in Figure 2.

Informational pattern, for querying written documents, such as SAP documentation in the SAP Help Portal, or customer policies etc.
Navigational pattern, for finding and navigating to applications.
Transactional pattern, for interacting directly with business applicatinos
Planned New: Analytical pattern, for answering analytical queries directly in Joule.

Figure 2: Joule Interaction Patterns. ALT text: four interaction patterns are shown: informational, with the prompt “what are the key rules for a team outing” followed by an eight-line answer and a link to a source document; navigational, showing a button “Go to Org Chart” after approving a position; transactional, with the text “Below are the new position details set to be hired starting today”, followed by a card summarizing the key details, and a prompt by the user “Send for approval”; Analytical, showing the prompt “What is the hiring versus attrition trend for this job role in the past 12 months?” and the answer shown as a chart with one line for hired and one for percentage attrition, plus numbers showing 124 similar roles hired and 6 role attrition.

Find out more about Joule for Analytics in this blog post:

Analytical Insights in Joule (powered by SAP Analytics Cloud), Controlled release in Q1 2025.

Outlook

We are working on making Joule available for further cloud products, as well as making it even more useful via agentic-AI, where Joule coordinates multi-agent systems. An AI agent can autonomously plan, reason, access external tools, work with other agents, and iteratively reflect on progress until it achieves its objective.

Joule will help SAP’s cloud users work faster, get instant insights, and achieve better outcomes by simply asking questions or telling the system what to do. Not only in English, but in their own language. We plan to allow users to interact with Joule in a growing number of languages including German, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. To get an idea of what is planned and what it could look like, accessing multiple products, using English and Spanish (with subtitles), have a look at this:

Video: AI is the new UI (3:00).

For more details of what is planned, have a look at the road map for Joule in the SAP Road Map Explorer:

Joule Road Map.

Central entry points and services

SAP Start

The integration with Joule in SAP Start is now generally available. The purpose of SAP Start is to bring together relevant business information from SAP for each user in one central place, and also to provide the one place to go to start your SAP applications in the cloud. SAP Start:

Gives you quick access to all your applications via the simple yet powerful search field;
New: Gives you direct access to your product home pages, as shown in Figure 3.
Proactively informs you about your to-dos from all products which are connected to the SAP Task Center;
Gives you key insights via insights cards from products connected to SAP Start,
Assists you with Joule, your copilot for working with SAP.

Figure 3: SAP Start, now with direct access to product home pages. This example shows direct access to three product home pages in the “Products” section: SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Fieldglass and SAP SuccessFactors. ALT Text: Below the “Products” section the screen shows the To-Dos section, with four cards for pending tasks, the first three with Approve and Reject buttons on them. Below that, the Insights section is shown, with two rows of four cards, starting with lists of My Statements of Work, My Workers, My Team, List of Top 4 Customer Projects.

Now, SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Integrated Business Planning support SAP Start, in addition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Fieldglass. Other cloud products can be integrated to provide tasks via SAP Task Center. You can find out how to set up and integrate cloud products to SAP Start here:

Documentation: SAP Start.

SAP Build Work Zone

Joule is now also generally available for SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition:

Joule is Now Integrated into SAP Build Work Zone!

SAP Build Work Zone now allows you to integrate web UIs based on HTML5 from other SAP BTP subaccounts. This is done by creating an HTML5 business solution that acts as a content provider in the subaccount.

This business solution can be accessed not only by the local subaccount but also by remote subaccounts through destinations.
To set up an HTML5 business solution as a content provider, the provider subaccount needs to adjust the HTML5 code to include a cdm.json file, which defines the design-time business content such as roles, groups, spaces, and pages, along with destinations. Find out more here:
- Simplifying HTML5 Content Consumption Across Subaccounts.

In my blog post from February 2024, I explained that SAP Build Work Zone allows customers to define guided experiences, i.e. wizards, to guide users step-by-step through complex processes.

A major enhancement in the October 2024 release is the ability to model guided processes directly in SAP Build Process Automation, bringing powerful process automation to your SAP Build projects. Get an overview here:

Guided Experiences powered by SAP Build.

Just recently, a new wizard setting was added to allow the execution of the same wizard multiple times. This setting is available both in freestyle wizards and in wizards that are based on a Guided Process from SAP Build Process Automation. For example, an admin can enable this option on the Purchase Order wizard, and this will allow users to run this wizard multiple times to purchase different items.

Enhanced Page Builder Experience across SAP Build Work Zone:

The SAP Build Work Zone page builder experience has been significantly enhanced with new features. Users can now enjoy a widget context menu, the ability to move sections up and down, and a section configuration menu, as shown in Figure 4. Additionally, the option to show or hide section headers and various accessibility improvements make the editor more user-friendly and versatile.

Figure 4: SAP Build Work Zone enhanced page builder experience. ALT Text: the image shows a section of the Work Zone screen with a visual editor. The section is partitioned into three sub-sections, each with a button “Add Widget”, the rightmost one shows an open context menu for the button, which shows that you can also add a column. The leftmost section contains a simple list of items, the middle one a bar chart for Project Cloud Revenue, the rightmost a donut chart for Open SAP Incidents.

Here is the guide with recommendations and further details:

How to Build and Design a Workpage.

SAP Task Center

Users can conveniently access tasks from many different systems in one place – not only from SAP products, we also provide APIs for integrating tasks from 3rd-party products.

Even more conveniently, users can now be notified of new tasks via e-mail. Also, end user notifications can now be enabled if you are using SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition as central point of entry for accessing your business applications.

SAP Build Work Zone itself can also be set up as a task provider for SAP Task Center. This means that tasks created by SAP Build Work Zone will also appear in SAP Task Center.

Furthermore, SAP Task Center now allows users to forward approvals.

New Intelligent Recommendations Feature Available for SAP Build Process Automation Tasks

We are introducing AI to expedite task processing: intelligent recommendations leverage artificial intelligence to streamline and accelerate task approval processes. They assist users in making decisions by analyzing key attributes relevant to specific business cases and generating a confidence level in percent for their tasks. Figure 5 shows some approvals with a confidence level of 100%, and some with 97.5%.

Figure 5: New Intelligent Recommendations feature in SAP Task Center. ALT Text: An image of the task center list of tasks, with a filter bar at the top with seven fields available, and the field “Task Type” set to “Manager Approval”. The list shows six entries. The new column “Confidence Level” is highlighted, and shows 100% for the first four entries, and 97.5% for the last two.

Find out more here:

Enhance Task Approvals with the Power of AI.

SAP Mobile Start

Beyond providing Joule natively for mobile devices, SAP Mobile Start has recently introduced a number of user experience improvements with their 2.0 and 2.1 releases. Here, I would like to highlight the support for ‘new site experience’, giving users a more structured view of applications and information.

Figure 6: SAP Mobile Start with Spaces & Pages from new site experience. ALT Text: Two images of mobile phones. On the left the Apps page, which contains “My Apps Space” showing a list of three page names “Customer Management Page”, “Project management page” and “App Page”. On the right, the App Page is shown, with a list of six apps as cards, with an icon on the left of the app name. The first three (My Inbox, Monitor Situations, Manage My Timesheet) have coloured KPI values displayed on the right.

A further significant enhancement is the support of declarative UI integration cards, which are displayed embedded in the respective pages on the Apps screen.

Figure 7: SAP Mobile Start supports UI integration cards from SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition. ALT Text: Two mobile phone images. On the left Project Apps, which shows a flat card for Project Factsheet and below that a UI integration card showing overall status for active projects, with a list of five projects along with their overall status – four on track, one with “high risk” in red; at the bottom of the card a “See all” button. On the right two further UI integration cards are shown: a list of top 4 projects, and “Cost to Date – Timeline” containing a KPI number for the actual cost to date and below that a line chart of actual and planned cost per month.

For a good and satisfying user experience, being able to personalize the UI so that it fits with how you like to work is a key element. To this end, SAP Mobile Start has now introduced personalization of the start page, allowing you to rearrange the order of sections as well as hiding sections which you don’t need – take a look at it in Figure 8.

Figure 8: SAP Mobile Start personalization of the start screen. ALT Text: Four mobile phone images. On the left the start page, with the sections Insights and News visible. Next, an image of the edit screen, with five sections listed: Latest To-Dos, Favorites, Insights, App Suggestions (deselected), News. Next, an image of the five sections, all selected, now with Favorites first and Latest To-Dos second. On the right, the start page with the sections Favorites at the top (containing flat cards for apps), below that Latest To-Dos (containing larger cards for ToDos, one shocing a purchase requisition with Total Amount $799.99).

To find out more about recent innovations as well as what is planned in our road map, have a look at:

Continue Reading…

I hope you enjoyed this first part, covering cross-product UX services. Part 2 is now available:

SAP UX Q1/2025 Update – Part 2: SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2502 and SAP Fiori Launchpad.

I will post part three in the next few days, covering a large number of UX innovations in SAP SuccessFactors.

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:

SAP User Experience Q1/2025 Update – Part 7: UI Design and Technology for Web and Mobile

2025-03-05T11:55:59.013000+01:00

This seventh and last post in my series gives an overview innovations in our UI technologies, making it ever easier to build and integrate UIs, for both web and mobile applications. First, we now provide tools to develop your own Joule agents, so that you can extend users’ Joule experience. Second, we use AI to help developers become more efficient and effective: using Joule and AI for developing UIs, for both SAP Fiori elements based UIs as well as freestyle SAPUI5. Beyond AI, we have further interesting news – focussing on quality with UI5 linter 1.0 now available, as well as web and mobile news.

If you haven’t already read it, do have a look at the introduction post to this series, which covers latest UX innovations for Joule as well as central entry points and services (SAP Start / SAP Work Zone, SAP Task Center, SAP Mobile Start):

SAP User Experience Q1/2025 Update – Part 1: Many New Innovations Available (AI, Joule and More).

News for Creating Web UIs

In the last few years we have invested heavily in making it easier for customers and partners to extend the scope of their SAP landscapes, either by adapting and extending existing applications or by building completely new ones. SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition offers a range of options: you can create UI adaptations, extensions, and custom apps that run on-stack within the product itself and/or create custom apps and automations that run side-by-side on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). For more information, see

Getting Started with Extensibility.

Recently, we have focussed on supporting developer extensibility for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Learn more about it here:

Blog post: Extending SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition using SAPUI5 adaptation projects.
Documentation: Extending an SAP Fiori Application for S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP BTP, ABAP Environment.
I highly recommend that you watch this video, showing extensions of existing apps as well as AI-assisted development of new apps based on a sketch of what it should look like:
TechEd Video: SAP Fiori Development with AI: Live Generator Demo (5:25 min.)

SAPUI5 adaptation projects have been enhanced with an improved experience:

New Adaptation Editor: Streamline your SAPUI5 extensions with the new Adaptation Editor in SAP Build Code. To improve the experience and harmonize the editors across different environments, SAP Business Application Studio now features the new Adaptation Editor, replacing the SAPUI5 Visual Editor. Developers benefit from its intuitive experience and improved performance. Have a look at this blog post:
- Introducing the new Adaptation Editor experience for SAPUI5 adaptation projects.

SAPUI5 flexibility offers capabilities to extend standard apps, not only for developers but also for key users and end users. Developers leverage adaptation projects in SAP Business Application Studio, the development environment of SAP Build Code. While adaptation projects are the strategic, advanced technology for code-based extensions of SAPUI5 apps, we also have the predecessor extension projects. To address frequent confusions, see the differences explained here:

Extending SAPUI5 apps: Adaptation projects vs. Extension projects

Customers and partners can extend the SAP Fiori launchpad: we support more launchpad-related object types in the ABAP development tools for Eclipse, and also provide a new Developer Guide for SAP Fiori Launchpad. Read more about this here:

SAP Fiori Launchpad: Updates for Developers and Partners in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2502 ABAP Environment.

We have also recently published the SAP Application Extension Methodology, and in particular the Extension Architecture Guide, which is for enterprise architects and solution architects that are already familiar with SAP's extensibility concepts and are seeking comprehensive decision-making guidance with an emphasis on the SAP Business Technology Platform. The section Presentation Tier Guidance summarizes SAP’s guidance for the extension task "create custom user interface (UI)", which addresses the need to develop a new custom UI, tailored to meet specific business requirements.

Creating Joule Experiences

Joule is our generative AI copilot for the SAP Business Suite, allowing users to use natural language to interact with products from wherever they are working. As such, Joule provides a great new user experience – one which we want customers and partners to also be able to leverage when extending SAP solutions. That is why we have created Joule Studio.

This becomes even more powerful for customers and partners with our recent announcement of SAP Business Data Cloud, which makes the foundation for Joule agents even stronger, since AI agents are only as powerful as the data in which they are grounded. Also, SAP Knowledge Graph serves as the semantic bridge between Joule agents and SAP Business Data Cloud. SAP Knowledge Graph reveals the connections between data and processes, helping Joule agents find all the most relevant data to ground their decisions and actions.

Joule Studio in SAP Build lets you create your own Joule agents, as you can see in this video:

To learn more about Joule and Joule Agents, have a look at:

For a more in-depth video showing how you can extend your SAP Solution with Joule Studio, watch this video by Vivien Boche:

Video: Joule Studio & AI Agents Overview in SAP Build (12:16 min.)

AI-assisted UI Development

Developers can now be far more productive with AI assistance, built in to SAP Build Code: both for creating simple SAP Fiori elements based applications as well as for UI5 freestyle development. Also, you can now use Joule to help you migrate SAPUI5 apps to TypeScript. If you want to get started with this, have a look at this Mission in the SAP Discovery Center:

Get Started with SAP Build Code and Joule using Generative AI (Trial and Enterprise Account).

Create SAP Fiori Elements Apps From a Sketch

The SAP Fiori tools project accelerator enables developers to create CAP-based (Cloud Application Programming model based) SAP Fiori elements applications directly from an image of the intended outcome. These images can be high fidelity Figma models, lower fidelity screenshots or a sketch on paper. Simply upload the image and use AI to generate the data models, services and the UI. Figure 1 explains this; you can watch a preview in the TechEd video I recommended above.

SAP Fiori tools is available via SAP Build Code, in the SAP Business Application Studio.

Figure 1: Generate a complete CAP-based application from a sketch with SAP Fiori tools project accelerator: data models, services and UI. ALT Text: An image showing on the left three images representing a list shown in a tabular form below a filter bar with five fields: the first image is from a high fidelity Figma model, the second a lower fidelity screenshot, the third a sketch on paper. On the right, the left side of a developer’s screen showing the SAP Fiori tools project accelerator is shown, with a thumbnail for the uploaded sketch image.

Joule for SAPUI5 Freestyle Development

Joule can be used to both accelerate the development and provide support for those who are not (yet) UI5 experts:

Joule for Migrating SAPUI5 apps to TypeScript

Joule's latest feature offers an AI-driven migration of UI5 applications to TypeScript, which, compared to JavaScript, enables improved development efficiency as well as code quality. See the details in

SAPUI5 Meets TypeScript: A Smooth Migration Journey with Joule

UI5 linter released

A big step towards improving code quality for SAPUI5 apps is now generally available: UI5 linter 1.0. It is a static code analysis tool which helps ensure that you have good quality code, and which saves you a lot of time debugging later by catching issues up front. It can check for problems such as the use of deprecated UI5 libraries, framework APIs etc. as well as the usage of global variables and possible CSP violations. Find out more in this blog post:

Release of UI5 linter v1.0.

Designing SAPUI5 Apps as Business Solution for SAP Build Work Zone

This new guide gives a lot of technical insights into SAPUI5 apps running on SAP BTP: you will learn how to structure complex SAPUI5 applications to avoid common pitfalls, how multiple apps work with a shared reuse library and how to integrate business solutions as content providers into SAP Build Work Zone:

Designing UI5 Apps as Business Solution for SAP Build Work Zone - Part 1.

Enhancements for SAP Fiori Elements with OData V4

We have recently introduced these new features for developers using SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori elements on OData V4, which are covered in the following subsections:

Support for mass change functionality.
Support for object creation via a dialog.

