SAP for Mobile

6 Students + 6 SAP Developers = 3 Very Cool Mobile Apps at SAPPHIRENOW Orlando 2013

Carolyn Fitton — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:21:41 GMT

Back from an amazing week at SAPPHIRENOW Orlando 2013! I had an packed week filled with customer and partner meetings and new technology experiences. I have lot to share but I want to start my updates with this blog.

Deep in the heart of the SAPPHIRE jungle, I found the 2013 University App Rumble! I met 6 amazing students who made some really cool mobile apps. Each group of 2 students were asked to take a design thinking approach to their mobile app and incorporate both SAP Mobile Platform and SAP HANA. Their ideas could fall under any SAP Industry, and could be business or consumer focused. Kudos to Jennifer Frank for managing this incredible program.

These brave students went before a panelist of SAP judges and presented their mobile applications. I was fortunate enough to sit through their presentations and grabbed some time with each group after the judging was complete.

I sat down with finalists Amanda Lopez and Mitchell Grewer from Grand Valley State University to talk to them about their 'Short Shop' app. These students worked with Vivian Liu and Yanislav Mihaylov to design and build their Grocery App, “Short Shop”. As a foodie and grocery shop planner, I love this app and my favourite feature is the tracking of what is already in your cupboards - this would save me from having 10 jars of Pataks Mild Curry Paste and no Vindaloo! Check out this interview to hear more from these talented young professionals.

Next I interviewed April Zeng and Mingbo Gong from the University of Southern California about their 'Dine Right' app. They collaborated with Ruchi Aswal and Frank Neumann to design and build a Restaurant App, “Dine Right”. As I mentioned before, I am a foodie and love to eat out in Toronto. A feature that I love in this app is the personalization of dining suggestions and nutrition goals - for example the 'Do You Really Want to Eat that? It will go Straight to Your Hips' audio alert when you scan a fatty snack like potatoe chips - talk about mobile enforced will power. Watch the video below to learn more about these impressive students and their mobile solution.

Last, I was able to grab the Grand Prize Winners Daniel Sanchez and Gary Longoria from San Francisco State University to chat about 'Advanced Diabetes Management App.' These students worked with John Astill and Jeff Cadow to create the mobile app that could actually change lives! I was blown away by this solution that was tailored for diabetics and the design is open and could be used to manage other diseases. This solution hit home with me as my grandmother was diagnosed with diabetes in her early 80s and struggled to manage her disease until her death. Furthermore, I was impressed by Daniel who started using Sybase Unwired Platform, now SAP Mobile Platform, a few years ago to build mobile apps.

I applaud these students for their amazing work and the SAP developers for their support to the program. It was a privilege to be included in the

2013 University App Rumble!

Using Neptune as a third-party development tool for the SMP Cloud Edition

Njål Stabell — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:41:11 GMT

The SAP Mobile Platform Cloud Edition is a new offering from SAP for an on-demand Mobile as a Service solution. For companies, the security issues regarding mobilizing backend systems, is often a showstopper when introducing enterprise mobility. Many of our customers could benefit from this new solution, so I decided to see how it fits with ABAP HTML5 applications created with the Neptune Application Designer.

After a quick conversation with Jens Koerner at SAP I felt sure that this was feasible. Two days later we had an app with CAPCHA onboarding to a trial version of SMP Cloud connected to our ECC system. In this blog I’ll outline the steps needed for setting this up and if you are a Neptune Developer feel free to request our new Neptune SMP Cloud template app to speed up deployment.

First, you need access to an SMP Cloud account if you just want to test it you can get a free trial from SAP. The UI and usability of the SMP Cloud is great and most of the features are self-explanatory.

Start by creating a new Application.

Then set up your backend and Authentication settings using the wizard. I chose to use the internet option as we do not currently have the Cloud Connector installed.

Check Enable CAPTCHA (If you wish to add some robot hacker attack protection for your onboarding J ) And use the Neptune_login_ping application as the Authentication URL as it only contains one div that has the id “ping” so it minimizes networking. I used SAP SSO Authentication but other options exists and I will explore them later.

That is about all you have to do before starting setting up the Neptune application.

A small tip is to press the Export URL button to get your endpoint URL’s for the logon script in your application.

In the SAP GUI start the Neptune Designer and create a new application (I can send you ours on request and it will be available in the system from the next release so in 2.1 you can just copy this to a new app)

I just used the standard Neptune ABAP login app as a template and added some CAPTCHA fields that I placed under a div with display: none as you only want to show it when you are challenged by a CAPTCHA request.

