Hello,
It’s my great pleasure to introduce the SAP Launchpad service on SAP Business Technology Platform (Cloud Foundry environment) and share first insights about this new exciting service. In the previous months, I’ve talked to many customers and partners who have been eagerly waiting for these capabilities. If you’re familiar with the SAP Fiori Deployment Options and Recommendations this is now the time where your journey to the cloud gets ready for take-off.
Motivation
Let me start by depicting the current situation at most of our customers. To get their job done successfully business users are typically required to access and work with applications from various business areas such as finance, HR, procurement, customer experience and even employee or manager self-services. To become intelligent enterprises and perform well in today’s challenging and volatile economy, organizations are streamlining their end-to-end business processes and driving towards an engaging experience for their employees, business partners and customers.
…yet the reality looks somehow different: business users face a fragmented, heterogenous landscape of solutions with inconsistent user experience and many local entry points. As a consequence, they need to remember numerous URL links and logon credentials. They spend hours with searching for information and navigating around in different systems and repositories. Sometimes you unnecessarily drilled down into a transaction just to look up some (unchanged) status of an order, request or approval step – how cumbersome is this?
Imagine how frustrating this can be for the users and how time-consuming this can get every single day. Wouldn't it be great to provide business users a central point of access via a unified, proactive and personalized environment?
Empower users to get the job done more easily
With the new generation of digital experience solutions we want to empower business users to work smarter, become more productive and get the job done more efficiently.
Our customers – especially large corporations – are looking for a clever way to simplify and unify access to all these applications, reports, workflows & tasks, bots and notifications – either running on premise or in the cloud. Now imagine what could be if your users can launch all their apps and services from ONE central place.
What are the benefits?
With the SAP Launchpad service we increase user’s productivity and efficiency by enabling organizations to establish a central point of access to SAP, custom-build and third party applications and extensions.
Increase user engagement
Boost user productivity
Improve operations efficiency
Sounds promising, right?
Use Cases
With the SAP Launchpad service and related UX services we want to help organizations like yours to address the following scenarios:
Key capabilities
Let’s have a closer look how this can be achieved. The Launchpad service provides enhanced administration capabilities for integrating business applications and managing the related content such as roles and tiles. Using the out of the box templates you can easily integrate single applications based on SAPUI5/Fiori, Web Dynpro ABAP or SAP GUI for HTML.
Furthermore, SAP enables solutions such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP Business Suite, SAP Enterprise Portal (and more) to serve as content providers by exposing their business content and role structures to the central Launchpad, which will make the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the content administrator much more efficient. Learn more about content federation and the prerequisites.
The general direction for the setup is depicted in the following picture, illustrating how the launchpad integrates with central services and content providers in the cloud and on-premise.
For details about the and configuration check the Planning and Lifecycle Management guide for SAP BTP. Please consult our road map for details on planned integrations with specific services and SAP solutions.
Further information
With this I hope you got an initial overview about the new service. Stay tuned for further information in the coming weeks, we'll publish exciting blog posts here in the community. In particular we are working on tools and guidelines for customers who want to adopt the service, and plan a transition from related services such as SAP Enterprise Portal or SAP Cloud Portal service.
You can learn more in the overview presentation and documentation. To get hands-on experience check out the discovery center mission, tutorials and get started using the trial environment.
I am looking forward to your feedback and comments.
Thomas
NOTE: this service was renamed in January 2021 (fka SAP Cloud Platform Launchpad) in the context of SAP Business Technology Platform.
It’s my great pleasure to introduce the SAP Launchpad service on SAP Business Technology Platform (Cloud Foundry environment) and share first insights about this new exciting service. In the previous months, I’ve talked to many customers and partners who have been eagerly waiting for these capabilities. If you’re familiar with the SAP Fiori Deployment Options and Recommendations this is now the time where your journey to the cloud gets ready for take-off.