Support for Mass Change Functionality

When developing with SAP Fiori elements with OData V4, you can now use the feature which allows users to select multiple entries in a table and assign new values to fields in all the selected entries in one go. Figure X shows an example, where three sales order items in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition have been selected for editing:

Figure 2: Mass changes supported by SAP Fiori elements with OData V4. ALT Text: A screenshot of a sales order greyed out in the background with six items, three of the items selected via checkbox. In the foreground a popover “Edit Items (3)” is shown, with a list of six fields such as Product, Requested Quantity, Item Category. Below each of these labels a data entry field with a drop-down option is shown, containing the text “< Keep Values >”.

Support for Creating New Objects via Pop-Over Dialog

When developing a list report and object page with SAP Fiori elements with OData V4, you can now choose to provide users with a pop-over dialog window for creating a new object, in cases where only a few fields need to be entered, at least to start with. This offers users a quicker way of creating objects for such use cases, as well as keeping them on the list screen. When using the standard approach, users are brought to the object page screen for maintaining the data. Figure 3 shows an example from a test app.

Figure 3: Object creation via pop-over dialog supported by SAP Fiori elements with OData V4. ALT Text: A screenshot of a test application greyed out in the background with a list report showing travels. A popover “New Object” is shown in the foreground with a list of five data-entry fields. Four of these are marked as mandatory: “Agency ID”, “Customer”, “Starting Date”, and “End Date”. The fifth field shown is “Description”.

Further News for Web Designers and Developers

I would also like to point you to the updated SAP BTP Developer’s Guide, where we have now brought in user experience design advice, as well as restructuring it to cover Explore, Discover, Design, Deliver and Scale & Run phases:

SAP BTP Developer’s Guide.
If you read the guide, do spend a few minutes to give us feedback, so that we can improve it even further, by taking this survey to help us improve the guide!

The developer’s guide recommends using SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori elements, built on OData services, for developing UIs. Should you not be able to follow this recommendation because you have existing applications using different protocols or frameworks, we have options to help you nevertheless:

If you have existing back-end code which cannot provide OData services, we have now released the SAPUI5 meta-data controls library sap.ui.mdc, as outlined here:

Smart choices for your UI: When to use sap.ui.mdc

If you already have applications written with a different UI technology, such as Angular or React, we have released Version 2.0 of our UI5 Web Components:

Blast Off! UI5 Web Components 2.0 is Now Live!

For friends of ABAP, we recently introduced the ability to create Fiori elements apps directly from within the ABAP Development Tools (ADT). Find out more here:

News for Mobile Designers and Developers

The main news for mobile designers is the latest releases of the mobile Figma design kits for Android, iOS, WatchOs and WearOS.

SAP Fiori for Android and iOS 24.12 – New Enhancements and Branching for Design Kits.

Developers get new features with the latest releases of the mobile SDKs, as well as the integration of the Mobile Development Kit (MDK) into SAP Build Code. Here are links to find out more about the SDKs:

The MDK brought in the following updates with the last two releases:

MDK 24.7
- New SAP Fiori Card Collection control.
MDK 24.11

New SAP Fiori ActionBar
Built in File Viewer for PDF, Text, Images and Media Files on Android.
Integration with SAP BTP AI Core Service to leverage Chat Completions API from various LLM providers.

The mobile SDKs for iOS and Android also continue to be enhanced regularly, with numerous SAP Fiori UI enhancements:

For a deeper dive, watch the recordings of the Devtoberfest sessions on developing mobile apps:

Cross-Platform Mobile App Development with SAP Build Code and the MDK (50:40 minutes)
Craft Enterprise Apps for iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS with SAP Fiori and SAP Build Code (47:16 minutes)
Build Elegant Enterprise Apps for Android with SAP Fiori and SAP Build Code (45:24 minutes)

Final words

As you can see from all seven posts in the series, we are progressing rapidly with the user experience of our product portfolio as well as with the enabling technology and guidelines for designers and developers.

Part 1 of the series lists all the parts, and links to those parts that have already been published:

SAP User Experience Q1/2025 Update – Part 1: Many New Innovations Available (AI, Joule and More).

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

SAP Mobile Start Widgets Earn Google Spotlight & Tier 1 Quality

2025-03-06T21:39:48.582000+01:00

SAP Mobile Start has been featured on the Android Developers YouTube channel as part of Google's Wonderful Widgets Spotlight Week! 🎉

You can watch the feature on YouTube.

This recognition, along with our achievement of Tier 1 quality in Google's Widget Quality Guide last year, reinforces our commitment to pushing the boundaries of enterprise mobile experiences. As highlighted in Google's recent Spotlight Week for widgets, “Widgets are a powerful way to bring your app's most important information and functionality directly to the user's home screen.” Moreover, Google Play is enhancing widget discovery, making it easier than ever for users to find and utilize valuable widgets like ours.

Our journey to Tier 1 quality wasn't just about meeting technical specifications; it was about crafting widgets that seamlessly integrate into users' workflows, providing actionable insights at a glance. We focused on the core principles outlined in Google's guide: responsiveness, reliability, and a visually appealing design that aligns with the Android ecosystem.

SAP Mobile Start widgets deliver real-time news and business metrics.

Our widgets deliver meaningful and actionable information, empowering users to perform tasks efficiently. For example, tapping on the Business Info widget takes you directly to the relevant business app within SAP Mobile Start, while tapping on the News widget opens the news feed inside the app. Selecting a specific news article within the widget opens it directly in the app for reading.

The Foundation: Tier 1 Quality

Achieving Tier 1 status signifies that SAP Mobile Start widgets excel in:

Responsiveness: SAP Mobile Start widgets load quickly and update efficiently, ensuring users have access to real-time information without delays.

Reliability: We've rigorously tested SAP Mobile Start widgets across various devices and network conditions, ensuring consistent performance and stability. We also handle loading and error states gracefully, providing a smooth user experience even when data is unavailable.

Widgets show a loading state while fetching data.

Error message with built-in support: Users can contact their admin and upload logs directly from the widget's error state.

Visual Design: We've adhered to Material Design principles, creating widgets that are visually appealing, intuitive, and seamlessly integrated into the Android experience. We leverage the Jetpack Glance theme to ensure a cohesive and modern look.

Functionality: Our widgets are integrated with SAP Mobile Start, enabling instant access to relevant content and actions with a single tap.

Spotlight on Innovation: Our Featured Widgets

The widgets that garnered Google's spotlight are:

News List Widget ("News Feed Widget")

This widget provides a dynamic news feed, delivering relevant and timely information directly to the user's home screen. We've optimized it for fast loading and clear presentation, ensuring users can quickly scan headlines and access full articles.

This widget is optimized to handle dynamic data updates and utilizes modern Android background processing techniques to ensure the data is always fresh without impacting device performance.

Business Info Widget ("Monitoring Widget")

This widget empowers users to monitor critical business metrics at a glance. We've focused on data visualization, presenting key performance indicators clearly and concisely.

This widget uses efficient data retrieval and caching, to minimize network usage, and maximize battery life. We focus on only pulling the most relevant data and utilize modern Android libraries to display that data in a performant way.

Technical Excellence: The Driving Force

Our achievement is rooted in a commitment to technical excellence. We've leveraged:

Jetpack Glance: We build our UI with Jetpack Glance, a framework built on top of the Jetpack Compose runtime, allowing us to develop and design app widgets using Kotlin APIs. This enables us to create responsive widgets for the home screen quickly and with less code.

Modern Android Development Practices: We've embraced the latest Android APIs and best practices, ensuring SAP Mobile Start widgets are optimized for performance and compatibility.

Data Optimization: We've implemented efficient data retrieval and caching mechanisms, minimizing network usage and maximizing battery life.

Accessibility: We've prioritized accessibility, ensuring the widgets are usable by everyone, including users with disabilities.

Testing and Quality Assurance: We've implemented a rigorous testing process, ensuring our widgets meet the highest standards of quality and reliability.

Enhanced Widget Picker Experience

We understand the importance of providing users with a clear and accurate representation of the widgets before they add them to their home screens. To ensure a seamless widget selection experience, we've implemented the latest Android preview generation techniques. This ensures users can confidently select the widgets that best suit their needs.

SAP Mobile Start widget previews: See both Business Info and News List widgets before adding them.

Enhancing Discoverability with Google Play

With Google Play's new widget discovery features, we are excited about the increased potential for user engagement through the introduction of:

Dedicated Widgets Search Filter

The widget search filter in Google Play

New Widget Badges on App Detail Pages

The widget badge on SAP Mobile Start's detail page

Curated Widgets Editorial Page

These features will significantly improve the discoverability of SAP Mobile Start widgets, leading to:

Increased User Engagement: More users will find and use the widgets, leading to increased app engagement and user retention.

New Opportunities for User Interaction: Widgets offer a unique way to provide value and interact with users on their home screens, fostering a deeper connection with our app.

Renewed Investment Justification: The improved discoverability features make widget development a more viable and rewarding investment.

The Future of Enterprise Mobility

Our Google Spotlight feature and Tier 1 quality achievement, combined with Google Play's enhanced widget discovery, validate our commitment to delivering exceptional mobile experiences for SAP users. We will continue to innovate and push the boundaries of widget functionality, empowering users to stay productive and informed, wherever they are. We are always looking for ways to improve SAP Mobile Start widgets and provide more value to our users.

We are proud to be at the forefront of enterprise mobility, and we look forward to continuing to deliver innovative solutions that empower businesses to thrive in the digital age.

Ready to experience the future of business? Download SAP Mobile Start now and unlock your full potential.

Support of SAP Build Work Zone, advanced and much more: SAP Mobile Start V2.2 & 2.3 - Release Update

2025-06-05T08:58:40.439000+02:00

In this blog, I will introduce the new features that we have released so far in 2025, with version V2.2 and our latest version V2.3.
When SAP Mobile Start got launched in August 2021, the app got automatically provisioned with SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition. In 2023, we added SAP Start and with the release V.2.2, SAP Mobile Start also connects to SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition.

When using SAP Mobile Start with SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition, you can now access your advanced edition content, like Workspaces or Feed Updates. As with the standard edition, your native and web apps are available within the Apps Screen of SAP Mobile Start, as well as in your Favorites Section on the Start Screen, based on your individual selection. This allows you direct and fast access to your business content while being mobile.
What about the SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition tasks and notifications? If you have set up the Alert Notification Service and SAP Task Center Service, then you find them next to your business tasks and situations in the To-Do sections and in the Notification Center of SAP Mobile Start.

Screenshot: Notification Center with advanced edition notifications

We are looking forward to seeing many SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition and SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone customers to onboard to SAP Mobile Start, as it is automatically available if the SAP Mobile Start “toggle” is enabled in the Site Manager.

Remark: SAP Mobile Start is not the successor app for the SAP Build Work Zone Advanced mobile app. SAP Mobile Start focuses on providing users easy access to their applications and business workflows. The app is deeply integrated into the device OS and provides native push notifications and widgets to ensure a best-in-class user experience. The SAP Build Work Zone Advanced mobile app focuses more on the collaboration aspects. Users can use both apps in parallel. Please also see our respective knowledge base article for further details.

Besides seeing your latest open To-Dos in SAP Mobile Start, you can now also see your completed To-Dos. Just tap the “Completed” filter button on the To-Do Screen and you will get your completed to-dos from the last six months right on the To-Dos Screen. You can also search across all open and completed to-dos via the search function.

Screenshot: Completed To-Dos

My favorite new feature is the site switch that is available with V2.3. This feature allows you to directly switch between SAP Build Work Zone sites. This is very helpful for IT teams but also for business users who work with multiple SAP Build Work Zone instances. Instead of always having to go through the complete onboarding process, the app offers you a list of recently used sites and you can just pick the one you need. Outdated sites can be deleted from your list with an easy swipe to the left. I am sure that you will love this feature.

Screenshots: Site Switch

Another nice enhancement comes for the news tiles. With the latest release of SAP Mobile Start, your news tile can also include news images. Furthermore, news feeds that require authentication are supported as well with the latest release. You just need to maintain the authenticated URL in the tile news property field “mobilestart.feedUrl” in the site manager. Please have a look at our SAP Help documentation for details.

Screenshots: News with Image

You can now see the source system name on the app tiles with the latest release, what is very helpful if you have for instance connected multiple SAP S/4HANA systems to SAP Build Work Zone. The system name helps you to easily identify the system that is behind the tile. To use this feature, you can enable it in the Site Manager (“Display: Show Source System Name on Tiles”).

Finally, the latest release provides some nice UX enhancements, like the enhanced navigation bar for Apple iPad and a new fresher design for monitoring details on Apple Watch. When you onboard to the app for the first time, a new in-app guide introduces the app features to you. In the Profile and Settings screen, you can now find detailed information about language settings for the app and for the displayed content; furthermore the app is now available in Hungarian.

Screenshot: New watch design

I hope you will enjoy those new features in SAP Mobile Start.

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

What’s New in SAP Build Q2 2025 - Release Highlights

2025-07-02T11:57:39.124000+02:00

Q2 brought a wave of innovations to SAP Build, including improvements across governance, integration and user experience. We also had several announcements in the spotlight at SAP Sapphire 2025 around new AI capabilities, unified pricing, and of course Joule Studio, which lets you create custom Joule skills and AI agents. In case you missed it, check out our roundup of key updates from SAP Sapphire and the announcement of Joule Studio.

If you’re interested in shaping the future of SAP Build, we’ve introduced the SAP Build Discovery Initiative 2025. We’re looking for participants to meet with product teams, test early prototypes and bring your perspective to influence innovations from day one. Find more info here.

Now let’s dive into the Top 10 release innovations from Q2 2025!

Enhanced governance capabilities

1. Empowering business users to maintain rules through an application

In Process Automation projects, business users are often the content owners of decisions and the logic behind business rules. While the SAP Build Lobby is a powerful environment, it can also be challenging to navigate and maintain the content of separate artifacts.

Now IT and dev teams can give business users access to decisions via a purpose-built application, which is opened in SAP Build Work Zone. By empowering business users to access the logic this way, it helps mitigate risks of unauthorized changes, while also reducing delays around the change management process.

Manage decisions through a purpose-built application

2. Improved governance with approval flows & multi-node project transport

Strong governance frameworks are essential to ensure that your development activities remain secure and compliant. We have now released two features that support greater control and quality assurance:

Governance approval flows: This enables administrators to control who is authorized to create or transport projects across tenants or sub-accounts. The approval process is fully customizable, allowing organizations to implement quality gates aligned with their specific governance and compliance requirements.

Multi-node project transport: Approvers can now move SAP Build projects (apps, processes, automations) through a controlled Dev -> Test -> Production landscape, with approval steps and quality checks at each stage. This ensures dev teams are moving projects securely and efficiently across tenants.

Governance approval flows

Seamless interoperability and AI-powered integration

3. Importing Business Process Model & Notation (BPMN) to generate process artifacts automatically

Great news for our automation enthusiasts – it’s now possible to import BPMN processes from other tools into SAP Build! BPMN is the industry standard for defining workflows, decisions, and interactions across systems and teams.

Now process designers can migrate existing BPMN processes from SAP Signavio, SAP NetWeaver, and IBM to generate process artifacts automatically. This long-awaited transportability helps to speed up the logic creation significantly, as well as acting as the bridge between SAP Build and other process modeling tools.

To get started with BPMN process imports, see the Help Portal.Import BPMN processes into SAP Build

4. Improved SAP SuccessFactors integration with event discovery

From the SAP Build Lobby, developers can manage and connect SAP and non-SAP systems through the Unified Customer Landscape (UCL). Now in the UCL, developers can discover business events from SAP Cloud Application Event Hub, as well as SAP SuccessFactors solutions. This improved integration supports more relevant scenarios for HR processes, such as employee onboarding and compensation management.

5. AI grounding in company-specific content for tailored responses

This feature makes it possible to base Joule copilot and other embedded AI capabilities on up-to-date documents and user-created content in SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition through the RAG (retrieval augmented generation) method. Rather than giving generic responses, it provides end users with more accurate and domain-specific content.

AI grounding within Joule copilot

6. Joule-based assistant to easily migrate SAP HANA applications to CAP

For simplified innovation across services, the SAP HANA Application Migration Assistant is a new extension available in SAP Build Code. This automates the conversion of XS classic applications into CAP-based services to accelerate modernization and help businesses adopt cloud-native architectures faster.