With some styling, this is how it turned out

To be able to access your backend system the SMP Cloud requires that you have a valid application connection. You need to pass a unique id for every time a new user/device onboards and pass it in the header field X-SUP-APPCID. I chose to use the UUID of the device, which you can access through the device.uuid in the Phonegap API.

I created four functions to enable onboarding with CAPCHA and logging on. The first is triggered by the logon button and checks if you have a valid APPCID.

function initsmp(){

var tok = $("#sap-user").val() + ':' + $("#sap-password").val();

var hash = Base64.encode(tok);

auth = "Basic " + hash;

$.ajax({

type:"GET",

beforeSend: function (request)

{

request.setRequestHeader("Authorization", auth);

request.setRequestHeader("X-SUP-APPCID", deviceID);

request.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/atom+xml");

url: SMPEndpoint,

statusCode: {

200: function() {

doLoginsmp();

404: function(data) {

doOnboardsmp();

}

});

}

For the onboarding (New user or device) I created this function that displays the CAPTCHA code from the SMP server if you need to verify your account. You will need to send xml in the request body so create a variable for that first (Add the device type with the Phonegap API to give you a bit better reporting later on)

var xmlString = "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>\n" + "<entry xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'\n" +

"xmlns:d='http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices'\n" + "xmlns:m='http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata'>\n" +

"<title type='text'/><updated>2012-06-15T02:23.29Z</updated>\n" + "<author><name/></author>\n" + "<category term='applications.Connection'

scheme='http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/scheme'/>\n" + "<content type='application/xml'>\n" + "<m:properties>\n" +

"<d:DeviceType>" + deviceType +”</d:DeviceType>\n" + "</m:properties>\n" + "</content>\n" + "</entry>";

function doOnboardsmp(){

$.ajax({

type:"POST",

data: xmlString,

beforeSend: function (request)

{

request.setRequestHeader("Authorization", auth);

request.setRequestHeader("X-SUP-APPCID", deviceID);

request.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/atom+xml");

url: endpointURL + “/odata/applications/latest/neptunedemo/Connections",

statusCode: {

201: function() {

doLoginsmp();

401: function(data) {

var CorrectCaptcha = data.getResponseHeader('WWW-Authenticate');

var image = document.getElementById('captchaImage');

image.src = "data:image/jpeg;base64," + data.responseText;

capchaDiv.style.display = 'block';

formDiv.style.display = 'none';

}

success: function( data, Status, xhr ) {

});

}

The CAPCHA challenge will look like this (yeah I know. I was lazy and didn’t add padding and positioning styles )

Now we need to create the function for sending the answer to the challenge to the SMP server. If the answer is wrong, you will receive another image. If correct you have validated your Application account and can log in.

function sendCapcha(){

var captext = document.getElementById('capchatext').value;

var hash = Base64.encode(tok);

auth = "Basic " + hash;

$.ajax({

type:"POST",

data: xmlString,

beforeSend: function (request)

{

request.setRequestHeader("Authorization", auth);

request.setRequestHeader("X-SUP-APPCID", deviceID);

request.setRequestHeader("X-SUP-CAPTCHATEXT", captext);

request.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/atom+xml");

url: endPointURL + “/odata/applications/latest/neptunedemo/Connections",

statusCode: {

200: function() {

doLoginsmp();

201: function() {

doLoginsmp();

401: function(data) {

var CorrectCaptcha = data.getResponseHeader('WWW-Authenticate');

if (CorrectCaptcha == 'CAPTCHA')

{

initsmp();

}

else

{

var image = document.getElementById('captchaImage');

image.src = "data:image/jpeg;base64," + data.responseText;

}

});

Lastly you need a function for logging into the SMP and start the Neptune app in the backend system:

function doLoginsmp(){

var hash = Base64.encode(tok);

$.ajax({

type:"GET",

beforeSend: function (request)

{

request.setRequestHeader("Authorization", auth);

request.setRequestHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*");

request.setRequestHeader("X-SUP-APPCID", deviceID);

url: endPointURL + /<Your SMP APP NAME> + “/neptune/” + <Your Neptune start app>.html,

success: function( data ) {

$.mobile.changePage("https://" + hash + "@“ + endPointURL + /<Your SMP APP NAME> + “/neptune/” + <Your Neptune start app>.html

error: function( data ) {

alert("error");

}

});

}

Now use the export to Phonegap transaction in the Neptune Application Designer and choose your new app as the index file export and zip and upload to build.phonegap.com.