Motivation
Let me start by depicting the current situation at most of our customers. To get their job done successfully business users are typically required to access and work with applications from various business areas such as finance, HR, procurement, customer experience and even employee or manager self-services. To become intelligent enterprises and perform well in today’s challenging and volatile economy, organizations are streamlining their end-to-end business processes and driving towards an engaging experience for their employees, business partners and customers.
…yet the reality looks somehow different: business users face a fragmented, heterogenous landscape of solutions with inconsistent user experience and many local entry points. As a consequence, they need to remember numerous URL links and logon credentials. They spend hours with searching for information and navigating around in different systems and repositories. Sometimes you unnecessarily drilled down into a transaction just to look up some (unchanged) status of an order, request or approval step – how cumbersome is this?
Imagine how frustrating this can be for the users and how time-consuming this can get every single day. Wouldn't it be great to provide business users a central point of access via a unified, proactive and personalized environment?
Empower users to get the job done more easily
With the new generation of digital experience solutions we want to empower business users to work smarter, become more productive and get the job done more efficiently.
Our customers – especially large corporations – are looking for a clever way to simplify and unify access to all these applications, reports, workflows & tasks, bots and notifications – either running on premise or in the cloud. Now imagine what could be if your users can launch all their apps and services from ONE central place.
What are the benefits?
With the SAP Launchpad service we increase user’s productivity and efficiency by enabling organizations to establish a central point of access to SAP, custom-build and third party applications and extensions.
Increase user engagement
- Intuitive user experience based on SAP Fiori design
- Simplified access to apps and services (desktop and mobile)
- Personalized home page with relevant, role-based content
Boost user productivity
- Fast access to information and efficient navigation via central, unified experience
- Proactive notifications
- Focus on important KPIs and live business data
Improve operations efficiency
- Streamline UX integration for common SAP solutions
- Out of the box integration with central services
- Seamless app integration for common UI technologies
Sounds promising, right?
Use Cases
With the SAP Launchpad service and related UX services we want to help organizations like yours to address the following scenarios:
- UX integration: build a central point of access to SAP and third-party solutions (both cloud and on-premise), in particular accessing multiple SAP S/4HANA systems from one common launchpad
- Extensions: easily access all your custom applications and extensions build on SAP BTP
- External-facing scenarios granting your employees or business partners secure access to selected applications and services over the internet on desktop and mobile devices (outside the corporate network)
- Cloud transition: Elevate your SAP Fiori (launchpad) experience to the cloud, especially for customers running an application-centric SAP Enterprise Portal
Key capabilities
Let’s have a closer look how this can be achieved. The Launchpad service provides enhanced administration capabilities for integrating business applications and managing the related content such as roles and tiles. Using the out of the box templates you can easily integrate single applications based on SAPUI5/Fiori, Web Dynpro ABAP or SAP GUI for HTML.
Furthermore, SAP enables solutions such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP Business Suite, SAP Enterprise Portal (and more) to serve as content providers by exposing their business content and role structures to the central Launchpad, which will make the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the content administrator much more efficient. Learn more about content federation and the prerequisites.
The general direction for the setup is depicted in the following picture, illustrating how the launchpad integrates with central services and content providers in the cloud and on-premise.
For details about the and configuration check the Planning and Lifecycle Management guide for SAP BTP. Please consult our road map for details on planned integrations with specific services and SAP solutions.
Further information
With this I hope you got an initial overview about the new service. Stay tuned for further information in the coming weeks, we'll publish exciting blog posts here in the community. In particular we are working on tools and guidelines for customers who want to adopt the service, and plan a transition from related services such as SAP Enterprise Portal or SAP Cloud Portal service.
You can learn more in the overview presentation and documentation. To get hands-on experience check out the discovery center mission, tutorials and get started using the trial environment.
I am looking forward to your feedback and comments.
Thomas
NOTE: this service was renamed in January 2021 (fka SAP Cloud Platform Launchpad) in the context of SAP Business Technology Platform.
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