For more info, see Product Updates for SAP Build Code – June 2025 Edition

Optimized user experience and accessibility across devices

7. SAP Mobile Start as the unified mobile access point for users

SAP Mobile Start addresses the challenge of fragmented access to enterprise applications and information for mobile users. The connection of SAP Mobile Start with SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition ensures that users have consistent and secure access to business applications, tasks, and notifications, regardless of their location or device.

8. Preview SAPUI5 updates for better UX management

To address the need for more controlled testing, we’ve introduced the ability to preview upcoming SAPUI5 versions in non-productive environments within SAP Build Work Zone. Admins can activate the preview in a staging or dev tenant, validate compatibility and confirm everything works as expected before go-live – ensuring agile development, reduced downtime, and better user experience management.

For more info, read the blog post.

SAPUI5 version preview in SAP Build Work Zone

9. Local Entry Point (LEP) to simplify access to standalone sites

The new Local Entry Point (LEP) concept of SAP Build Work Zone simplifies how SaaS application providers integrate business solutions into SAP BTP. Providers can generate a standalone entry-point site in the consumer’s subaccount, eliminating the extra efforts and complexity required to set up their own instances.

To get started, see the Help Portal.

10. Updates to Mobile Development Kit for enhanced UI, APIs and more

The latest release to SAP Mobile Development Kit (MDK) has brought several new updates for customers, including the newest version of Mobile Services Client in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Among the newest enhancements to UI is support for donut charts, providing a new way to visualize data and emphasize different aspects of datasets.

See all the latest updates: What’s New in Mobile Development Kit client 25.6

Ready to see these in action?

To learn more and see live demos of the latest release highlights, watch the replay of What’s New in SAP Build Q2 2025 Webinar:

SAP UX Q3/2025 Update – Part 1: AI, Joule, SAP Build Work Zone, SAP Mobile Start

2025-07-29T07:30:00.042000+02:00

This series of posts gives an overview of user experience innovations in the cloud from the last six months, covering our whole portfolio, such as AI and Joule, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2508, SAP SuccessFactors, as well as covering innovations in our UI technologies for building great UX.

In this first post, we’ll look at the latest cross-suite UX innovations, coming from Joule, SAP Work Zone and SAP Mobile Start.

Here are the links to the other posts in the series published so far:

Before we get started: if you haven’t already seen them, do have a look at the overview of public cloud UX innovations I posted in Q1/2025 (parts 2 to 7 are linked in part 1):

SAP User Experience Q1/2025 Update – Part 1: Many New Innovations Available (AI, Joule and More).

This upcoming series of posts includes Joule and AI UX highlights from individual products within the SAP Business Suite, but for a more comprehensive overview of our recent AI innovations, not just UX related, have a look at:

Joule User Experience Innovations

Joule is the AI-powered copilot for SAP systems, offering a powerful new user experience, using natural language to access our cloud products and providing a seamless flow for the user wherever they are, on desktop, laptop or mobile devices.

First, we’ll have a look at the latest generic or cross-product UX innovations, before I give you some pointers to the product-specific innovations as well as news about developing custom capabilities.

Cross-Product Joule UX Innovations

This section covers these user experience innovations:

Joule Analytical Pattern.
Joule supports multiple conversations.
Use Joule in 11 languages.
Joule stand-alone: Joule for Consultants
Joule in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams
Joule Agents.

Joule Analytical Pattern

This new pattern is available in all products which give users access to our Joule copilot. This new pattern is powered by SAP Analytics Cloud, with data from models that are indexed by the Just Ask feature of SAP Analytics Cloud.

Figure 1: Example Joule Analytical Pattern. Alt Text: an animated GIF showing how a user asks Joule “Show me sales commission by agend for model bike sales”, and how Joule shows a horizontal bar chart for top 5 sales commissions per sales agent.

As you can see in figure 1, users can now access analytical insights from the product they are working in, without having to first navigate to SAP Analytics Cloud, making work more efficient and hence also more enjoyable.

The example in figure 1 is what we call a descriptive question, but Joule can respond to a wide range of queries:

Descriptive questions, such as “What is the total revenue for Q1?” or “Show me sales by region in 2025”.
Comparative analysis, such as “Compare sales between 2023 and 2024" Or How do profits in Germany compare to France?”
Time series analysis, such as “Show me sales by month” or “Show the trend of customer acquisitions over the last 6 months”.
Top / Bottom N analysis, such as “Show me top 5 sales by store” or “List the bottom 3 regions in terms of sales”.

Find out more in this blog post:

Introducing Analytical Insights in Joule: Empowering Smarter Decisions, Instantly.

With the introduction of this new pattern, Joule now supports four interaction patterns:

Informational pattern, for querying written documents, such as SAP documentation in the SAP Help Portal, or customer policies etc.
Navigational pattern, for finding and navigating to applications.
Transactional pattern, for interacting directly with business applications.
Analytical pattern, for answering analytical queries directly in Joule.

Joule Supports Multiple Conversations

When having a conversation with Joule, you can ask follow-up questions, building on the previous questions and answers in the conversation, since Joule keeps the context.

Now you can initiate up to ten conversations in parallel, with Joule keeping the context for each of the conversations, so that when you return to a previous conversation you can continue where you left off. Figure 2 shows what this looks like.

Figure 2: Joule supports multiple conversations. On the left, a conversation was started by asking “How many languages does Joule support”. On the right, you see how active and expired conversations are shown. Alt Text: On the left, Joule replies with “Joule currently supports eleven language officially” and then lists them, below the answer a link to the source document “Joule Multi Language Support” is provided. On the right, the conversation history sidebar is visible on the left, overlaying half the screen, with a button “+ New Conversation” at the top, followed by a section “Active” with two conversations and a sectin “Expired” with four. The bottom contains a link to “Settings” and on to “AI Notice”.

You can return to conversations within 8 hours. To start a new conversation, simply click on “New Conversation”. The old conversation will be listed in the “Active” section, as you can see in Figure 2. The title of the conversation is automatically created by Joule using AI; users can rename the titles when they return to the conversation. Joule supports a maximum of 10 active conversations.

After 8 hours, the conversation expires but is not deleted. It is kept read-only in the “Expired” section, as shown in Figure 2. Conversations are finally deleted 7 days after the creation date.

In the browser, Joule can be expanded to fill the screen, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Joule expanded to full-screen mode, showing the conversation history sidebar and the chat side by side. Alt Text: The same information is shown as on both screens of Figure 2, since the conversation history sidebar does not overlay the chat, and the chat is shown on the right with much more screen width.

Find out more in the documentation:

Using the Joule Web Client.

Use Joule in 11 Languages

Figure 3 shows that you can ask Joule which languages it supports, and it will answer with the list of 11 languages. Here they are in alphabetical order, with the variant of the language in brackets.

Chinese (Simplified)
English (US)
French (France)
German (Germany)
Greek
Japanese
Korean
Polish
Portugese (Brazil)
Spanish (Spain)
Vietnamese

Joule Stand-alone – Joule for Consultants

In addition to providing Joule embedded in our products, we have a design pattern called Joule stand-alone, which we use for Joule for Consultants. With this pattern, Joule can be started directly, without first opening an SAP product and then opening Joule via the icon in the shell header. Joule stand-alone is opened in full screen, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Joule for Consultants using the Joule stand-alone pattern. Alt-Text: Joule full-screen, with one active conversation “Can you explaine about SAP Clean Core”, followed by a comprehensive answer, and scrolling options for reading the entire text”.

By supporting this pattern, people can open up Joule for Consultants directly and start asking questions about implementing or extending SAP products. Since in this case Joule is stand-alone, as the name suggests, the conversations you have there are not visible in the Joule instance that is embedded in our products, and vice-versa.

Joule in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams

How often have you been in a chat with a colleague and needed to find some information from an SAP system? Up until now this would involve you leaving the chat, going to a different window and navigating to the right SAP application to get what were looking for.

Now, you can chat directly with Joule in Microsoft Teams, use Joule in Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Teams Mobile as an app, and ask Joule questions directly in Microsoft 365 Copilot. To get an idea of how powerful this is, watch this video:

To get started, have a look at the documentation:

Integrating Joule with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Joule Agents

We are bringing SAP Business AI to the next level via Joule Agents, that can autonomously plan and execute multi-step workflows.

Why do I include this in a section on user experience updates? Aren’t Joule Agents a back-end thing? Well… the reason is simple: Joule Agents significantly enhance the overall user experience, as opposed to the user interface, because the system will do a lot more for you based on your requests. This means that the overall experience you have using SAP goes up a level, since you can get a lot done much more easily than before.

Joule Agents can be triggered from Joule directly, or embedded within applications. These four marketing videos show you examples of agents available today:

Finance: Dispute Resolution Agent (1:38 minutes)
Procurement: Sourcing Agent (1:48 minutes)
Sales and services: Account Planning Agent (1:24 minutes)
Human Resources: Performance and Goals Agent (1:34 minutes)

This example for customer service agents goes into more detail:

CX Agents (in SAP Discovery Center).

For a general overview of Joule Agents, have a look here:

Joule Agents on sap.com.
AI Agents in Action (blog post).
Envision the Future of Generative AI with SAP's AI Agents (blog post).
How SAP’s AI Agent Architecture Enables Unprecedented Automation and Decision Augmentation (blog post by Philipp Herzig).

Product-specific capabilities

In addition to the above generic capabilities, our products provide a large number of Joule skills for getting your work done more efficiently, as well as a handful of the new agents discussed above. For a comprehensive overview of Joule capabilities, including product-specific skills available today, here’s where to go:

Joule Capabilities (a 484 page (!) PDF document from July 11th, 2025, including a list of What’s New)
Joule Capabilities (online documentation)

Customer-specific Joule skills

You can now build your own Joule skills using Joule Studio, which has now been made generally available. Read Michael Ameling’s overview blog post:

Joule Studio is generally available in SAP Build: Empower your business with intelligent automation

Joule on Mobile Devices – now for SAP SuccessFactors too

Joule has been available via SAP Mobile Start since Q1/2025 (as announced in this blog post), and is now also available directly from within the SAP SuccessFactors mobile app, supporting these three patterns:

Transactional: Joule can handle tasks like requesting time off, updating contact information, and even deleting phone numbers, directly within the chat interface.
Navigational: Joule can guide users to specific pages within the app based on their requests, such as directing them to where they can assign team goals.
Informational: Joule can access documentation and knowledge bases to answer questions about company policies, HR guidelines, and other relevant information, providing summaries and links to related resources.

Figure 5 shows two examples of the transactional pattern plus one example of the informational pattern (“Can I use my private car for my business trip?”).

Figure 5: Examples of Joule on the SuccessFactors Mobile App. Alt Text: The image shows three examples: The first shows the response to the request by a manager “View time off approval”, with the details of one request, including the employee's name, the time-off period, and the type of time-off (vacation). The user can view the details, approve, or decline the request. The second screen shows a conversation where the user asks if they can use their private car for a business trip, and the system responds that they can, providing details on the reimbursement policy. The third screen shows the user requesting one day of vacation leave on March 3, 2025. The system confirms the request and provides the details of the leave, including the start and end times, and the date the user will return to work.

Find out more here:

Further information on Joule

If you want an overview of what’s new, or want to set up Joule in your landscape, have a look at the documentation:

Joule documentation (including What’s New, What is Joule?, integration guide)
What is Joule? PDF file

For an overview of what is planned, have a look at the road map for Joule in the SAP Road Map Explorer:

Joule Road Map.

SAP Build Work Zone

SAP Build Work Zone users and administrators benefit from these recent innovations:

New Side navigation for SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition.
SAPUI5 version preview.
Mobile Start supports Work Zone, advanced edition.

New Side Navigation

As I announced in April, in my blog post Upcoming Design Updates for the SAP Business Suite (SAP Fiori for Web), we are introducing some design updates to all our products in the SAP Business Suite to further increase consistency, helping users to feel confident and at ease when using a suite of products – no unexpected surprises. One of these is the introduction of a navigation menu on the left side of the screen.

SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition, is the first product to support this new design. Figure 6 shows what it looks like when the navigation menu is expanded, while Figure 7 shows it collapsed.

Figure 6: Side navigation expanded for SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition. Alt Text: A screen showing a SAP Build Work Zone screen with a navigation menu on the left with four entries “Central Procurement”, “Global Support”, “My IT Experience” (selected), and “Self Services”. On the right various cards are shown in a section “Employee Information”.

Figure 7: Side navigation collapsed for SAP Work Zone, standard edition. Alt Text: similar to Figure 6, but with the navigation menu on the left collapsed to the width of an icon, with four icons shown representing the four navigation options.

SAPUI5 Version Preview

We have introduced a new feature that allows administrators to preview upcoming SAPUI5 versions in non-productive environments within SAP Build Work Zone, two weeks before they are adopted in the productive environment. Until now, the latest SAPUI5 versions were automatically adopted in production environments, which limited opportunities for early evaluation ahead of deployment.

By enabling the preview setting on specific non-productive sites, administrators can assess compatibility and performance with the upcoming version. This controlled testing environment helps identify and address potential issues, reducing the likelihood of disruptions in production. After the two-week preview period, the RTC version becomes the default, aligning all sites with the latest stable release.

When looking at the sites in the site directory, those sites for which the preview is switched on are indicated clearly, as shown in Figure X.

Figure 8: Site directory with a site where preview is turned on. Alt Text: the image shows a card from the site directory for a site called “Preview SAPUI5 Demo” with a green badge containing the text “SAPUI5 Preview Enabled”.

Read more about this feature in this blog post:

Introducing SAPUI5 Version Preview in SAP Build Work Zone.

SAP Mobile Start Supports SAP Work Zone, Advanced Edition

When using SAP Mobile Start with SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition, you can now access your Workspaces or Feed Updates. As with the standard edition, your native and web apps are available within the Apps Screen of SAP Mobile Start, as well as in your Favorites Section on the Start Screen, based on your individual selection.

Tasks and Notifications from SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition, are also integrated into SAP Mobile Start: they are shown next to your business tasks and situations in the To-Do sections and in the Notification Center. Figure 9 shows an example with notifications from the advanced edition.

This integration is automatically available to customers with SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition or SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone if the SAP Mobile Start toggle is enabled in the Site Manager.

Figure 9: SAP Mobile Start notification center with notifications from SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition. Alt Text: A list of two notifications: “Leave Request”, with a red text “Important” and “2 weeks ago”, and “Invite to Worskpace”, with text “Mustaq Ahmmed has invited you to join the workspace “Help & Support Workspace” and “2 weeks ago”.

Note that SAP Mobile Start is not the successor app for the SAP Build Work Zone Advanced mobile app. Find out more here:

Support of SAP Build Work Zone, advanced and much more: SAP Mobile Start V2.2 & 2.3 - Release Update.

SAP Mobile Start

Updated August 13th with information about the 2.4 release.

Beyond providing Joule natively for mobile devices, SAP Mobile Start has recently introduced a number of user experience improvements with their 2.2 and 2.3 releases. In addition to supporting SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition, as described above, the main new features are:

Completed To-Dos are now displayed too (see Figure 10).
Site Switch allows you to directly switch between SAP Build Work Zone sites, without having to go through the onboarding process for each site.
The news tile can now also include images (see Figure 10).
News feeds that require authentication are supported now.
Design updates such as enhanced navigation bar for Apple iPad and a new fresher design for monitoring details on Apple Watch.
SAP Document AI integration.
Onboarding via deep links.
Top news, which gets shown prominently on the start screen.
Additional text with sensitive content can now be shown in notifications.

Figure 10: On the left, SAP Mobile Start showing completed To-Dos, on the right showing news with an image. Alt Text: On the left, the To-Dos section is selected, showing two To-Do cards, and the top half of a third card. The first one shows Maria Smith requested 180 days maternity leave, the second one that Quality Manager Donna Moore requested €47,600 spend. The right shows the start page, with a section Monitoring apps at the top, with two cards, followed by the News section, with one card listing two news items, the first of which has an image.

To find out more about the above recent innovations as well as what is planned in our road map, have a look at:

Continue Reading

I hope you enjoyed this first part, covering cross-product UX services. Here's a link to part 2, covering a large number of UX innovations which are generally available with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2508 and SAP Fiori launchpad:

SAP UX Q3/2025 Update – Part 2: SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2508 and SAP Fiori Launchpad.