That’s it! No 100 pages documents for installing a huge amount of onPremise software and development tools. . I connected this app to our Neptune HR templates app and here is the result

References

http://scn.sap.com/community/mobile/blog/2013/03/29/sap-mobile-platform-on-hana-cloud-released

http://scn.sap.com/blogs/sankeerthana/2013/05/06/sap-mobile-platform-cloud-what-is-it

http://neptune-software.com/tips-and-tricks/login-screen-for-phonegap/

http://neptune-software.com/resources/download/

How to build a Hybrid Container using Cloudshare.com

Zan Chou — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:46:01 GMT

In this tutorial, I have use SUP server, SDK tools and android simulator to help me build the hybrid container. and this environment are available in cloudshare,com for free, (not technical free, 30 days trial environment). and to help understand more about Sybase,I listed down the webpages where it help me to understand the Mobile Business Object(MBO), Hybrid container, Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) server, Sybase Unwired workspace and sybase control center. and I have attach the tutorial document at the bottom of the of the page.

Mobile Business Object (MBO)

http://infocenter.sybase.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.sybase.infocenter.dc01204.0152/doc/html/asc1229701240371.html

Hybrid Container

http://infocenter.sybase.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.sybase.infocenter.dc01204.0152/doc/html/asc1229701240371.html

Sybase Unwired Workspace.

http://infocenter.sybase.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.sybase.infocenter.dc01204.0152/doc/html/asc1229701240371.html

Sybase Control Center

http://infocenter.sybase.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.sybase.infocenter.dc01204.0152/doc/html/asc1229701240371.html

thanks

How to Create Mobile Business Object build a Native Hybird Web Container.

Sap have set up a cloud environment in Cloudshare.com to allow developer to experience mobile apps building for 30 days, as long as you have enquire a SCN member account. These VM environment will include:

-SAP Mobile Platform Server

-SAP Mobile Platform Development Tools (SDK)

-Android emulator ( Andriod 2.2)

Get into SAP community Network and search for SAP for mobile, there will be a lot of user or developer posting or comment on blog for sap mobile.

Click on this webpage, http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-36055 and it will lead you to

SAP Mobile Academy- Getting Started

Click On the arrow, it will lead you to SAP Developer Center- End user License Agreement for Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP).

Click on ‘I Have Read And Agree’ button, this will lead you to a submit page, press submit, the development team will send a activation e-mail to your personal e-mail, after the email it will lead you to cloudshare.com registration screen.

Fill in the detail and you are good to go!!!!

CloudShare.com will show the VM environment to show up in the screen.

Click on ‘More Detail’ if you want to see the VM environment detail or wish to use Remote Desktop Connection. It will show up the screen.

Click on the ‘View Machine’. You can start your development environment.

Explore the icon on the VM environment, click on the icon ‘Start Sybase Unwired Platform Service’ and it will show up the screen like below

After the server is fire up, click on the ‘Sybase Control Center’ with explorer icon. And it will show you a login page for Sybase server.

User name: supAdmin

Password: s3pAdmin

After login into the control center, you will notice the local server will be running.

After the login, please do not close the window. Simple minimize it and click on ‘Sybase Unwired Workplace’ icons also known as SAP mobile development tools (SDK).

Select File > New > Mobile Application Project

It will pop up the “New Mobile Application Project” Screen

Type In the name of the project then click finish.

Right click on the ‘Mobile Application Diagram’

And it will show a pop up screen like below:

And ‘switch Developer profile’ from basic to advance

And you will see the project build on the left top corner of the screen and it will have more function in the screen.

Click On the ‘Database Connections’

Click on ‘My Sample Database’

Click on ‘Tables’

You will find that there will be a lot of sample data are prepare by SAP for us to explore or play around with when we trying to build mobile apps. And for this project I will use customer tables to put into the mobile business object (MBO).

Drag and drop ‘Customer’ Table from ‘my sample database’ in to ‘Mobile application diagram’,

And it will show a ‘Quick Create’ window. And you will see there is a select statement in the window

Deselect all “create, update and delete” this function which is use for database implementation. Which we are not using it in this practice.

