More and more customers are adopting the new Fiori Launchpad (FLP) design on SAP Enterprise Portal (EP) to benefit from a modern and easy to use user interface that also runs nicely on mobile devices. Of course, users also want to access their documents and unstructured content in their Portal in a UI that fits into the new FLP design seamlessly both from desktop and mobile.
To achieve this, SAP Mobile Documents is the natural choice. Besides the cool UI, it also allows you to easily integrate content from other sources like Microsoft Sharepoint or the SAP Business Suite. In this blog, I would like to look into the integration from a technical point of view. For more details on business benefits and how you can best leverage SAP Mobile Documents with SAP Enterprise Portal, I recommend reading Annette Fuchs' blog on SAP Mobile Documents and SAP Fiori launchpad on EP integration.
1. Installation of SAP Mobile Documents
For your on-premise server installation you need an SAP NetWeaver AS Java as a platform to install the SAP Mobile Documents Server. So you might decide to install it on your Portal server. There are already quite some blogs out there on SCN describing the installation in detail.
Check out Martina Kirschenmann's SAP Mobile Documents - Implementation and Integration for a comprehensive overview of all necessary and optional configuration steps and links to more detailed blogs.
2. Configuration of SAP Mobile Documents
In Mobile Documents, you usually have 3 areas:
- My Documents where the user can store personal documents and sync them to all connected clients,
- Shared documents for securely sharing documents with internal and external users according to various security settings
- Corporate Repositories where managed content can be provided to the users.
To use My Documents and Shared Documents, you first have to create repositories called mydocuments and shareddocuments in the Knowledge Management of your SAP Enteprise Portal.
Further repositories from SAP Knowledge Management or other sources can be accessed in the Corporate section- see my blog Providing corporate content to end users with SAP Fiori Launchpad on Enterprise Portal for more detail and check out:
- SAP Mobile Documents Setup Guide for all details on configuration
- Setup connection for SAP Mobile Documents to Microsoft Sharepoint for Microsoft Sharepoint integration
- SAP Mobile Documents - Connecting a File Share as Corporate Repository.
3. Setting up SAP Fiori launchpad in the Enterprise Portal
Some time ago, I already published a blog on Building your Mobile Portal using Fiori Launchpad on EP. It touches all steps that are necessary for setting up FLP on EP, but since that one was more addressed to the experienced portal admin, I will now go into more details specifically for Mobile Documents and add some more screenshots.
a. Create a new URL Alias and assign the Fiori desktop to it
In this step, you create a new URL suffix that you can use to call the portal in FLP design directly. Of course, you could also configure your Portal to run with FLP, when calling the standard URL, and use a specific URL alias to access the Ajax Framework page.
In the Portal, navigate to System Administration > System Configuration > Portal Display > URL Alias Manager. Click New to create a new URL Alias with a meaningful name starting with portal/ like portal/fiori or portal/flp.
To assign the URL alias to the Fiori desktop, navigate to System Administration > System Configuration > Portal Display > Desktops & Display Rules.
On this page, navigate to Portal Content > Portal Administrators > Super Administrators and open the Master Rule Collection. Click Add IF Expression.
In the IF part of the new expression, select URL Alias from the dropdown and enter your newly created URL alias into the text field right to it. Click Apply.
Now click the THEN part of the expression. In the Portal Content tree, open Portal Content > Portal Users > Standard Portal Users > Fiori Framework Content. Right click Fiori Desktop and select Add Portal Desktop to Expression. Click Submit again. With Move Down, you can bring your new expression to the right place in the Master Rule.
In most cases, you will change the Fiori Launchpad theme to better reflect your corporate identity, so you would rather use an adapted copy of the Fiori desktop.
b. Defining categories for the Tile Catalog
You can use categories to allow end users to identify relevant content more easily. The categories that are needed in your company, can be configured as properties of the Fiori Launchpad Categories iView. If you do not define categories, all tiles will appear under one category called General.
In the Portal, navigate to Content Administration > Portal Content Management.
Open folder Portal Content > Portal Users > Standard Portal Users > iViews > Fiori Launchpad.
Right click Fiori Framework Categories to open the Properties. Click All to display all properties.
When you scroll down a bit, you can see Category 01 ID, Order, Title to Category 20 ID, Order, Title. Here you can define up to 20 categories for the tiles in your launchpad.
c. Create SAP Mobile Documents iViews
For each tile in your SAP Fiori launchpad that should open Mobile Documents, you need to create a URL iView.
Go to Content Administration and choose create iView from Template. Select the URL iView template. After iView creation, edit the following properties:
- On the URL iView tab, enter the URL to start Mobile Documents.You can either display the complete Mobile Documents web client or a direct link to a specific folder.
- Complete web client: Enter URL /mcm/browser. If SAP Mobile Documents runs on the Portal server, it is not necessary to enter a system. Otherwise, create a system for Mobile Documents in System Administration > System Landscape and enter the alias of this system on the URL iView tab.
- Direct link: Enter URL /mcm/browser/v1/open and if necessary, a system. To find out the object ID of the folder to display, open the Mobile Documents web client and navigate to the folder you want to display in the iView.
Select the folder by clicking the checkbox in front it, then click the i to open the folder information. In the web link and mobile link on the information page, you can find the object ID and the repository ID.
In your URL iView settings, enter two URL parameters:
- URL parameter rep with value the repository ID as you find it after rep= in the folder's web link, type String
- URL parameter obj with value the object ID as you find it after obj= in the folder's web link, type String.
- Now you have to set some more iView properties that are not Mobile Documents specific, but are important for the iView to show up in Fiori launchpad. Go to tab Properties, click All and Modify Properties. Set the following properties:
- Object ID of Device group: Enter the ID of all device groups on which the iView should show up. You can find these IDs in System Administration > System Configuration > Portal Display > Device Group Manager. You can find the IDs in the rightmost column. Enter the IDs for all relevant device groups separated by semicolons, e.g. com.sap.portal.dg.desktop;com.sap.portal.dg.smartphone;com.sap.portal.dg.tablet.
- Mobile App Categories: Enter a list of all categories where the iView should show up in the Tile Catalog according to the categories that you created in part 3b.
- Default App in Home Page (as of Portal 7.4 SPS 10 or Portal 7.31 SPS 15. In earlier releases, this property is called Permanent in Launcher😞 If this is set to true, the selected iView is displayed by default on the home page. Otherwise, the end user would first have to go to the Tile Catalog and assign the tile to one of his groups.
- SAP UI5 icon: Define the icon that is displayed on the tile, e.g. sap-icon://documents or sap-icon://document-text. If you set the Image Type to Image instead of Icon, you can also display an image stored in the Web Resource Repository using the property Icon URI.
If you would like to read more details about iView properties, please read Shani Limor's blog on SAP Fiori Launchpad on Portal - Sample Content for Administrators.
d. Assigning the iViews to roles
Create a new freestyle role or edit an existing one. Add the new Mobile Documents iViews to the role and make sure that there is an entry point defined for the iView or one ore more levels higher. Make sure the the iView is set to Visible.
Assign the role to a user or a group. Now all iViews in the role are listed in the Tile catalog for the user. The tiles that were defined as Default App in Home Page / Permanent in Launcher are accessible from the user's home page automatically.
Now the system is set up. Access Fiori launchpad in the Portal with the following URL http://<portalserver>:<portalport>/irj/<your URL alias>. Click the menu icon to access groups and the tile catalog and you can start to play with Mobile Documents in your Portal.
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