New in SAP Mobile Start V2.4: Integrate and Launch SAP Document AI on Mobile

2025-08-11T08:00:00.115000+02:00

With the SAP Mobile Start 2.4 release, users can leverage SAP Document AI—integrated seamlessly within the Mobile Start app—to transform document handling into a secure, intelligent, and automated experience. They can scan or upload documents directly from SAP Mobile Start, which are then processed by the SAP Document AI service. This streamlines processing, cuts down manual work, and boosts data accuracy throughout your operations. In this blog, I'll walk you through the integration steps, prerequisites, and configuration details needed to bring SAP Document AI capabilities to your mobile users.

Preconditions

Before you begin, ensure the following prerequisites are fulfilled.

Subscribe to SAP Document AI

Ensure that your SAP BTP subaccount is subscribed to the Document Information Extraction service (document-information-extraction-application-ias with embedded_edition instance). Once complete, access the SAP Document AI workspace from your BTP subscriptions to configure document types and schemas relevant to your business scenarios. For more information, refer to the official user guide.

Enable Identity Authentication for SAP Build Work Zone

In SAP Build Work Zone, navigate to Site Manager > Settings, and ensure Identity Authentication is enabled.

Screenshot: Enabling Identity Authentication in SAP Build Work Zone Settings

Note: Valid only for SAP Build Work Zone subscription made before 20 March 2025.

Configure Trust Relationship for API Access

To allow SAP Build Work Zone to consume SAP Document AI APIs, you need to add a dependency in the SAP Cloud Identity Services (IAS) administration console:

Go to the Applications tab
Select the SAP Build Work Zone application
Under Dependencies, add a new entry with:
Name: documentai (or any unique name)
Application: Select the “SAP Document AI” entry in your IAS tenant

Create Destination for SAP Mobile Start

To authorize SAP Mobile Start App to access SAP Document AI, create a destination in your BTP subaccount with the following settings:

Name: sapdocumentaimobilestartintegration
Type: HTTP
Authentication: NoAuthentication
Proxy Type: Internet
URL: (Use https://<your-tenant-url-endpoint>/document-ai/v1, located in Document AI instance > service key > endpoints > backend > URL)

Add the following additional properties:

HTML5.DynamicDestination = true
HTML5.IASDependencyName = documentai (dependency name created in SAP Cloud Identity Services)

Once completed, both SAP Build Work Zone and SAP Mobile Start are authorized to access SAP Document AI. You can control user access in SAP Document AI using default authorization policies via Identity Authentication service. (Learn more)

Configuring tile for SAP Document AI access in mobile

To make SAP Document AI accessible via SAP Mobile Start:

Step 1: Create a New App in Site Manager

In SAP Build Work Zone, navigate to Site Manager > Content Manager and create a new App.

URL: https://<your-tenant-url>/launchpad?sap-ushell-config=headerless#InboundDocument-manageInDocumentAI
ℹ️ Use sap-ushell-config=headerless to hide the launchpad header

Step 2: Configure Navigation Parameters

In the Navigation tab, add the following parameters:

name: Schema name - Optional (from SAP Document AI workspace > Schemas tab)
latest: true, this signifies that only the latest version of the schema is used
client_ID: Client ID (from SAP Document AI workspace > Settings), preset to ‘default’
instance_ID: Instance ID (from SAP Document AI workspace > Settings or BTP account > Instances > Select SAP Document AI instance)
showWorkspaceHeader: true

Step 3: Configure Visualization

You can set your own preferred title, subtitle, icon.

Visualisation Type: Static Tile
Add the following name-value parameters:
mobilestart.type: documentAi
mobilestart.documentAi.clientId: (as specified in Navigation Tab parameters)
mobilestart.documentAi.instanceId: (as specified in Navigation Tab parameters)
mobilestart.documentAi.documentSchemaId: Optional - needed if only a specific schema scenario should be enabled, otherwise all active schemas will be shown to the end user. You can find Schema ID in SAP Document AI workspace > Schemas tab

Screenshot: SAP Document AI Tile Visualization in SAP Build Work Zone

You’ve now created a fully functional SAP Document AI tile for SAP Mobile Start! 🚀

User Experience in SAP Mobile Start

As a business user, you can locate the newly created SAP Document AI tile in the SAP Mobile Start app using the Search function. For easier access, you can also add the tile to your Favorites. When you tap the tile, you’ll be directed to a native document selection screen. Depending on how the service was configured by the administrator, you may have the option to select a document type and schema. If the tile is configured for a specific schema use case, it will be automatically selected.

Screenshot: SAP Document AI tile in SAP Mobile Start App

Upload Options

Scan via Camera – Leverages the device’s native camera with real-time preview, cropping, rotation, and filtering. Multiple scans are compiled into a single PDF.
Select Images from Gallery – Users choose previously captured images which are compiled into a single PDF.
Select File from File Explorer – Users upload a single PDF from their device’s file system.

Screenshot: Scanning a document via device’s native camera

Upload Validation & Handling

Before uploading a document, the app performs several validation checks to ensure compatibility. The file size must not exceed 50 MB, and the document should contain no more than 100 pages. Additionally, file names are automatically sanitized to remove any invalid characters. Once these checks are successfully passed, the upload process begins, with a visible progress bar indicating status. Android users can upload multiple documents synchronously.

After the upload is complete, the document extraction workflow is triggered, and users receive a success notification confirming the process.

Track Status and Review Document

To monitor the progress of document extraction, simply open the Document Overview from the overflow menu within the document selection screen. This action launches the mobile-optimized SAP Document AI UI, providing a clear and intuitive view of the status, allowing reviews and other updates related to your uploaded documents.

Screenshot: Track status and review document via mobile optimized UI

Conclusion

With the release of SAP Mobile Start 2.4 and the seamless integration of SAP Document AI, business users now benefit from a truly mobile-first, intelligent document processing experience. Whether it's capturing receipts on the go, processing invoices, or extracting data from complex forms, SAP Document AI empowers users to automate workflows efficiently—right from their mobile devices. This integration brings the power of AI-driven document handling directly to your fingertips, enabling smarter, faster, and more scalable business operations.

SAP Mobile Start V2.4: SAP Document AI integration and much more. Release Update

2025-08-12T05:02:05.149000+02:00

With the recently released version 2.4, SAP Mobile Start has provided a lot of new features, like integrating with SAP Document AI, onboarding via deep links and the support of additional text (sensitive content) in native push notifications.
Let´s have a joint look at those new features.

With the integration with SAP Document AI, users can scan or upload documents directly from SAP Mobile Start, which are then processed by the SAP Document AI service. So, if you for instance need to scan and upload a quality certificate, you can start the upload process right from SAP Mobile Start, and the SAP Document AI service takes care of all needed follow-up steps, like extracting the data and assigning it to the right business objects.

Screenshots: SMS with SAP Document AI

For further information and a detailed step by step guide on how to setup SAP Document AI service within SAP Mobile Start, please have a look at my colleague Umair´s blog: New in SAP Mobile Start V2.4: Integrate and Launch SAP Document AI on Mobile.

In my last blog, I introduced the site switch. Since our last release, SAP Mobile Start remembers your previous site connections, including multiple different sites and you can easily switch between sites by signing out and then selecting the respective site from the site menu. Now, with version 2.4, you can do this directly from the app profile and settings menu, which makes the process even simpler.

Screenshot: Site switch in Profile screen.

So far, SAP Mobile Start has supported two comfortable ways to onboard users. First, users can onboard by scanning a QR code from the SAP Build Work Zone or SAP Start web page. Second, users can get onboarded automatically via a managed configuration if an Mobile Device Management system is in place. Now, users can also be onboarded via deep link.

How does this work? IT teams can invite users to onboard to SAP Mobile Start via an email or message and provide a deep-link that users can use to initiate the onboarding process, after they have installed the app. After tapping on the link, SAP Mobile Start opens and the user can directly onboard to the respective SAP Build Work Zone/ SAP Start system. You can find further details in our documentation.

With version 2.4 we have also introduced Top News – news that is so important to users, that it is shown prominently on the Start Screen. As for the regular news, this feature can also easily be added via the SAP Build Work Zone Site Manager.Regular news are still supported as well. Please check our documentation for details.

Screenshot: Top News

Until now, only public text was visible in push notifications, which often resulted in generic messages lacking sufficient context for the user. With the 2.4 release, SAP Mobile Start can now load and display additional details directly in the push notification, providing more meaningful and informative messages. This enhancement is controlled by a feature flag in the Mobile Services Admin Cockpit. For further information, please see our documentation on notifications and on how to access the cockpit.

Screenshot: Additional details in push notifications

I hope you will enjoy these new features in SAP Mobile Start.

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

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

SAP TechEd 2025 - Go Mobile!!!

2025-09-25T13:30:00.035000+02:00

SAP TechEd in 2025 kicks off on November 4th in Berlin, and preparations are in full swing! This premier tech conference is perfect for developers, IT professionals, business experts, and tech visionaries to deepen their knowledge of SAP solutions and connect with peers and SAP experts.

We have prepared an exciting offering of mobile sessions for you: Strategic Talks, Roadmap and Hands-on sessions on Mobile Apps, Mobile Design and Mobile Technology. Furthermore, we will have a demo booth where you can explore our apps an Mobile Joule on your own.

Certainly Mobile AI, is the focus topics this year.

Here are some of the sessions I’m most looking forward to this year:

CA200 | An overview of our AI-enhanced mobile products across SAP Business Suite - Deep Dive
View demos of selected apps and learn how the latest mobile apps from SAP make it easier for your users to leverage SAP Business Suite on the go. You can build your own mobile apps the same way we do—start by exploring how we use SAP Design System for mobile apps as well as the latest technologies such as the Joule copilot and SAP Build solutions.

ST112 | AI and the future of product and user experience on the web and mobile - Strategy Talk
Discover how the Joule copilot and embedded AI are transforming UX as well as how you can use AI to enhance and extend the UX for SAP Business Suite. See our strategy for giving users access to all they need and enabling them to provide feedback, wherever they are, through the web and on mobile, including applications and central services.

CA811 | User and product experience innovations by SAP—on the web and mobile - Road Map
Have a look at the latest user and product experience innovations across our suite of applications, along with cool innovations coming soon—on the web and mobile. Also, check out selected highlights from UI technologies.

AD170 | Build scalable enterprise mobile solutions with SAP Build - Hands-on Workshop
Dive into the technical details of building scalable, cross-platform mobile solutions with SAP. Get a hands-on overview of integrating SAP Build solutions and our mobile development kit to streamline your development process and deliver high-quality apps.

CA260 | Learn how to build your own app and use it in SAP Mobile Start - Hands-on Workshop
Build an application on SAP BTP using SAP Build Code and SAP Cloud Application Programming Model that integrates with SAP Mobile Start. Accelerate development with development productivity tools in SAP Business Application Studio. Learn how to make the app accessible and send push notifications for relevant business events directly to your users.

CA201 | Creating AI-enhanced UX for your own applications with SAP Design System - Deep Dive
Discover how AI is changing the idea of what an application is—and what this means for you. Learn about how to create AI-enhanced UX for your applications by using SAP Design System (SAP Fiori UX for web and mobile), and see how building applications is made easier through our AI UI technologies for web and mobile apps.

AD109 | Bridging the gap: Build your enterprise mobile strategy - Deep Dive
Are your employees struggling to find critical company data on the go? The SAP Mobile Start app solves that challenge by connecting them to SAP Build Work Zone and enabling custom mobile solutions. Find out how to create a powerful, integrated mobile journey for increased productivity.

AI166 | Mobile projects with SAP Joule for Consultants and SAP Joule for Developers - Hands-on Workshop
Learn how SAP Joule for Consultants accelerates execution of mobile projects and cloud transformation by simplifying knowledge access and offering expert guidance. Also, explore SAP Joule for Developers and its mobile development kit AI capabilities—including code suggestions, explanations, test generation, and more—to boost development efficiency.

CA914 | AI-based user and product experience innovations on the web and mobile - Demo Station
Experience the latest user and product experience innovations by SAP, including the Joule copilot on mobile devices and AI-embedded scenarios. Learn how you can leverage SAP Design System and our UI technologies to build your own apps.

Join our live Mobile AI usability testing session: Exploring Joule and voice – understanding mobile AI in your daily work
Usability testing offers a unique opportunity for SAP users to engage directly with SAP product and development teams. In a focused 60-minute one-on-one session, you’ll interact with product screens and evaluate whether the buttons, terminology, and features meet your expectations and workflow needs. This session focuses on how AI on mobile is used in everyday work and what users envision for the future.

Do not miss this opportunity and join us in Berlin. Register now! 📅November 4 - 6, 2025 Berlin
We look forward to meeting and interacting with you!

Unlocking SAP Fiori and other business content on Mobile: A Practical Guide

2025-10-01T11:43:30.288000+02:00

Introduction: Accessing SAP business content on mobile

While analysing the recent search queries from users around “the use of SAP on mobile” we came across the below examples.

is there an app for SAP Fiori?
can I access SAP Fiori from mobile?
how to use SAP Fiori on iPhone?
can SAP be used in mobile?
how to open SAP on mobile?
what SAP business content is available on mobile?

There were also questions around how SAP Mobile Start fit into the picture with the standard set of mobile apps for each of the cloud solutions from SAP; for e.g. SAP SuccessFactors mobile.

Providing clarity on these kinds of questions served as the motivation for writing this blog. We will also look at the broader set of business content that can be accessed from mobile as standard or via configuration.

Is SAP Fiori Client still relevant?

The SAP Fiori Client mobile app provided a native runtime environment for SAP Fiori apps on iOS and Android devices. It was removed from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store on March 31st, 2022. (Refer to SAP Note 2992772).

While the above SAP note does recommend the users of SAP Fiori to transition to SAP Mobile Start, the above search queries gave the impression that customers probably could do with bit more guidance on the overall strategy and approach around accessing SAP business content including SAP Fiori apps from mobile.

Decision tree for alternatives to SAP Fiori Client

As mentioned in the SAP Note 2992772, one of the options is for the users of SAP Fiori Client to transition to SAP Mobile Start. Here’s a visual representation of the decision tree for customers who are still using SAP Fiori Client as covered in SAP Fiori Client successor recommendations.

Product positioning of SAP Mobile Start

SAP Mobile Start is positioned as the mobile native entry point for business applications, processes and business data from SAP and non-SAP solutions. SAP Mobile Start was initially released for iOS (iPhone and iPad) in September 2021 and the Android version was later released in June 2022. This also signified a change in mobile strategy for SAP by moving away from the hybrid world to native app approach.

The mobile app for SAP's central entry point solutions

SAP Mobile Start brings the content that is deployed on SAP’s central entry point solutions to mobile users.

Once the business content is deployed on these solutions, you can enable the power of mobile to the end-users with a QR code scan at almost no additional implementation effort or deploy using Mobile Device Management (MDM).

Accessing SAP business content from mobile

Now let’s dive deeper into how the following types of business content can be deployed and consumed via SAP Mobile Start.

standard business content from SAP S/4HANA that is mobile enabled
custom SAP Fiori apps created using SAP Build
custom native apps created using SAP mobile services
other SAP business solutions content

1. SAP S/4HANA standard business content on mobile

Let’s address the question on how to access SAP S/4HANA business content (SAP Fiori roles and apps) via mobile.

SAP Fiori Apps Reference library can provide a list of SAP Fiori apps that are optimized for mobile phone and tablet. For e.g. you can discover apps “by Line of Business”; for e.g. Finance, Sourcing and Procurement etc.

You need to implement SAP Fiori roles and apps for your chosen processes on your SAP Fiori launchpad on SAP S/4HANA; refer to How to Deliver a Great User Experience with SAP S/4HANA.
You can then federate and bring the business content (SAP Fiori roles and apps) to one of the central entry point solutions mentioned above. Refer to the learning journey: Setting up SAP Mobile Start with SAP S/4HANA on SAP Build Work Zone which explains how to do this using SAP Build Work Zone and bring it to mobile.

You can also refer to below assets:

SAP Fiori Deployment Options and System Landscape Recommendations is the reference document for all consultants, partners and customers who implement SAP Fiori. Do note that it also mentions the use of SAP Build Work Zone as a central entry point deployment option.
SAP Fiori Deployment in 2025: Embedded vs. Work Zone Standard vs. Advanced Edition also gives some insights into comparing various deployment options.