Press Ok. And it will show the Mobile Business Object in the ‘Mobile Application Diagram”

And it will look like below.

And Mobile Business Object are ready to deploy.

Right click in ‘Mobile Application Diagram’

And click on ‘deploy project’

It will show up “Deploy Mobile Application Project’ window.

Change “Replication-Based’ button to ‘Message-Based’ button which it only allow end-user to view the object as it is.

Press next till the ‘Target Server’ screen.

Click on ‘My Unwired Server’, and it will connect to the Sybase unwired server which we have set up at first. Press next again and select ‘My Sample Database’ in ‘Server Connection Mapping’ screen.

Click on the row under ‘Server Connection’ and select ‘sampledb’.

Then press next, then finish. And the deployment will send to Sybase Unwired Server.

And basically we have built a MBO and send the deployment to the server.

Create Hybrid container.

After the deployment, right click on the title of your MBO where it located under the ‘Workspace Navigator’ for me which is ‘BCO6181’

Select New > Select Hybrid Web Container

And it will show up a ‘mobile work flow Form editor’

Type in the name u wan for hybrid container. Press ‘Next’

And will lead you to starting point and this will indicated how the mobile business object started, select the button next to ‘Can be started, on demand, from client’ which will allow client started on demand.

After this it will lead you to a .xbw file which will display next to Mobile application diagram.

And you will see

After this open up the mobile business object section and drag the customer table from the MBO and drop it into .xbw file. After that you will see the customer table screen in .xbw window. Next thing, we have to connect it together.

Double Click on the ‘start screen’ and it will bring you to the ‘screen design’ window.

Click on “MenuItem’ and click on the ‘cancel screen’

And this will allow you to put a title on the screen

And it will show the screen like above.

Click on ‘Properties’ tab underneath ‘screen design’ row.

Click on the bar next to ‘type’ and switch ‘Save screen’ to ‘Online request’

Click the search button

And click search again, and the Customer will show in the row. ( this will allow us to search the MBO where we deploy into the server)

Click on customer and click ok.

It will back to ‘Properties’ Tab, click on button ‘Invoke Object Query’ and on ‘object query’ select ‘findall’

Under ‘Show crudential screen on authentication failure’

Type in ‘No Customer here Yet’ under ‘Submit error message’ And click on ‘Generate Error Screen’

And under ‘Default success screen’ select customer.

Then click on ‘Flow design’ tab, you will see the start screen and the customer table screen are connect to each other like below.

And now the hybrid container are ready to deploy. But we need to register the device in Sybase Control center. Go to Sybase control center and click on ‘Application’ under Unwired Platform Cluster Tab. Click On ‘Application Connection’ Tab and click on register.

Put in the user detail, Can be anything.

Put in the IP address on the server name, where you can search under cloudshare.com environment detail. And this IP address will be used in the android simulator.

And click on ‘Specific code’ put in ABC123.

Click on ok.

And it will show your user is pending activation under status. Leave it as it is, and open up the android stimulator in the VM environment.

Click on SUPHybridContainer and click on start.

And ‘Launch’ it.

Click on the Hybrid container icon on the Android Screen.

Put in the Password in the screen

Password will be the same as specific code. ABC123. And click ok

And it will lead to a server registration page. Put in the IP address as the same as Sybase Unwired Platform server.

Leave Port as it is.

Enter 0 under Farm ID.

Enter User Name as the same in Sybase control center.

Activation Code will be ABC123.

And click on menu button.

Click on Show Log

It will show up the connection log.

And it will connect the server with the stimulator, can double checking the Sybase control center. You will notice the status will change connect to android stimulator.

Now back to Sybase Unwired Workspace and deploy the hybrid container.

Right click on the .xbw tab. And click on ‘Generate Mobile Workflow Package’

Check on the unwired server profile is under My Unwired Server

And tick on the ‘Assign workflow to user’ click on ‘Get User’ and it will automatically get the username from the server (this will generate the user where it register in the designated server in SUP). And Click finish. And the deployment to server is done.

Open up the Android stimulator again. Click on back button till you got to the no message screen.

And click on menu. And you will see there is a hybrid container icon pop up on the bottom of the screen.

Click on it.

Click on the title.

And due to we haven’t design on start screen, it will look plain.

Click on get customer.

And you are successfully create a hybrid container and deploy to android stimulator.

Thank for joining me.

