Fiori Launchpad on Hana Cloud Platform – A first look to creating your Launchpad in the cloud

[Former Member]

Fiori Launchpad on Hana Cloud Platform – A first look to creating your Launchpad in the cloud

Recently on March 31st, SAP announced general availability of SAP Fiori Cloud Edition.  This is made available in the Hana Cloud Platform's Cloud Portal.  For my first SCN blog, I’ll walk through step by step how to enable the services you’ll need in HCP and how to create a few simple applications to see your new Cloud Fiori Launchpad in action with some initial impressions.

I won’t cover signing up for your free Hana Cloud Trial account, but if you don’t have one yet…sign up for free at:  https://account.hanatrial.ondemand.com

The first step in setting up your own Fiori Launchpad in the cloud is to logon to your Hana Cloud Platform account and activate the Hana Cloud Portal.  Below you see the HCP dashboard.  Once you click on “Services” and scroll down to the bottom of the page, you see Hana Cloud Portal.  I had already enabled mine for other demos but by clicking on the service you can activate your Cloud Portal.

Hana Cloud Platform dashboard

Hana Cloud Services – SAP Hana Cloud Portal

Now that the Hana Cloud Portal is activated you can click on “Go to Service”.

Clicking “Go to Service” launches your own Hana Cloud Portal URL.  The home screen here is a welcome to Hana Cloud Portal along with links on the left hand side to the different options you have in your Cloud Portal.

In order to create a Fiori Launchpad (FLP), you click on Site Directory and click on the + tile. You can see below I have already created a Nimbl Cloud FLP, but if I wanted to create another one I would click the +.

There are multiple site templates available for you to choose from.  I selected SAP Fiori Launchpad.

After you have created your SAP Fiori Launchpad, you have the option to edit your Launchpad.  Here you are taken to a very nice looking Launchpad designer/editor.  I believe the cloud version of this is already miles ahead of the on-premise solution.  From this Launchpad Home screen you can perform all of the major tasks that any Launchpad designer might do.  Create an App tile, go to catalogs, groups, see the apps uploaded to your Hana Cloud account for usage, etc…

From the FLP cloud edition home page, it’s a lot like creating tiles, groups, and catalogs in the on-premise version of Launchpad Designer, only easier.

Below I go through the quick steps of creating an application tile that points to a URL. For my use case, I decided to make my own Development Tools catalog of application tiles.

How to:  Creating an application tile

Click Create App Tile from the Home tab.  You are taken to a wizard for creating your application tile as seen in the screenshots below.  Very simply, enter the information on this screen and the Navigation screen.  Once that is done, your application tile is created.  If you have not already created Groups/Catalogs, you can house this application in the sample group/sample catalog already created for you.

Enter apps name and description

For this example, I am choosing to link to a URL App Type:

The Navigation tab, Icon selection, and tile group assignment:

The end product:

In less than an hour, I was able to activate my Hana Cloud Portal, Fiori Launchpad in the Cloud, and create 4 application tiles to URLs, a Catalog, and a Group.  Now I am happily using my Nimbl Development Launchpad as an everyday starting point to checking Nimbl email, log into my Web IDE account, search on SCN, and/or google more SAP solutions.

Usage Analytics

The one feature that the Fiori Launchpad cloud edition differentiates itself with is the built in analytics.  There wasn't a good way in the on-premise version of FLP to track site visits, how many times someone has accessed a certain application, and give trends on daily/weekly/monthly access.  FLP in the cloud fixes that with this slick looking Usage Analytics page. After accessing my apps and playing around during development, I was able to see how many times I visited the page, what OS I was using, and what browser I accessed the FLP with.

For Help or to learn more about Fiori Launchpad in the Cloud, you can click on the help linkand you are taken straight to the page below to peruse/learn more:

Stay tuned for another installment in the Fiori Launchpad Cloud edition blog to see how to connect to an on-premise SAP system and deploy any of the 29 currently available SAP standard apps.

Happy Cloud Launching!