2. Creating and consuming custom SAP Fiori apps

SAP Build is a unified application development and process automation solution, enabling personalization and efficiency at scale. You can create custom SAP Fiori apps, using SAP Build Apps (for low-code development) and SAP Build Code (for pro-code development). You can connect to your SAP S/4HANA or other backend system, use visual tools to define data models and UI elements, and leverage generative AI with tools like Joule to accelerate development.

SAP Build Work Zone can act as the central entry point to consume these custom apps as well as the federated (standard) business content from SAP S/4HANA. SAP Mobile Start can consume the content that is deployed on SAP Build Work Zone.

3. Creating custom mobile apps that follows SAP Fiori guidelines

Some customers may have use cases for which they might want to create custom native mobile applications that meets the following requirements:

utilize the native capabilities offered by the respective operating systems
while also following the SAP Fiori design guidelines
and maintaining the same user-experience as that of the business solutions from SAP.

This is where SAP Mobile Services comes into picture. It is an open standard based service on SAP Business Technology Platform that enables simple mobile application development, configuration, and management. It offers:

SAP Mobile Development kit which is a metadata driven tool that can allow you to develop cross platform applications.
Or SAP BTP SDKs for iOS as well as Android for those who want more flexibility beyond what the above metadata driven approach can provide.

These SDKs follow SAP Fiori design guidelines to preserve the familiarity of both the native operating system experience as well the SAP Fiori app experience; refer to SAP Fiori mobile design guidelines.

Any custom native app that you create can of course be launched from SAP Mobile Start via a native tile; refer to add native apps to your content.

4. Other SAP business solutions content

To be a true native entry point, SAP Mobile Start app also needs to bring the business content and key capabilities from other SAP business solutions to a mobile user. Let's have a closer look at the possibilities.

SAP S/4HANA (as explained above)
- mobile enabled apps from SAP S/4HANA SAP Fiori launchpad via content federation
- workflow notifications and situations
SAP Task Center integration for tasks; for e.g. Purchase Order approval from SAP S/4HANA. Also tasks from SAP Ariba , SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Cloud for Customer, SAP Concur, SAP Fieldglass, SAP Field Service Management, SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Workflow Service, 3rd party providers
UI integration cards displaying Insights and custom cards
URL tile to Cloud solutions from SAP e.g. SAP Concur web
Analytical story from SAP Analytics Cloud
Native app tile to launch specialised app from the respective SAP Cloud solution
- e.g. SAP Concur mobile
- or deep links where SAP Cloud solution supports the same; e.g. using SAP SuccessFactors deep link to directly launch Compensation details
SAP Document AI integration

Big picture on SAP’s mobile portfolio

To complete the picture on SAP’s mobile portfolio, we must also talk about the dedicated mobile apps that comes with each of the cloud solutions from SAP ; for e.g. SAP SuccessFactors mobile, SAP Analytics Cloud mobile, SAP Concur mobile etc and how SAP Mobile Start fits into the picture.

SAP Mobile Start in the context of other SAP mobile apps

SAP Mobile Start is not intended to provide the ability for the end users to access all mobile enabled capabilities from all the cloud solutions from SAP. It is meant to be a native entry point from where the following can be done.

the most valuable capabilities and content from the business solutions can be accessed as described above.
and the specialised mobile apps provided by each of these cloud solutions from SAP can be launched.

Conclusion:

In summary

SAP Mobile Start is the mobile native entry point into SAP universe for a mobile user.
Administrators can deploy the most critical content from various business solutions from SAP as outlined above on SAP's central entry point solutions and bring them to SAP Mobile Start.
The end-users can further use the specialised standard SAP mobile apps.
SAP Mobile Services provides a choice of SAP BTP SDKs that can be used to create custom native apps when end-user needs go beyond the standard set of apps provided by SAP while also maintaining the familiarity of the respective operating system as well as SAP Fiori design guidelines.
The users of SAP Fiori Client are encouraged to move to SAP Mobile Start.

We look forward to hearing your experience with setting up these solutions in your landscape. We are keen to hear about mobile personas and use-cases you have taken advantage of. Please do share your thoughts and comments below.

Stay up to date with 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.

Introducing SAP Fiori for Android/iOS 25.8: Innovative Enhancements for Android and iOS

2025-10-07T10:45:01.820000+02:00

SAP Fiori continues to advance its technological offerings with the release of SAP BTP SDK version 25.8, featuring exciting updates for both Android and iOS. This release introduces a suite of new capabilities as well as upgrades to current features, enhancing user experiences on business apps.

New in SAP Fiori for Android 25.8

In the following section, we’ll give you a brief overview about everything that’s new in SAP Fiori for Android 25.8.

Circular In-Place Progress Indicator

The circular in-place progress indicator displays the status of ongoing processes when loading is initiated by a button. An indicator within the button shows the loading state. The progress indicator has been enhanced to allow customization of the icon button so that once loading is finished, the icon button can be changed to a different icon.

For more information, check out the Circular Progress Indicator article in the SAP Fiori for Android design guidelines.

Object cell with a circular progress indicator

Illustrated Message

The illustrated message component, which helps communicate empty, error, and success states through a combination of engaging illustrations, solution-oriented messages, and a conversational tone, has been updated with new illustration assets.

To learn more about this component, refer to Illustrated Message.

Illustrated message with the new “empty task” illustration

Native File Viewer

The native file viewer, which allows users to preview files, now supports viewing password-protected PDFs by prompting them to enter a password in a dialog before the file is displayed, expanding accessibility and document control within apps.

For more information, check out Native File Viewer.

Password-protected PDF files in native file viewer

Picker Form Cell

The picker form cell, used for making date and time-based selections, is now available for Jetpack Compose.

See Date and Time Picker Form Cell for more information.

Date picker form cell with Horizon tonal color option

Stepper Form Cell

The stepper form cell and the nested stepper control, which allow users to incrementally increase or decrease a select value, are now available for Jetpack Compose.

Check out the Stepper Form Cell guideline article to learn more.

Stepper form cell in horizontal layout (top) and vertical layout (bottom)

Text Input Form Cell

Text input form cells have been enhanced to provide currency support, allowing users to enter currency values in single property form cells. The form cells now feature ISO codes that automatically format the text input with the corresponding currency symbol.

For more information, refer to Text Inputs.

New in SAP Fiori for iOS 25.8

Check out what's new in SAP Fiori for Android 25.8.

Illustrated Message

Just like the Android equivalent, the illustrated message component has been updated with new illustration assets to help communicate empty, error, and success states with engaging illustrations.

Learn more about this component in the Illustrated Message SAP Fiori for iOS guideline article.

Illustrated message in different containers

Modals and Sheets

We have added new guideline articles for modality and sheets that cover all types of modals and sheets, including but not limited to full-screen modals, non-modal sheets, action sheets, popovers, and form sheets.

For more information, refer to Modality and Sheets.

Modal sheet

Pickers

The date range picker is now supported as a picker form cell, enabling the triggering of the date range selection component.

Take a look at the Pickers guideline article for more information.

Date range picker

Text Inputs

Text inputs now come with currency support via a new view modifier, enabling display of the ISO code in the text input label, showing the currency symbol after editing, and applying localized formatting using native Apple APIs and formatters.

Check out Text Inputs to view more details.

Text input - single property form cell with currency field support

Resources

Design Guidelines

SAP Fiori for Android Design Guidelines | SAP Fiori for iOS Design Guidelines

UI Kits for Figma

SAP Fiori for Android and iOS UIKit

SAP Fiori for Android 25.8 UI Kits | SAP Fiori for iOS 25.8 UI Kits

SAP User Experience Update: What’s New for SAP S/4HANA 2025 (Private Cloud and On-Premise)

2025-10-31T13:35:46.042000+01:00

SAP S/4HANA 2025 comes with a whole host of user experience innovations and improvements. Web access via My Home and the SAP Fiori launchpad has many useful improvements, as does SAP Mobile Start for mobile access. Joule gives conversational access to Private Cloud Edition using natural language, now also with analytical insights. There are additional collaboration capabilities, and many improvements in details: some towards providing a more consistent and integrated SAP Business Suite, some simply making a user’s life easier. Finally, design and UI technology is also advancing, with powerful AI support for developers now available.

This post covers:

UX Updates for Consistent and Integrated Business Suite
Web access: My Home and SAP Fiori launchpad
Mobile access: SAP Mobile Start
Joule
Situation Handling news
AI-Assisted capabilities: outlook
New collaboration capabilities
UX improvements in details
UI adaptation improvements for key users
Design and Technology news

If you want to get an impression of how good SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, looks across all the main product areas, have a look at the online Product Tour.

Since this post covers what’s new, building on the previous 2023 release, you might want to have a look at the UX innovations which came with the Feature Pack Stacks 00, 01 and 02 of the 2023 release:

For a full overview of what’s new since the FPS00 shipment of the 2023 release, have a look at the documentation (note that it includes features from the above 2023 FPS01 and FPS02 blog posts, as well as this one):

What’s New for SAP Fiori launchpad for SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition.

UX Updates for Consistent and Integrated Business Suite

We aim to provide a consistent and integrated experience for all users of the SAP Business Suite, which means providing an entry point for users to access all the various SAP products within the suite, and ensuring that the user experience across these products is consistent, making it easy for users to use applications from different products.

Entry Points

Figure 1 shows our approach for providing a web and a native mobile entry point to the products of the suite, such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud. I’d like to highlight that Joule can also be seen as an entry point to access the entire suite, since our goal is to provide Joule wherever you are, be it in our web applications or native mobile apps. Using Joule, our goal is to allow users to query and perform actions on all the products and applications which they are authorized to use, simply using natural language. As you’ll see below, we are making good progress towards this goal.

Figure 1: Entry points providing an integrated workplace for accessing the SAP Business Suite. Alt Text: Image showing Joule on the left, “available web and mobile”, and on the right a diagram with boxes indicating that SAP Mobile Start, SAP Start, and SAP Build Work Zone provide central access to SAP, with three boxes below for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors and Other SAP Products.

Web Central Access

I have covered recent UX innovations in our web central entry points, such as SAP Start and SAP Build Work Zone, and central services such as SAP Task Center, in my recent cloud UX blog posts. Since these capabilities also apply to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition as well as SAP S/4HANA (except for SAP Start), I will not repeat them here, but rather refer you to them:

What we will look at in this post in detail are UX innovations for local access from web or mobile, via My Home and the SAP Fiori launchpad, and via SAP Mobile Start. Each has a dedicated section further below.

Design Updates for Suite Consistency

To achieve consistency across the suite, we have made design improvements which are relevant for a consistent user experience across the entire SAP Business Suite, and which are now available with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition 2025 and SAP S/4HANA 2025. As I mentioned in my April blog post Upcoming Design Updates for the SAP Business Suite (SAP Fiori for Web), consistency of the user experience across the various applications used by a user is an important part of overall usability, helping users to feel confident and at ease when using a suite of products – no unexpected surprises.

In this section, we’ll look at four design updates provided by the SAP Fiori launchpad, as well as examples of the new design for illustrations:

Navigation menu: Side navigation
Updated shell bar
Updated user menu
Updated notifications
New illustrations design

Navigation Menu: Side Navigation

Many SAP products already offer a navigation menu on the left of the screen, a pattern already familiar to many people. Hence, we have decided to apply that approach to navigation across the SAP Business Suite in upcoming releases.

In SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and SAP S/4HANA, the side navigation is displayed as an overlay, as you can see in Figure 2. It gives you direct access to your favorite apps, either directly or via the folders you have created. It also gives you direct access to your Spaces and Pages. The previously available menu to access all your spaces and pages along with personalization options is available via the entry “All Spaces” at the bottom of the menu.

A big benefit of this new navigation menu is that you can now access your favorite apps directly from any application. Previously, you would have to return to My Home and then click on your favorite app, now you can access it directly from the menu, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The new navigation menu, opened up from the new shell bar, showing direct access to Favourite Apps, My Spaces and All Spaces. Alt Text: an image showing a list of sales orders and on the left a pop-over with a navigation menu with the sections already mentioned. Below the “Favourite App” eight apps are listed as well as two folders for favorite apps, plus the folder “Insights” for the insight tiles.

New Shell Bar

The new shell bar design for the SAP Business Suite is available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. The immediately visible difference is that now the product name is displayed to the right of the SAP Logo, in this case “S/4HANA Cloud” as you can see at the top of Figure 2. The logo and the name are all contained within a clickable area, which brings the user to the start page (e.g. My Home).

The new shell bar enables the next two design updates to the user menu and to notifications.

By default, after upgrading, the new shell bar is visible, with the new navigation menu. We advise that you check any test automation and RPA (Robotic Process Automation), since you may need to make some adjustments – in particular if you log off at the end of a test.

Updated User Menu

The new user menu design shown in Figure 3 provides more space for the avatar of the user, and provides more space between items for easier selection. The settings are always at the top as the first entry, and the “Sign Out” option is separated from the actual navigation options in the list, to make it easier to find.

Figure 3: Updated design of user menu and notifications. Alt Text: On the left an image of the previous user menu and the updated user menu. On the right an image of the updated notifications list, showing four notifications in the group “Last Month”, each with a title, two lines of description and a line with the data and a “more” link.

Updated Notifications Design

The new simplified design of notifications shown on the right in Figure 3 fits better with the overall design of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and SAP S/4HANA, and provides simpler interactions. By default notifications are sorted by date, with grouping by “Today”, “Yesterday”, “Last Week”, “Last Month”. Users can also choose to sort by importance.

New Illustrations Design

We have modernized the design of our illustrations, and also made them easier to understand. Figure 4 shows two examples – one for indicating that something went wrong (the fallen ice cream cone), one for search, with an example of where the search illustration is used when opening a list report application without any filter values defined.

Figure 4: Examples of new illustrations. Alt Text: On the left top three different size illustrations showing an ice cream cone fallen on the ground; bottom left an illustration of a globe with a magnifying glass, representing “search”. On the right an image of a list report showing the search illustration since no data has been selected.

Web Access: My Home and SAP Fiori Launchpad

The 2025 release brings a number of improvements in My Home, the start page in the SAP Fiori launchpad, as well as some improvements in the launchpad itself (beyond the design updates mentioned above) – for users as well as for administrators.

My Home

Here is an overview of the enhancements with this release:

To-Dos:
- Tasks: Enhanced workflow relevant information and in-place actions
- Situations from both standard and extended framework- are displayed
Intelligent homepage experience to boost productivity (cloud only):
- Intelligent app recommendations.
- Intelligent generation of pre-delivered cards.
Improved user experience:
- Drag & drop is now enabled in the insights section, so you can directly rearrange your tiles and cards.
- Information about deprecated apps: any such apps are marked with an “deprecated2 icon .
Manage News application.

This collection of videos shows the individual features of My Home – both new and already existing ones:

My Home - Deep Dive (video collection)

Figure 5: My Home in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition 2025 and SAP S/4HANA2025. Alt Text: A screenshot showing all the sections of My Home: To-Dos with tabs for Tasks (selected) and Situations;, a row with News on the left and Pages showing 8 pages on the right; Apps, with tabs for Favorites (selected – showing 2 folders and 7 apps), Most Used, Recently Used, Recommended; Insight Tiles, showing 8 tiles; Insights Cards, showing 4 cards, 1 with a list and 3 with charts.

To-Dos Enhancements

The To-Dos task cards now offer action buttons, for example to approve or reject items. Often, this requires some key information about the item, for example the name of the product and the value for a purchase requisition. These details are now visualized directly in the task cards, as you can see in Figure 5, making the workflow more efficient.

To-Dos now also shows custom Situations, created using the extended Situation Handling framework, in addition to the standard situations delivered by SAP.

Intelligent Homepage Experience

Another useful new feature is AI recommendations for applications: as you can see in Figure 5 in the Apps section of My Home, a new tab Recommended has been introduced which uses AI to create a list of applications which are recommended to the user to add to their Favorites.

To help users get started with My Home, we provide intelligent generation of pre-delivered cards, so that when they first log on, the Insights Cards section is not blank, but rather has a number of pre-delivered cards relevant to the user’s role.

Manage News Application

I’m glad to announce that administrators can now easily create their own news to be displayed on My Home, using the new Manage News application. Figure 6 shows the start page of the application, listing news articles.