The Future is Mobile - SAPPHIRE NOW 2013

Mahira Kalim — Fri, 17 May 2013 20:48:46 GMT

It has been a busy week at SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando. Here is a summary of mobile highlights in case you missed it:

Keeping simple things simple with SAP Fiori – SAP launched Fiori, a collection of apps that are simple, easy-to-use, and provide an intuitive user experience for the most used SAP functions. The initial release includes 25 apps covering business functions like workflow approvals and information look-ups. These apps address 45% of SAP system usage and 80% of SAP users. “We are on a mission to renew the experience across all of our applications. Users demand simplicity and ease of use, and SAP Fiori brings this experience to our customers.” - Vishal Sikka, CTO SAP. Check out the full press release.

Secure mobile devices at $1.11 with SAP Mobile Secure - an enterprise mobility management solution that provides customers with enterprise-grade security for devices, apps and content. The full announcement details the capabilities of SAP Mobile Secure and it’s availability as a cloud service. Watch replay of press conference with Sanjay Poonen.

SAP partners with Mocana to further secure mobile apps – Mocana’s Mobile App Protection product makes it possible to quickly add fine-grained usage and security policies to iOS and Android apps without having to write any code. The partnership will expedite deployment of secure mobile apps, especially in highly regulated industries. Read full announcement.

Other interesting happenings at SAPPHIRE NOW Mobile campus include:

SAP is helping build a connected world – Smart vending machines let attendees make contactless purchases using NFC technology on mobile devices. The machines transmit data to back-end inventory management systems that use predictive modeling to ensure products never run out. Another demo showcased remote service management to remotely monitor and fix equipment without dispatching a service agent to the site.

Bringing augmented reality to the enterprise – SAP Mobile showcased a smart glasses solution for the manufacturing industry for warehousing; in field data collection etc. This video gives you a flavor of the smart glasses experience.

Societe de transport de Montreal is bringing highly personalized experience to riders – STM CMO Pierre Bourbonnière showed their newly launched mobile app Merci based on SAP Precision Marketing solution. This app partners with retailers to bring riders highly personalized, location-based mobile offers. Since launch Merci is the most downloaded app on Apple AppStore in Canada.

Mobility is in Vodafone’s DNA – Niall O’Sullivan, Global Finance Operations Director of Vodafone showed the mobile app that lets their employees submit expenses on the go. The company is able to reimburse expenses within 7 days of submission. Watch how Vodafone is empowering employees to make decisions on the go with SAP Mobile.

SAP’s new focus on fashion and sports – The interactive demos showcased consumer solutions for fashion and sports industries. SAP’s fashion app My Runway is now available for download in the US. Check it out now. Attendees experienced first-hand how SAP is working with NBA, 49ers, Sony Open, and McLaren to enhance end-to-end fan experience.

Stay tuned for more updates. Check out more videos brought to you live from SAPPHIRE NOW.

ASUG 2013 Day Three - Rolling up the mobile carpets

Jim Spath — Fri, 17 May 2013 02:36:10 GMT

1 |2 |3

Today started with SCN space moderation, as each day this week has. It seems as if a few regular Moderators are attending this event, or somehow not doing their usual diligence, leaving more content to be reviewed. Not a huge deal, though I hope levels drop off next week, and this isn't some global outbreak of gamification fever. I found a blog that looked suspiciously well written, though with what seemed to be minor edits from the original source I found, with only minor effort on Google.

Then, a visit to the Microsoft booth for a long sit down with a long-time acquaintance Jurgen Thomas, about the moving parts of newer systems, including BusinessObjects, databases, file shares, data protection and recovery. We parted with a similar refrain: avoiding disasters takes practice, practice, practice.

After that, another chat with Jeremiah Stone and Tom Raftery. I promised Jeremiah I'd do a thoughtful piece on yet another SAP web site - sapcsrideas.com. I've struggled with how that fits into SAP's sustainability and community efforts, and need more time to dive into the site before commenting further. I didn't track Jeremiah down in the pod/booth area; there was just too much happening again this year.

A new 3 letter acronym (for me) this year - MDG. I've heard of MDM a lot, and we have an ASUG Data Governance SIG (special interest group), but I didn't know there was (if there is) a product or service called Master Data Governance. Maybe someone in the ad department thought "management" was not cool enough and decided "governance" was a better word. Curious.

The other "new thing" was SAP Glass, which I did not see in any demos, but heard it had potential. Reports of Google Glass are the same way; I would not be surprised if both go the way of Google Wave.

