SAP Mobile Secure includes a mobile application management (MAM) feature known as SAP Mobile Place. Mobile Place is a brandable, localizable and secure enterprise app store that makes it easy for companies to simply and proactively push their mobile apps into the hands of employees, business partners and consumers. And it does a lot more too.
Our top priority is to make the mobile app experience as easy as possible for all mobile users. Mobile Place technology delivers apps, services and content in a simple way to both managed and unmanaged mobile devices.
The concept of serving both managed and unmanaged devices is very important and ensures that you provide the best mobile experience for consuming enterprise apps. For example, a large beverage company will use Mobile Place to make their mobile apps easily accessible to distributors, and a healthcare provider can provide a single mobile app to authorized patients. The discovery features of mobile place help ensure any corporate developed or 3rd party apps can be easily configured.
For managed users, Mobile Place identifies when their device is out of compliance and directs them to download the appropriate mobile device management (MDM) solution before they can download any apps (note that MDM solutions include SAP Mobile Secure's own cloud based MDM offering, our on-premise SAP Afaria product or other MDM vendor products). And for companies who don’t want to MDM manage their devices, unmanaged users can get the same apps installed and secured at the app level.
Mobile Place also provides a mobile app configuration service to simplify the deployment of mobile apps – and specifically SAP Fiori apps. The mobile app configuration service is a feature that is designed to help companies easily to build, configure, wrap and deploy mobile apps. Now, a Fiori app can be deployed to a mobile device by passing the Fiori endpoint URL to the configuration service which packages the URL into the configuration of a SAP Fiori Client application, builds and signs the app and finally makes it available for deployment through Mobile Place.
Without this build service, the process for deploying Fiori apps requires several steps for both end users at IT. Users started with the basic Fiori client app, which they downloaded from the App Store. They entered the URL and other parameters manually. This increased the probability of user error and potentially reduced usability. Also, Fiori apps were generic with the same icon and name; they could not be customized or personalized in any way. Finally app-level security policies could not be defined or enforced by default. I’m pleased to report that those days are over!
The mobile app configuration service makes it easier not only for IT, but also for end users. It enables the easy creation of multiple customized SAP Fiori apps for different functionalities - with different app names, splash screens and icons. It takes the burden off the end user, increasing adoption and giving IT more control of app customization, and it allows for app-level security policies to be defined and enhanced with SAP Mobile App Protection.
Want to learn more?
Mobile Place is included at no additional cost with the purchase of SAP Mobile Secure in the cloud. And that's only 1 euro per device per month.