You can specify title, subtitle and main text, a background image, the start and end dates for publishing, as well as categorizing and targeting the news for specific groups of users. Also, you can mark a news article as being “Critical”, so that it is highlighted accordingly. You can see an example in Figure 5.

Figure 6: Manage News application. Alt Text: Screenshot of the Manage News application, showing a filter bar and a list of two news articles with their title, subtitle, footer text, criticality, status “published” and publish start and end dates.

To get a better impression of how it works, watch this video:

Video: Manage News Application in My Home for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (2:00 min.)

You can find out more about these My Home innovations here:

My Home documentation.

SAP Fiori Launchpad

The launchpad provides more than just the spaces and pages for finding and starting apps: it provides the runtime shell in which all the applications run, and hence the updates mentioned above such as the new navigation, the new shell bar and user menu. It also controls navigation between apps, as well as settings such as which theme to apply. Here are some additional improvements with the 2025 release.

Automatic high-contrast and dark-mode detection, also for custom themes

Users can define on their front-end device’s operating system whether applications should appear in a light mode or a dark mode, or a high-contrast mode. Now these settings are taken into account also for custom themes, in addition to SAP visual themes.

Technically this is done by the launchpad supporting theme sets, which is a group of themes of the same family with different flavors – such as the Horizon theme, with a light and dark version along with high contrast black and high contrast white versions. Customers can create their own theme sets using the UI theme designer. Have a look at the documentation:

Managing Your Settings (see the setting Appearance).

Hiding empty pages and spaces

The apps which a user sees on a page on the SAP Fiori launchpad, and the pages which appear in a space, depend on a user’s authorizations. This can lead to a page being defined in such a way that certain users are not authorized to use any of the apps therein; similarly, a space can end up not having any pages available to a user. Now, if this happens, any such empty pages or spaces are hidden from the user, rather than being shown empty. Find out more here:

SAP Fiori launchpad: Hiding empty spaces and pages.

Improved About Dialog for Application Information

We have simplified the about screen, organizing it into separate tabs for Application, System and Environment information, so that there is a clear separation between the different types of information – see it in action in Figure 7:

Figure 7: New About dialog. Alt Text: A short video showing the list view of the Manage Sales Orders – Version 2 app. The user opens the user settings menu in the shell header bar, selects “about”, and a popover appears with the same design as the user settings, showing three separate tabs listed vertically on the left for “Application”, “System” and “Environment”, with “Application” the default. Application shows title and ID of the app, along with framework version; System shows the product, system and tenant name; Environment shows the client device type and user agent details.

Update for Administrators of SAP Fiori Launchpad

Redesign of Apps for Managing Spaces and Pages

Up until now, the apps “Manage Launchpad Spaces” and “Manage Launchpad Pages” distinguished between entries which could be edited within a given tenant and entries which could only be used as templates when creating new spaces or pages. The editable ones were listed in the tab “Customer-Created”, the others in the tab “Predefined”.

Our customers gave us feedback that this was in fact confusing, because a page which was listed as “Customer-Created” in a non-productive tenant and which was transferred to a productive tenant became “Predefined” there, i.e. it was not listed under “Customer-Created” despite it being customer-created.

Now, the design has been changed, with two tabs for editable entities (spaces or pages) and non-editable ones. For example, in the app “Manage Launchpad Pages”, the tabs are called “Pages” and “Page Templates”, as shown in Figure 8. No matter what tenant you are in, you cannot change or edit page templates, you can only use them to create new pages. The same applies to spaces in the Manage Launchpad Spaces app.

Figure 8: The redesigned app Manage Launchpad Pages with Tabs for “Pages” and “Page Templates”. Alt Text: image shows an extract of the app showing the two tabs.

Role-dependent Launchpad Configuration Parameters

We provide administrators a new option to apply launchpad settings role-based, so that different roles can have different settings being applied. This can be helpful if a specific group of users need different settings, for example if you want to gradually introduce Spaces and Pages, you no longer have to switch it on for all users. Find out more, and further examples, in the documentation:

Setting Parameters per Profile

Mobile Access: SAP Mobile Start

The recent innovations I would like to highlight here are directly relevant for users accessing SAP S/4HANA directly:

Personalization
News – now with images and top news
Document AI
Joule for Mobile (covered in the section on Joule further below)

Personalizing SAP Mobile Start

Figure 9: SAP Mobile Start personalization of the start screen. Alt Text: Four mobile phone images. On the left the start page, with the sections Insights and News visible. Next, an image of the edit screen, with five sections listed: Latest To-Dos, Favorites, Insights, App Suggestions (deselected), News. Next, an image of the five sections, all selected, now with Favorites first and Latest To-Dos second. On the right, the start page with the sections Favorites at the top (containing flat cards for apps), below that Latest To-Dos (containing larger cards for ToDos, one shocing a purchase requisition with Total Amount $799.99).

News with Images and Top News

News can now include images. Furthermore, we have also introduced Top News – news that is so important to users, that it is shown prominently on the Start Screen. You can see examples of top news with an image as well as regular news with images in Figure 10. For more information, check out the

SAP Mobile Start Administration Guide (documentation).

Figure 10: News with images, including Top News. Alt Text: Two mobile phone images shown, on the left the start page with Top News at the top, with an article and an image; below that sections for Favorites and Latest To-Dos. On the right a list of five news articles with text on the left and an image on the right.

Document AI Integrated into SAP Mobile Start

With the integration with SAP Document AI, users can scan or upload documents directly from SAP Mobile Start, which are then processed by the SAP Document AI service. So, if you for instance need to scan and upload a quality certificate, you can start the upload process right from SAP Mobile Start, and the SAP Document AI service takes care of all needed follow-up steps, like extracting the data and assigning it to the right business objects.

Figure 11: Screenshots of SAP Mobile Start with SAP Document AI. Alt Text: 3 mobile phone images: on the left the start screen, in the middle a screen Select Document Type, with choices Standard Delivery Note (selected) and Supplier or Procurement quality certificates, on the camera showing an document, with a Save button.

Find further information and a detailed step by step guide on how to setup SAP Document AI service within SAP Mobile Start here:

New in SAP Mobile Start V2.4: Integrate and Launch SAP Document AI on Mobile.

Further Innovations and Information on SAP Mobile Start

SAP Mobile Start has further innovations related to integrating with SAP Build Work Zone, such as supporting spaces and pages from its new site experience, supporting its declarative UI integration cards, or supporting integration with the advanced edition.

To find out more about all the recent innovations as well as what is planned in our road map, have a look at:

Joule User Experience Innovations

Joule is the AI-powered copilot for SAP’s cloud products, offering a powerful new user experience, using natural language to access them and providing a nice flow for the user wherever they are, on desktop, laptop or mobile devices.

First, we’ll have a look at the latest generic or cross-product UX innovations in the web and mobile, before I give you some pointers to the product-specific innovations as well as news about developing custom capabilities.

Cross-Product Joule UX Innovations

This section covers these user experience innovations:

Joule Analytical Pattern.
Joule supports multiple conversations.
Use Joule in 11 languages.
Joule in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams
Customer specific skills and agents.

Joule Analytical Pattern

Figure 12: Example Joule Analytical Pattern. Alt Text: an animated GIF showing how a user asks Joule “Show me sales commission by agend for model bike sales”, and how Joule shows a horizontal bar chart for top 5 sales commissions per sales agent.

As you can see in figure 12, users can now access analytical insights from the product they are working in, without having to first navigate to SAP Analytics Cloud, making work more efficient and hence also more enjoyable.

The example in figure 12 is what we call a descriptive question, but Joule can respond to a wide range of queries:

Descriptive questions, such as “What is the total revenue for Q1?” or “Show me sales by region in 2025”.
Comparative analysis, such as “Compare sales between 2023 and 2024" Or How do profits in Germany compare to France?”
Time series analysis, such as “Show me sales by month” or “Show the trend of customer acquisitions over the last 6 months”.
Top / Bottom N analysis, such as “Show me top 5 sales by store” or “List the bottom 3 regions in terms of sales”.

Find out more in this blog post:

Introducing Analytical Insights in Joule: Empowering Smarter Decisions, Instantly.

With the introduction of this new pattern, Joule now supports four interaction patterns:

Informational pattern, for querying written documents, such as SAP documentation in the SAP Help Portal, or customer policies etc.
Navigational pattern, for finding and navigating to applications.
Transactional pattern, for interacting directly with business applications.
Analytical pattern, for answering analytical queries directly in Joule.

Joule Supports Multiple Conversations

When having a conversation with Joule, you can ask follow-up questions, building on the previous questions and answers in the conversation, since Joule keeps the context.

Figure 13: Joule supports multiple conversations. On the left, a conversation was started by asking “How many languages does Joule support”. On the right, you see how active and expired conversations are shown. Alt Text: On the left, Joule replies with “Joule currently supports eleven language officially” and then lists them, below the answer a link to the source document “Joule Multi Language Support” is provided. On the right, the conversation history sidebar is visible on the left, overlaying half the screen, with a button “+ New Conversation” at the top, followed by a section “Active” with two conversations and a section “Expired” with four. The bottom contains a link to “Settings” and on to “AI Notice”.

You can return to conversations within 8 hours. To start a new conversation, simply click on “New Conversation”. The old conversation will be listed in the “Active” section, as you can see in Figure 13. The title of the conversation is automatically created by Joule using AI; users can rename the titles when they return to the conversation. Joule supports a maximum of 10 active conversations.

After 8 hours, the conversation expires but is not deleted. It is kept read-only in the “Expired” section, as shown in Figure 13. Conversations are finally deleted 7 days after the creation date.

In the browser, Joule can be expanded to fill the screen, as shown in Figure 14.

Figure 14: Joule expanded to full-screen mode, showing the conversation history sidebar and the chat side by side. Alt Text: The same information is shown as on both screens of Figure 2, since the conversation history sidebar does not overlay the chat, and the chat is shown on the right with much more screen width.

Find out more in the documentation:

Using the Joule Web Client.

Use Joule in 11 Languages

Figure 14 shows that you can ask Joule which languages it supports, and it will answer with the list of 11 languages. Here they are in alphabetical order, with the variant of the language in brackets.

Chinese (Simplified)
English (US)
French (France)
German (Germany)
Greek
Japanese
Korean
Polish
Portugese (Brazil)
Spanish (Spain)
Vietnamese

Joule in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams

To get started, have a look at the documentation:

Integrating Joule with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Joule Available on Mobile

Joule is also now generally available for mobile, running natively with SAP Mobile Start. It is now also available integrated in the SAP apps SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Sales Cloud. Figure 1 shows examples of Joule running on a mobile phone.

Figure 15: Examples showing Joule integrated in SAP Mobile Start, showing from left to right: the start page, the informational pattern accessing SAP Help Portal, and the transactional pattern used to interact with SAP S/4HANA Cloud and then with SAP SuccessFactors. ALT Text: Four images are shown: the start page shows a “How can I help you” text, followed by some suggested prompts as buttons; the informational pattern shows the prompt “How can I customize a sales order”. Below that, the sixteen-line written answer is shown, followed by a “Search results” selector and three top search results. The navigational pattern shows the prompt “Show sales orders with delivery status not completed”, below that, the reply from Joule “Here’s what I’ve found” is followed by a card containing three lines and an “Open” button. A second transactional example with the prompt “Show profile of Maria Alvares”, followed by the result and a button for navigating to her profile.

On Apple devices you can now use Siri and Siri Shortcuts to seamlessly start a conversation with Joule - which even works better with Apple Intelligence. Simply say "Hey Siri, ask SAP. Show my sales orders with delivery status not completed" and Joule will provide you with the respective content within the app.

Note that as of today, not all your prompts and web apps are supported on the phone; however, we are continuously adding further Joule business skills and scenarios.

Find out more here:

Joule on Mobile & Start Screen Personalization: SAP Mobile Start V2.1 - Release Update

Product-specific capabilities

In addition to the above generic capabilities, we provide Joule skills for getting your work done more efficiently, for specific use cases. Find out more about these in the SAP Discovery Center and in the documentation:

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, Joule (SAP Discovery Center).
Here you’ll also find links to many further resources.
Joule in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition (Documentation).

Customer-specific Joule skills and agents

You can now build your own Joule skills and beta-test agents using Joule Studio, which has now been made generally available. Read Michael Ameling’s overview blog post:

Joule Studio is generally available in SAP Build: Empower your business with intelligent automation

Joule Agents

We are bringing SAP Business AI to the next level via Joule Agents, that can autonomously plan and execute multi-step workflows.

Joule Agents can be triggered from Joule directly or embedded within applications.

For a general overview of Joule Agents, have a look here:

Joule Agents on sap.com.
AI Agents in Action (blog post).
Envision the Future of Generative AI with SAP's AI Agents (blog post).
How SAP’s AI Agent Architecture Enables Unprecedented Automation and Decision Augmentation (blog post by Philipp Herzig).

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.

If you’re not familiar with Intelligent Situation Handling, I recommend that you watch the introductory video and read the “Get started” blog posts on the SAP Community topic page:

Intelligent Situation Handling topic page.

With the 2025 release, SAP provides nine new situation templates in the areas of finance, public sector, service, sourcing and procurement, and supply chain:

New use cases for Situation Handling.

For the full list of available templates provided by SAP, look here:

Use Cases for Situation Handling.

New Situation Handling Framework Capabilities

Already with the 2023 release we made it possible for partners and customers to create their own situation objects with ABAP Development Tooling (ADT) via developer extensibility. This becomes even more powerful with the 2025 release, with the extended framework supporting the collection of data context, support for custom objects in your own use cases, and support for the standard translation option. Let’s have a look at these in a bit more detail.

Data Context supported by the Extended Framework

The data context is business data from business objects involved in a situation instance that can be collected, distributed, and used for advanced analytics – for example using the Monitor Situations – Extended app. If enabled in a situation type, data context is collected when a situation instance is created, updated, or completed. For example, If you use the situation template Quantity Deficit in Supplier's Delivery to inform specific members in your purchasing organization about a deficit in the quantity of materials to be delivered by the supplier, you'll get, for example, the material, plant, or supplier as part of the data context.

With the 2025 release, every extended object-based situation template supports data context. You can activate it in the Manage Situation Types - Extended app. Doing so results in an event being triggered that includes the data context every time a situation instance is created, updated or completed. For more information, look at the documentation:

Data Context (documentation).
Data Context in the What’s New documentation.

Custom Object Types Supported

You can now use custom object types and object node types, that you have created with the ABAP development tools for Eclipse (ADT), in situation objects in the Manage Situation Objects app as well as in ADT. Until now, you could only use those delivered by SAP. Hence you have far more flexibility in supporting your own Situation Handling use cases.

Translation with Standard Function Supported

With this feature, you can use the standard function for translating texts included in situation objects, situation scenarios, and situation types. This means that you now can use the Maintain Translations app, so that all your translation work can be done in a consistent way now. Find out more in the documentation:

Translate Texts from Situation Objects, Situation Scenarios, and Situation Types.

AI-Assisted Capabilities: Outlook

We have introduced a number of AI-assisted capabilities in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, as presented in my blog post SAP UX Q3/2025 Update – Part 2: SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2508 and SAP Fiori Launchpad, in particular:

AI-assisted enterprise search.
AI-assisted easy filter.
AI-assisted smart summarization.
AI-assisted financial business insights.

These are currently on our road map for delivery in Q4/2026 for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. Please not that, as usual with such forward-looking statements, our plans are subject to change.

If you look at the above public cloud blog post, you might also notice the new Salutation Bar and the Recap feature in My Home. These are also currently on the road map for delivery in Q4/2026.

New Collaboration Capabilities

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 16); 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 16.

Figure 16: 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. Alt Text: three screenshots are shown as described, the names of the colleagues editing are shown as pop-overs.

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

To-Dos in Microsoft Teams

Important notifications should not go unnoticed, so we help to ensure that by providing an additional way for users to be notified about To-Dos from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Tasks and Situations which are shown on My Home can now also pushed to users via Microsoft Teams, where they show up as new activities. Figure 17 shows how tasks are integrated. As you can see, not only are users notified directly in Teams, they also get direct access to their task embedded in Teams and can take direct action, such as approve or reject a request.