Session - Mobile or Immobile

This session ended up being a good overview, in a project management sense, of how to approach mobile development. It would not cut it in a TechEd setting, but the speaker had both good experience and a good speaking manner to communicate the ways and means of mobile. A few takeaways:

A good example for the dilemma of BYOD (bring your own device) - user watches an "R" rated movie on a plane using their own phone. But what happens when device is plugged into the corporate network?
Have an in-house organization with a mobile architect or steering committee. Sounds good; I wonder how many ways this is being done
The universal work list on portal, now web-enabled. Susan Keohan - what does this mean?
HTML5 is "a little bit immature". Meaning, don't expect every browser to work right, nor every device to act the same.
Phonegap is a method/solution of connecting specific devices such as camera or accelerometer into an app. There's more to it than that; I'm simplifying.

Four connect methods were delineated:

VPN - simple, end-user cumbersome
firewall/DMZ - cache or not
internal wireless - low value (could swamp WAPs)
clue/SAP MaaS - secure, but internal?

Session - Going Beyond SAP ITS Mobile Apps to a Responsive Design Mobile Apps

The last session of the last day was on SAP ITS, which while very mature, is not buried quite yet. The speaker asked who had heard of "Responsive web designs". A few had, of the few that stuck it out until the very end. I found this link, which could help n00bs like me: http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design . The gist for ITS Mobile is a standard process for creating pages that work on different form factors.

Here's what I replicated to build a google query trend view of this and related terms, as shown on slide 7:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=responsive%20design%2C%20adaptive%20design%2C%20mobile%20web%20design%2C%20web%20framework&date=1%2F2008%2061m&cmpt=q

Takeaway:

Will a developer be able to do this right from the presentation?

Absolutely.

As long as the device supports HTML5

Alas, no photo from the last session. But there are shots from the session after that - the SAP Mentor wrap up, which was set to start at 5:30. The show floor was advertised as open until 6PM, but I had to convince security there was still business to be done there, and dodge deconstruction crews on the way in. Those Mentors (and a special guest) got advance information on a development only seen by seven people so far ( Chip Rodgers is #7. Not 007, just 7).

Lastly:

Call for speakers for SAP TechEd. Link to follow, once I find it. ASUG members only!

CARDS

In years past, I'd add people's names I met to the blog posts on conferences, partly to remember them, and partly to keep the networking going. These days, cards are used less and less, as we find each other via Twitter, LinkedIn, or even Facebook. This time, I collected a few, and their names follow, including where possible their SCN hooks. Some of these I found on the show floor, though.

TUESDAY

Hyungmuck(Josh) Kang	Doosan
Jim Dilley	IBM
Toros Aledjian	SAP
Hari Guleria	HP
Dennis Joseph	QMS

WEDNESDAY

Paul Loos	Oracle
Dirk Kempf	SAP
Marcie Hite	Fujitsu America
John Rabito	SuSE

THURSDAY

Tom Turchioe	Critigen
(JK) JayaKumar Pedapudi	NTT Data

images

ASUG 2013 Day Two - more mobile choices than you can shake a stick at

Jim Spath — Thu, 16 May 2013 04:02:17 GMT

1|2|3

In two ASUG education sessions today, I heard more ways to develop and deploy mobile applications. While there's a concept out there that SAP has a single mobile platform solution, it's unlikely that one answer will solve every problem, and even more unlikely that an answer given today will be the same thing in 12 to 18 months. My sense from the sessions (and I'll look for confirmation tomorrow) is that one can't build apps quick enough to satisfy demand, so get started, and prepare to change the plan sooner than you think.

In Paul Aschmann's session, on developing for the iPad ("From Start to Finish: Developing an iPad App Using SAP NetWeaver Gateway"), he focused on key design and development techniques to building successful apps, including coding tools, graphics design ideas and methods, and tons of references materials. He probably had too much content for the one hour session, and with questions coming in

Paul described one SAP document as "convert BAPI into web service." It's SCN document number 5010, but the title doesn't say the same thing:

How to Create CRUD Operations in Gateway Services Based on Remote Function Modules

For graphics work, which Paul said is critical to user acceptance of an app, professional designers using PhotoShop are ideal, though Pixelmator, or GIMP, are workable also. He's a big fan of open source tools (me too).

Paul asked me before his session if the conference wireless was going to work. As it turned out, no, it didn't, but the show went on.

In the session by IPG ("Deploy a Mobile Workflow-Approval Application using UI5 and SAP Portal On-Device Technology"), they talked about shifting within the past year from a SharePoint based portal to SAP's portal, embracing UI5 and not doing an SUP stack.

Their current application has document imaging in PDF or TIFF format. They talked about getting to JPEG or PNG formats soon. Those are both compressed, but I'd want to check if the ratio is that high. It makes sense to get smaller document files, as long as all the pieces accept them.

While Paul is focused on Apple devices, Orhan and James need to support other vendors, forcing the question of how much custom development is needed for each app. With a relatively simple workflow app, maybe not big deal, but as more data and more content is required, the stakes go up.

A good question came in for the audience as to whether their app bundled multiple pages in one sweep, meaning fewer round trips to the device. The answer was "probably", but the developer wasn't here to verify. Security of devices was also discussed; their intent is to not cache data locally, but there are still potential holes if the device falls "into the wrong hands". Unfortunately their slides don't go into this at all.

During the remainder of the day, I haunted the vendor floor, hunting down the elusive HANA hardware. I bagged shots of two of them. The SuSE booth had an IBM appliance, while the other shot is from the Fujistu booth. I've had interesting discussions about benchmarking. I wish I had numbers to share.

Two more gripes about the conference agenda app:

Session end times are not shown. As a moderator, I need to keep track of this, and a reminder would be helpful.
On Wednesday, the Tuesday sessions still appeared at the top of the list; it would be better to shift to present and future sessions, skipping the past.

And, finally, two tweets from the network on SAP's Lumira, which admittedly I have not tried and know little about. I just report what I hear.

Robert Russell ℹ @rjruss 10h

@jspath55 no features or options I expected from SAPVISI. I followed some SCN guides but couldn't make it work, maybe just me.....

Thorsten Franz @thorstenster 18h

Tried out SAP Lumira Cloud - sorry, I'm not smart enough for this. Very unintuitive UI, FAQ didn't answer my questions.

Thorsten Franz @thorstenster 8h

Has anyone figured out how to delete uploaded data in SAP Lumira Cloud?

Sessions, Mobile

Other

Hardware, HANA

I am not a number. I am a person.

Sarah McMullin — Wed, 15 May 2013 20:01:48 GMT

I had the pleasure of sitting in on a BayCHI meet-up (the largest Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction within the Association for Computing Machinery) at the PARC no less (where the GUI was born). This particular meet-up had Interaction Designer Dan Saffer speak about microinteractions, those little details that delight and happen at the micro level. He illustrated several examples of microinteractions within software that you are probably familiar with today, for example:

The xylophone ringtone on an iPhone
The status message on a Dropbox upload that tells you to ‘Grab a Snackers’ if it’s a long wait
A form that prepopulates your First Name based on the Email Address you supplied in the field before it

His premise was that if you care about user experience you must pay attention to these microinteractions, likening microinteractions to a pebble in a shoe --no matter how nice the shoe is, you won’t care until you get the pebble out. He also provided a framework that you can categorize these microinteractions within (Triggers, Rules, Feedback, Loops and Modes). I won’t go into the details related to these categories (for that I would suggest reading Dan’s book on microinteractions), however I do want to touch on the Feedback category, specifically related to his advice on ‘speaking human’.

My understanding is that feedback microinteractions occur as an almost subtle response (i.e. feedback) to user interaction with software. Have you ever tried to click and drag an item from one area to another but a prohibition sign appears, giving feedback that you cannot perform that action? This is an example of a microinteraction feedback. So what does it mean to give microinteraction feedback by ‘speaking human'?

Think about personal interactions you’ve had. How do you let someone know that you’re pleased with something they’ve done? Perhaps you smile? We can also use this human-speak to create a feedback microinteraction within software. Dan gave the example of using the happy face or sad face symbols on screens where something has or hasn’t occurred. Language can also play a large role. How many times have we all read bizarre error messages that do not have any meaning to us? What if we used ‘human speak’ to convey these messages? It may not stop the error from happening, but the effect of it on the user may be lessened (i.e. instead of wanting to smash my keyboard, some humorous expression may stop this inclination and at least garner a smirk).