Figure 17: Tasks appearing as activities in Microsoft Teams. ALT Text: The “Activity” tab in Microsoft Teams is shown , with a list showing on the left one activity “New tasks in SAP S/4HANA – There is 1 new task for you – ToDos” and on the right embedded within Teams the screen from My Inbox, showing the header data plus a list of Items and Bidders, and action buttons at the bottom for Approve, Reject, Show Log, Claim, Forward and Suspend.

See it in action here:

Video: To-Dos in Microsoft Teams (1:00 min.)

In addition to being able to process To-Dos for tasks directly in Microsoft Teams, you can also process To-Dos for Business Situations directly in Microsoft Teams.

This means that you get notified in your Teams activity feed about new Business Situations, and you can process Business Situations in place, without having to leave Teams, as you can see in Figure 18.

Figure 18: To-Dos for Business Situations are available via Activities in Microsoft Teams. Alt Text: Two screenshots are shown, the top one shows an row of Situation cards in My Home, the bottom one shows the Activity view in Teams, with the activity “Situations in SAP S/4HANA” and sub-text “There are 9 situations for you” selected on the left, and the right two thirds of the screen showing a list with the same situations as shown in My Home.

To enable this, you need to install the SAP S/4HANA for Microsoft Teams app.

For further information:

Documentation: Integrating Microsoft Teams.

Contact Cards Show Contact’s Availability Status

Since FPS02 of the 2023 release, users can initiate a chat or call with Microsoft Teams directly from a contact card. I featured this in my previous blog post, look at Figure 5 there for two examples:

SAP User Experience Q4/2024 News for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition 2023.

Now, with the 2025 release, this has been enhanced to show the availability status of the contact as provided by Teams.

Share as Card via Adaptive Card-based Loop Component

We now offer the option to enable embedding of interactive cards with information and actions from SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA directly into Microsoft Teams chats. The data and actions are only shown to users with the necessary authorizations. Technically this is done via adaptive card-based Loop component, for applications built with SAP Fiori elements. Figure 19 shows an example.

Figure 19: An example of an adaptive card embedded in a Teams chat. Alt Text: A screenshot of a chat, with a request text to Megan at the top, followed by a URL to access the app, and then a card showing a purchase contract, with the text Quantity Contract as a hyperlink, along with 9 further fields from the contract. At the bottom clickable buttons “Copy” and “Withdraw from Approval”.

Find out more, including how to set it up:

Integrating the Share: Microsoft Teams > As Card – Authentication-Enabled Option (documentation).

UX Improvements in Details

As I never tire of saying: the details matter if you want to provide a great UX! We continue to work on these details, which can often result in higher satisfaction for users. With the 2025 release, we bring you a large number of improvements, as outlined in the following subsections. Note that we have four interesting ones related to working with tables towards the end of this section.

New Options for Filtering Dates (Semantic Date Range)

We have two new features here:

We now offer the semantic date range also for selecting dates in the table settings dialog, if you want to define a specific filter on a given field in the table. (Note that the table settings dialog allows you to define filters on all the fields in the table, irrespective of which fields appear in the filter bar at the top of the screen).
I’m pleased to say that, on request of many users, we now provide the option to define filters on date fields for the “Last X days/weeks/months/… to date” as well as the “Next X days/weeks/months/… to date”, where users can specify the number “X”.

An example of how tricky such seemingly simple things can be: if, on December 11th, you choose “Last 2 months to date”, do you mean the period from November 1st to December 11th, which would be up to the current date but not a full two months, or do you mean “the last two full months”, i.e. October 1st to November 30th? Since both make sense, the selection screen gives users the option to choose, with the default being the “full month” case, described as “exclude current period”, as you can see in Figure 20.

Column Size Persisted in Flexible Column Layout

When users open up an application which uses the Flexible Column Layout, it will now remember where the user had placed the separator last time, rather than putting it in the default position. Figure 21 shows an example where at the top you see the default position, and below you see the separator moved to the right slightly, so that all the text is visible in the table on the left. Next time the app is opened, the separator will open in the same place.

Figure 21: Flexible Column Layout now remembers the previously used column width. The image at the top shows the default column width, the image below shows the last column width the user chose. Alt Text: two images of Manage Cost Centers application is shown, the upper one has the separator bar between the list on the left and the details on the right further to the left than the image on the right.

All Data Dictionary Help Texts Available to Users

This feature was requested by many customers, and I am happy to announce that it is now available: all the help texts for individual fields which are stored in the back-end data dictionary are now available to users using the built-in help, powered by SAP Companion. In other words, users of SAP Fiori apps have access to the same help texts as were shown with the classic UIs such as SAP GUI. You can see an example in Figure 22.

Figure 22: Data Dictionary help texts now available in SAP Fiori apps. Alt Text: The Manage Purchase Contracts screen is shown, with question marks next to all fields and column headers. On the right the Help Topics are listed, with the Purchase Contract Number selected. Next to the corresponding column header a popover shows the definition text.

Documentation of Keyboard Shortcuts within Applications

Power users are often quicker when only using the keyboard, rather than switching back and forth between keyboard and mouse – but only if they know all the relevant keyboard shortcuts. With the 2508 release we provide information about available keyboard shortcuts directly where you need them, in the context of the application. By selecting “Keyboard Shortcuts” in the user menu, a new window appears explaining all the available shortcuts for the application area currently in focus. If you click on a different part of the application, or navigate somewhere else, then the window showing the available shortcuts is updated immediately for the new context.

Figure 23 shows an example for Manage Journal Entries, where the focus is currently on the filter bar. Clicking on the the table results in many more shortcuts being shown, for example for the arrow keys for moving up and down etc., as shown in Figure 24.

Figure 23: In-context documentation of keyboard shortcuts, for the filter bar. Alt Text: A screenshot of the app “Manage Journal Entries” with the focus on the filter bar, with a second window on the right containing Keyboard Shortcuts in two groups, “Global Shortcuts” and “Generic Keyboard Interactions”.

Figure 24: In-context documentation of keyboard shortcuts, for the table. Alt Text: A screenshot of the app “Manage Journal Entries” with the focus on the table, with a second window on the right containing Keyboard Shortcuts in two groups, “Global Shortcuts” and “Journal Entries (43,854)”. The latter contains descriptions for shortcuts for the table, such as the arrow up, down, left, right keys, or using “Cmd + D” to delete.

Automatic Update of SAP Fiori Apps Upon Change of Data in Backend

There are quite a few cases where users would appreciate seeing absolutely up-to-date data in their application, so that the data is automatically updated if changes occur in the backend. These changes could be made by other users, or by automated background processing . An example for the latter is the Traceability Results application, which is now automatically updated if a batch run has created new traceability items.

Note that this only supported by applications built with SAP Fiori elements using OData V4.

Improved performance for scrolling in grid tables

Our engineers have done some magic so that now scrolling is very fast in grid tables, which are the table type typically used for working with large volumes of data.

Why do I call it magic? Well, modern web-based UIs have the UI layer running in the browser, managing direct user interactions, and calling services in the backend to get and update data. However, if you are working with a list of say over 100,000 items, you would have to wait quite a long time when starting the application until all items have been loaded into the browser. Hence we only load a certain number to start with, such as 100. This however means that when a user scrolls beyond the 100 which have been loaded, additional data needs to be fetched from the backend, which slows down scrolling. Now, our engineers have found a way to minimize this effect to almost zero, so that you have fast scrolling all the time – magic!

Figure 25: Performance improvement for scrolling in grid tables. Alt Text: a short video showing scrolling through a grid table.

Whenever the threshold is reached and more data needs to be loaded, there is a very short delay, with the progress indicator being shown for a few milliseconds, as you can see in Figure 25. In most cases, this is completely negligible. Nevertheless, we do also provide customers the option to change the number of entries loaded by default when the application is started. This is useful if a customer knows that, for a certain application, the number of entries will not exceed 2.000 for example. Then they can set the threshold to 2.000, which means that the application will take a little bit longer to load first time around, but then scrolling will be instantaneous for all the data. Figure 26 shows the UI for doing this, as part of UI adaptation. The “Threshold” determines the maximum number of entries loaded when the application is started, the “Scroll Threshold” determines the maximum number that are loaded during scrolling if new entries need to be fetched.

Figure 26: UI adaptation to determine the threshold determining the maximum number of entries loaded in a table when an application is started. Alt Text: A screenshot with a pop-over “Configure Table” with two new fields “Threshold”, being edited with the value 3000, and “Scroll Threshold”, containing the value 300.

Table Grouping and/or “Show more per row” State can be Shared

If a user personalizes a table by grouping entries by one of the fields, such as the date, this grouping is persisted when sharing the link with a colleague: when the colleague opens the application with the link, they see the same grouping applied.

Similarly, if “show more per row” was selected by the user before sharing the link, the recipient will also see more information per row upon opening the application via the link. This information is also stored when saving a view of a table.

Sort or Group Tables by ID or Description

SAP Fiori apps display the ID and the description in the same column within a table, which provides a better experience than having them in two separate columns.

Now, we offer users a choice when sorting or grouping the table by a column which contains both ID and description: they can choose to do this by ID or by description. As you can see in Figure 27, this selection is very intuitive. The example shows what it looks like when sorting by Company Code. At the bottom of the table you see an entry “1710 (BestRun US)”, where the Company Code (the ID) is 1710 and the Company Name (the Description) is “BestRun US”. In the popover “Sort By” section, the row of icons next to Company Code and Company Name indicate that currently no sorting is active, with the option to sort either bei Code or by Name ascending or descending.

Figure 27: Sort or group tables by ID (in this case Company Code) or by Description (Company Name) when both are displayed together in one column . Alt Text: A screenshot of part of the Manage Journal Entries app, with a list of journal entries and a pop-over “Column Settings” with two sections “Sort By” and “Group By”. The “Sort By” section has two lines, “Company Code” and “Company Name”, and offers three buttons with icons for each of these, representing “no sorting”, “ascending”, “descending”.

Hiding Description Fields in List of Fields in Table Settings

For tables as above where ID and description are displayed in one column, technically, the ID and description are stored in two different fields. Until now, when users personalize the table, both the ID and the description were listed in the list of columns, which confused some users.

Now, we have addressed this by providing the option to hide the descriptions (see Figure 28), and hence simplifying personalization. This option is on by default, i.e. the description fields are automatically hidden now.

Figure 28: Description fields can be hidden from the list of fields shown when personalizing tables. Alt Text: A screenshot with a pop-over “View Settings” containing tabs “Columns”, “Sort”, “Filter”, and a pop-over “Filters” with two options “Hide descriptions” (selected) and “Hide Unselected” (deselected) . “Columns” is selected and shows a list of columns with check marks. The third entry is “Company Code”, followed by “Created On” – i.e. the description column “Company Name” is not listed next to the “Company Code”.

These are the highlights of our changes in details. For the full list of what’s new since the FPS00 shipment of the 2023 release, have a look at the What’s New Viewer:

What’s New for SAP Fiori launchpad for SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition.

UI adaptation improvements for key users

We have made significant enhancements to UI Adaptation for key users with the 2025 release. The “Adapt UI” option which key users see in their user menu shows you what you can change in the app, in a very intuitive way. And you can change and adapt far more than in the past. See below for some highlights.

Also good to know: the Adapt UI menu entry is also available when using a Classic app (SAP GUI for HTML) from within the SAP Fiori launchpad. It will bring up the Adapt UI app for Screen Personas F5740 Adapt UI for Classic Applications with Screen Personas, which allows key users to adapt the layout of these classic UIs.

Key Users Can Rearrange ID and Description Within a Field or Column

SAP applications come with a standard arrangement of ID and description within a field or a column, based on user research. We have found that for financial users, it is usually best to have the ID first and the description in brackets: Company Code (Company Description), for example “1710 (BestRun US)” as shown in Figure 27. For users in sales and logistics, it is usually best to have the name first and the ID in brackets: for example Customer Name (Customer ID), for example “US Specialty Cycles 5 (USCU_S05)” as shown in Figure 2.

Now, key users can use UI adaptation to rearrange the order for a given application. Doing this change applies then to all occurrences of the field in the application, i.e. the filter bar, the table or in a form on an object page.

Far More Options for Key Users to Adapt UIs

Key users can now make far more significant changes to UIs than before. For example, they can add a button to clear all filter values in the filter bar, remove buttons such as the “Export to Excel”, and much more. Figure 29 shows the options for configuring a table for example.

Figure 29: Many more options for Key Users to adapt UIs. Alt Text: UI Adaptation is shown switched on for the application Manage Bank Hierarchies, with a popover called “Configure Table” filling half the screen, and showing 12 options such as “Enable Table Export”, “Frozen Column Count” with a field for entering the number, “Sorting”, “Columns” etc.

Design and Technology News

For a comprehensive overview of the recent design and technology news, have a look at my blog posts from Q1 and Q3 2025. These are also relevant for the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and SAP S/4HANA 2025 release, since the design and technology are already available in the cloud:

SAP User Experience Q1/2025 Update – Part 7: UI Design and Technology for Web and Mobile
SAP UX Q3/2025 Update – Part 7: UI Design and Technology for Web and Mobile
Note though that the SAP Build Extensibility Wizard presented there is currently only integrated with for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

We are progressing at such a pace, that I have some additional news to share with you, not covered by the above posts. In addition, I would like to explicitly mention some particular highlights here from the above posts too.

Regarding extensibility: do have a look at the new SAP Extensibility Explorer.

SAP Design System Portal and UI Kits – now with AI Components

We recently introduced the new SAP Design System portal that brings together the product design guidelines SAP Fiori for web, SAP Fiori for iOS, and SAP Fiori for Android, as well as to the new digital design system guidelines. With its enhanced usability, simplified versioning and improved performance, designers (and developers!) get a better user experience compared with the previous SAP Fiori design guidelines.

The new UI Kits available for designers in Figma make it easy for designers to design accessible UIs at enterprise scale, for web applications, mobile iOS and Android applications as well as wearables. The UI Kits provide reusable components for web and mobile, along with web floorplans, which give you what you need out-of-the-box.

We have just released SAP Web UI Kit v8.0 which includes a full set of AI components: AI Button, AI Menu Button, AI Split Menu Button, AI Prompt Input, AI Input, AI Text Area, and AI Rich Text Editor.

Figure 30: The SAP Design System portal start page (on the left), and SAP’s UI Kits for designers in Figma (on the right). Alt Text: Two screenshots. The portal page shows four main sections SAP Fiori for Web, … for Android, … for iOS, and SAP Digital Design System, each followed by links to UI elements, Figma kits, and overviews. The UI Kits show 8 cards, SAP Fiori for Android, Web, iOS, watchOS, Wear OS, Performance, Accessibility and SAP S/4HANA.

Find out more here:

New SAP Design System Portal for SAP Fiori Design Guidelines, and New UI Kits for Designers.

SAP Fiori Development Portal

I’m also happy to inform you about the new SAP Fiori development portal, introduced a few weeks ago. It is designed to help developers maximize the benefits of SAP Fiori elements for OData V4, which is more than just a UI framework: it’s a metadata-driven approach that leverages the SAP Design System as its guiding principle, incorporating the most relevant design system options for typical business tasks.

Figure 31: The SAP Fiori development portal. Alt text: A screenshot showing the Introduction page. On the left a menu has entries Using the Portal, Building Blocks, Global Patterns, Floorplans, SAP Fiori Tools. The Introduction page has a full width card “Building Blocks” at the top, with a description and tiles representing various building blocks. Below that “Choose Your Option” heading above two side-by-side cards for “Floorplans” and “Customer Layout”, each with an image and description, and a “Learn More” button.

The SAP Fiori development portal puts building blocks front and center. These building blocks - such as tables, forms, filter bars, and charts - are orchestrated by SAP Fiori elements and form the basis of every OData V4 application. They provide standardized layouts and interaction patterns, ensuring UI consistency and boosting developer productivity. The great advantage of using building blocks is that you can use them to create a customer layout and yet still benefit from the advantages of the metadata driven approach: low code, built in enterprise-grade capabilities such as multi-language support, accessibility, security and performance, and design system consistency.

Find out more in this six-part series of blog posts, here is the first one, which contains links to the others:

Introducing the SAP Fiori Development Portal: Your Gateway to Rapid SAP Fiori App Creation (1 of 6).

Using AI to Develop UIs

The above posts from Q1/2025 and Q3/2025 introduced a number of powerful ways to accelerate UI development by using AI, such as:

Creating SAP Fiori elements apps from a sketch (in the Q1 post), now integrated in SAP Build Code and Joule (Q3 post)
Joule for SAPUI5 freestyle development (Q1 post)
AI-assisted auto-fix of coding errors with UI5 linter (Q3 post)

Recently, we have gone even further and introduced MCP servers for freestyle SAPUI5 development as well as for developing with SAP Fiori elements and the associated building blocks. These open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers provide AI agents with comprehensive UI5 and SAP Fiori elements knowledge, including best practices and project-aware context information, and thus provide developers with valuable support. Figure 32 shows examples.

Figure 32: Examples of the UI5 MCP Server (on the left) and the MCP Server for SAP Fiori (on the right) in action. Alt Text: both images show screenshots of a CLINE console view with a task entered as text at the top, followed by a list of steps which the system proposes to do to solve the task.

Read about these new MCP servers in these blog posts:

Accessibility taken to the next level: WCAG 2.2 support

Accessibility is key to using SAP's business solutions. Adopting the latest standards gives applications a true cutting edge, ensuring that solutions are inclusive and meet the diverse needs of users globally. When creating apps with SAP Build and SAPUI5, developers can leverage the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2.

For example, two of the key new requirements in the 2.2 version are:

The minimum target size of an interactive element now needs to be 24x24 px, so that users don’t accidentally activate a neighbouring element.
Each operation that can be performed by dragging can also be performed alternatively without dragging – so that people who cannot use a mouse to drag can still use the UI.

See more details:

SAPUI5 is Leading the Way in Accessibility with WCAG 2.2

Blue Crystal and Belize Themes No Longer Available in the Web

As announced in April (Upcoming Removal of SAP Fiori Themes Belize and Blue Crystal), the visual themes Blue Crystal and Belize have been removed from our web UI technology with the 2025 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and SAP S/4HANA.

After upgrading, existing usages of Belize or Blue Crystal will be automatically redirected to the Horizon theme.

If you have created your own custom theme based on Belize or Blue Crystal using the UI theme designer, you will need to migrate this to an available theme. Our strong recommendation is to base the new version on the Horizon theme.

For more information about the web UI technologies affected, and how to migrate custom themes, have a look at this blog post:

Announcement: Removal of Belize theme of SAP Fiori.

Note that SAP GUI for Windows continues to support older themes, including Blue Crystal and Belize.

Final words

Come join us at TechEd 2025, November 4 - 6, either virtually or in Berlin, or at one of the TechEd On The Road events in Louisville (USA), Bangalore (India) and Sydney (Australia), to find out more about our latest user experience innovations. I myself will be in Berlin and Bangalore, so feel free to approach me after my talks if you have any specific questions. I’m looking forward to meeting some of you!

This blog posts gives an overview of all the UX related sessions at all four events:

Exciting UX talks at TechEd – Virtual, or meet us in Berlin and On The Road (USA, India, Australia).

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.

Building Pro-Code Extensions for SAP Mobile Start leveraging mobile native functionalities

2025-11-27T15:04:08.058000+01:00

We just concluded this year's SAP TechEd with two very insightful in-person events – SAP TechEd 2025 in Berlin (Nov 4–5) and SAP TechEd on Tour Bangalore (Nov 25–26). As depicted in the announcement blog post of my colleague Thilo Berndt, the mobile topics were again very well covered in various sessions and activities. As part of which, we were conducting a Hands-on Workshop both in Berlin and Bangalore called "CA260 – Learn how to build your own app and use it in SAP Mobile Start", which we would like to recap in this blog post and highlight the most interesting technical aspects.

Overview

SAP Mobile Start is the native entry point to the SAP Business Suite, to all relevant business processes, data, and content. It provides access to native or web-responsive business apps along with other content and critical business information. This includes notifications and consolidated views on tasks, approval workflows, and SAP S/4HANA situations. SAP Mobile Start provides business information from SAP Start, SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition, and SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition. Non SAP content can be integrated as well. It runs on iOS, iPadOS and Android devices, on watchOS and Wear OS devices, and on Apple Vision

While one significant aspect of SAP Mobile Start is to provide access to SAP’s role-specific standard content, such as business applications and tiles exposed from SAP S/4HANA via SAP Build Work Zone, this year’s SAP TechEd Hands-On Workshop CA260 centered on the ease of building pro-code extensions using SAP Build and specifically SAP Build Code with the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP). Participants were able to experience the necessary steps in building and deploying such a pro-code extension, as well as how to specifically utilize mobile native capabilities within that extension, such as Widgets (e.g. on the iOS Home and Lockscreen) and (Push) Notifications.

The session material and exercises are available on Github within the repository SAP-samples/teched2025-CA260. We do highly recommend checking out the exercises and trying them out on your own development system environment. This blog post will provide a brief overview of the most important steps and technical activities.

Please note that the session material on Github as well as some screenshots and code snippets in this blog post will contain usages of "###" as a placeholder for the participant number that was assigned in the hands-on workshop. Participants were instructed to replace these occurrences with their own participant number.

Building and Deploying the base version of the extension

The exercises started by building and deploying an initial version of the extension that the workshop is using as an example. As the initial version provided to participants, we are using a slightly modified version of the "Incidents Management" CAP sample application. The provided full-stack application and its dependencies are defined in the Multitarget Application descriptor (mta.yaml) which is being built and packaged into an mta archive (.mtar) during the build operation, which eventually gets deployed to the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), specifically SAP BTP Cloud Foundry environment. While the workshop is making use of SAP Build Code and its productivity tooling for developing full-stack applications with CAP, building the MTA project and deploying the build artifact to the SAP BTP, you can as well use your IDE of choice such as Visual Studio Code.

Screenshot: Overview of the project structure

With the deployment, the CAP application (in terms of the server logic) is running an application container on the Cloud Foundry Runtime. The UI of our full-stack application is realized using SAP Fiori Elements, which is generating the User Interface based on standard floorpans and UI annotations as part of the service definitions using CDS. The Fiori frontend application lives within the HTML5 Repository of the SAP BTP. While this would already be sufficient to expose our extension to SAP Build Work Zone and SAP Mobile Start as an application tile and run the frontend within the shell of SAP Build Work Zone using its managed Approuter, we want to have more control over the visual representation.

Frontend deployed to the HTML5 Repository; backend application deployed to Cloud Foundry

We can achieve this greater control by leveraging SAP Build Work Zone's content definition format – the Common Data Model (CDM). The definition of which is documented here and represents a standardized data structure for defining business apps, their visual representation, the required roles, and the logical hierarchical structure in which business apps shall be organized using a concept called "Spaces & Pages". Such CDM structure can be supplied to the HTML5 Repository during deployment of our extension. In the workshop's repository, this definition resides in the /workzone/cdm.json file.

Integrating the app into SAP Build Work Zone & SAP Mobile Start

For integrating our extension into SAP Build Work Zone, which makes it automatically available to SAP Mobile Start, we leverage a relatively new feature of the SAP Build Work Zone Channel Manager – defining a HTML5 Business Solution. While we could also create a regular Content Provider, using the new Content Channel type "HTML5 Business Solution" further simplifies the process as we are not required to manage any design-time destination. The HTML5 repository is merging all deployed HTML5 applications and their CDM definition from a common "Business Solution", making it available for selection as a joint Content Channel by the "Business Solution" dropdown.

Creation of a HTML5 Business Solution Content Channel in SAP Build Work Zone

This value used for merging multiple HTML5 application belonging to the same business solution is done via a dedicated property ("service" under "sap.cloud") in the web applications manifest.json. If you want to read more about HTML5 Content Consumption capabilities of SAP Build Work Zone, we can recommend this excellent blog post from our colleague Rupam who is part of the SAP Build Work Zone team.

{
  "_version": "1.65.0",
  "sap.app": {
    "id": "com.sap.ca260.###",
    "type": "application",
    [...]
  },
  [...]
  "sap.cloud": {
    "public": true,
    "service": "ca260###"
  }
}

After adding the Content Channel's role to our Site and making sure we have the role assigned to our desired users, we can see it exposed in SAP Build Work Zone using the browser as well as in SAP Mobile Start – Nice! As defined in the /workzone/cdm.json file, the application tile of our built extension is placed onto a Page with the title "Apps from Participant CA260-000", which itself is available under a Space named "Extensions from CA260".

Deployed application visible in SAP Build Work Zone and SAP Mobile Start

Extending the app to make use of Widgets on your mobile device

The steps to extend now our application in order for it to be configurable as a Widget, for example on the iOS Homescreen or the Lockscreen, are actually much easier than you might think. SAP Mobile Start offers multiple types of Widgets. The one we will be using here is the "Business Info Widget", which can be configured to display any KPI that is available to SAP Mobile Start. In technical terms this means that we need to enhance the application tile of our extension to become a "Dynamic App Launcher". In the simplest case, these are tiles showing a number coming from a connected data service. In more complex scenarios, these can also display criticalities, trend and more information around the selected KPI.

The process to transform our basic tile into a Dynamic App Launcher is fairly simple. Within our web application's manifest.json file, we can add the required definition to make it such a dynamic tile and connect it to our OData service for incidents available in our CAP application. For our example, let's point to the OData count of incidents and filter for incidents that are not in status closed using the status_code property. The needed configuration resides within the inbound definition under the node "indicatorDataSource". In order to make this change visible on our environment, the updated version needs to be deployed and the Content Channel needs to be synced.

Transforming the application tile into a DynamicAppLauncher

As a result, our application now appears a KPI tile on our Site and in SAP Mobile Start and we can monitor the automatically updated value both inside of SAP Mobile Start – for example when accessing the Page or by adding the app into my favorites on the Start tab of SAP Mobile Start. This fact allows us to configure the same Dynamic App Launcher tile as a Widget, for instance to our iPhone's Homescreen.

Pro tip: Why not mirroring your iOS Widget of open incidents to your Mac or configure the same on your Apple Watch as a watch face complication?

The Dynamic App Launcher tile appearing in SAP Build Work Zone and SAP Mobile Start

Implementing our own (push) notifications

Let's now go one step further and implement our own notifications from our CAP application. The beauty of the integration via SAP Build Work Zone and SAP's notification framework leveraging the SAP Alert Notification Service on BTP is, that such notifications will automatically appear on our SAP Build Work Zone Site in the browser, in SAP Mobile Start under the notification bell as well as be delivered as a mobile native push notification to the mobile devices on which you use SAP Mobile Start. That's a game changer for informing your users about a time critical situation directly from your pro-code extensions.

For CAP based extensions, we can make use of the @cap-js/notifications plugin. The plugin communicates with the necessary APIs using a Destination that needs to be created in the SAP BTP Subaccount in which the application will run. By default it expects the name for the Destination to be SAP_Notifications if not configured differently. The values for this Destination can be retrieved from the Settings of SAP Build Work Zone (Administrator role required).

For sending actual notification from our CAP service, we need to define our desired NotificationTypes first in the /srv/notification-types.json. These defined types represent the blueprint for the actual notifications to be sent. They include the texts for the actual notifications in all the languages that shall be supported with dedicated placeholders which will be filled when the notification is actually triggered in the service logic. Below you can see an example for such a type:

{
    "NotificationTypeKey": "IncidentCreated",
    "NotificationTypeVersion": "1",
    "Templates": [
      {
        "Language": "en",
        "TemplatePublic": "New Incident created",
        "TemplateSensitive": "New incident created by {{customer}}",
        "TemplateGrouped": "Incident Status Update",
        "TemplateLanguage": "mustache",
        "Subtitle": "{{description}}"
      },
      {
        "Language": "de",
        "TemplatePublic": "Neuer Vorfall eingegangen",
        "TemplateSensitive": "Neuer Vorfall von {{customer}}",
        "TemplateGrouped": "Vorfall Status Änderungen",
        "TemplateLanguage": "mustache",
        "Subtitle": "{{description}}"
      }
    ]
  }

Sending actual notification is fairly easy and can be done with very few lines of code. We first need to initialize the notifications plugin with cds.connect.to('notifications'), which creates a handle with which we can send notifications later. Sending notifications can be done with the function alert.notify. Here, we reference the desired NotificationType (defined before), recipients and further properties and data related to this specific notification we intend to send.

Coding used to send notification when incidents are created and closed.

As a result, we receive a push notification at the event of incident creation and closure. Already in the push notification displayed by the mobile operating system, we see the defined texts from our NotificationType with the specific values filled for the specific incident object. When tapping on this push notification, SAP Mobile Start shows the full notification in the dedicated area of the mobile app. Using "Open in Browser" brings us to this specific incident in our SAP Fiori Elements application where we could take further action. This is achieved by supplying the Intent Based Navigation (IBN) information of our app – consisting of the Semantic Object and Action defined in our web application's manifest. This allows SAP Mobile Start and SAP Build Work Zone to open the right application as a navigation target from the exposed content – in our case, the SAP Fiori Elements application running the HTML5 Repository and exposed to SAP Build Work Zone using the HTML5 Business Solution Content Channel. The deep link to the specific incident object is achieved by supplying a special navigation target parameter that SAP Fiori Elements supports for opening the desired "Inner App Route" – in our example, the Object Page of a specific incident using its ID. Feel free to check out how this was done for this specific example in the repositories' code.

The notification details visible in SAP Mobile Start and the deep-link navigation to the SAP Fiori Elements application

Outlook

We hope we were able to show, how easy it is to create pro-code extensions, deploy them to the SAP BTP, integrate them into SAP Build Work Zone & SAP Mobile Start. The demonstrated examples of mobile native widgets and push notifications hopefully showed the ease of leveraging the mobile native device capabilities. Beyond the content of the CA260 Hands-On Workshop of SAP TechEd 2025, we would like to give you an outlook to what else would be possible with this basis.

The beauty of using the HTML5 Business Solution Content Channel Exposure in SAP Build Work Zone is that we have the flexibility and feature set of the Common Data Model (CDM) available. We could further extend the /workzone/cdm.json file to make use of even richer visualization capabilities – for example by defining a declarative UI Integration Card. Such cards allow to achieve UI richt micro-experiences right on the Page's structure, for example displaying a short list of incidents with the most important information to get a brief overview as a processor. In the browser when consuming the page via SAP Build Work Zone, the card is rendered as a regular SAP UI5 UI Integration Card. In SAP Mobile Start, declarative cards are supported as mobile native UI elements. With a single declarative definition of such a card using the UI Integration Card framework, we can achieve native cross-platform support with a high quality user experience directly within SAP Mobile Start.

Having a UI Integration Card added to the Page in SAP Build Work Zone and SAP Mobile Start

For further information on SAP Mobile Start related features and 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 these hands-on exercises; please do share your thoughts and comments below.

SAP Mobile Start V2.5 - Release update brings UX and To-Do enhancements

2025-12-08T18:31:01.906000+01:00

With the recently released version 2.5, SAP Mobile Start adopts Apple's new Liquid Glass design language and provides several enhancements for To-Dos.

Let´s start with Liquid Glass. With Liquid Glass, Apple has unified its platform design language across Apple’s ecosystem of products. Liquid Glass provides a much more dynamic and expressive user experience and complements the experience of latest Apple devices like the Apple iPhone 17 – e.g. the round edges of the latest devices are now also reflected in the new design language.

What does this mean for our iOS users of SAP Mobile Start? First, you get a more dynamic user experience, but most important is that you get more space on the screen as the navigation bar collapses if it is not needed. Also, the content scrolls below the navigation and header bar.

Screenshot: New Liquid Glass design of SAP Mobile Start

Another small but worth to mention UX enhancement is that empty pages are not shown on the App Screen anymore. In the past, the app showed empty pages that did not have any mobile app assigned. With the new release, those are not shown anymore.

On the To-Dos screen, you get an additional To-Do filter option with the new release. This allows you to filter your to-dos by semantic groups defined in Task Center. For instance, you can have a group "Procurement", that automatically brings together to-dos from different source systems into one streamlined view. Furthermore, you can switch from the standard card view to a new compact view that provides you more flexibility to choose the view of your to-dos, based on the amount of to-dos you are dealing with. Please check our SAP Help documentation for details.

Screenshot: To-Do screen with new filter and view type

I hope you will enjoy these features in SAP Mobile Start.

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

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