This human-speak is also another great example of what we might classify in the Design Thinking sphere as an example of showing understanding or empathy for the end user. It starts by first recognizing that the end users are people – meaning human, and those people produce feelings, thoughts, expressions and actions based upon individual personality and experience. Now how can the software I interact with guide my behaviour to optimize its performance using subtle queues (or microinteractions) that I innately respond to? Well we’re well underway with doing just that at SAP with our new SAP Fiori mobile applications launched this week at SAPPHIRENOW. We are working hard to make sure you do indeed continue to feel human when interacting with our software, so check them out and make sure to share your personal experiences on the SAP User Experience Community.

Andriod device unable to authenticate on self service portal during enrollment

Sukumar Natarajan — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:32:50 GMT

Question:

When I attempted to enroll my Android device I was unable to authenticate to the self-service portal – I immediately received a 401.3 error.

Answer:

The default browser on some older Android devices don’t support Windows Authentication. The recommended workaround is to try a different browser and re-attempt the enrollment process. The text of the 401 error shows that same message:

Android device cert mismatch

Sukumar Natarajan — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:30:31 GMT

Question:

My Android Device was able to log into the self-service portal, but when it attempted to connect to the server I received a “Server name does not match certificate” and the connection fails.

Answer:

This is a known issue and will be corrected in an upcoming release. This typically only occurs on older devices.

Why do I not see Windows Phone 8 inventory in all my devices?

Sukumar Natarajan — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:50:13 GMT

Question:

Why do I not see Windows Phone 8 inventory in all my devices?

Answer:

There is an issue with Group Assignments in Windows Phone 8 that is currently being addressed in Afaria engineering. To get around this issue, there is a Group on every SAP Afaria, Cloud Edition Server called "Windows Phone 8 Devices". It has a default policy applied which will gather device inventory. Modify the Default Enrollment Code fo Windows Phone 8, select the "Group" tab, then add the "Windows Phone 8 Devices" group.

Smart Vending Showcase at SAPPHIRENOW

Joe Granda — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:15:30 GMT

The Internet of Things is bringing together mobile, big data and the cloud from SAP, the firm best prepared to according to a leading analyst firm. We put together a showcase that can be found in the User Experience area to shows how we bring all of these together to improve invenory management, deliver dynamic sales promotion, offer remote service management and detailed analytics.

The Use Case:

A large Vending machine Operator approached SAP with a basic question: The basic challengefor a firm with a large fleet of vending machines is that the operator has no insight into the inventory level of a particular machine. Either they discover on a replenishment visit, the machine is out of stock, meaning the operator has lost days of sales or the machine hasn’t sold anything, thus the truck run cost and time was wasted.

From that premise we drove innovation with the customer to extend the basic inventory question to an end-to-end M2M scenario that covers the basic replenishment and service operations by transmitting each sale wirelessly. The operator knows the exact sales and inventory of each machine and can streamline his operations by only loading needed product on the trucks (reduce excess product damage) and scheduling replenishment runs only for machines that are close to stock out (eliminating stock outs and wasted truck runs). From there we explored additional use cases around consumer personalization. The machine now knows the consumer and transaction history, therefore we can run promotions and loyalty programs (new business model, increasing revenue) and add additional services like utility bill payments and cell phone top-up. Using the GSM backchannel we can also change prices on the fly and offer personalized promotions and loyalty programs based on the demand signals we get from each machine or consumer.

So we will be able to help vending operators to increase their revenue and open new business models by offering real time price changes based on demand, loyalty and promotions on the machine wirelessly.

In addition, we have built a predictive solution that based on historic sales and demographic data calculates the optimal product mix for a specific location across the vending machine fleet (optimizing sales and the placement of new machine). Vending Machines in Fitness Studios are likely to have a different product mix than office or factory locations, eg. more sparkling water. Using the predictive algorithm, we are able to automatically calculate the best product mix for a location based on historic sales and additional demographic data and significantly improve sales and revenue and well and predict the performance of new locations.

This also enables the operator to introduce seasonal products (new business model, increase sales).

Moreover, the vending machine has sensors that report machine failure in real time and issue a service ticket for a technician (reducing service cost, increasing revenue). Now you can tie in this information seamlessly so a technician can be sent to service the equipment using either SAP CRM Service Manager or SAP Work Manager mobile apps.

Lastly, real time analytics and mobile apps for executives, analysts and drivers help identify low rotating, low margin products and can feed into the product mix optimization further streamlining the business.

These Apps provide real time insight into:

- Revenue

- Product rotation,

- Machine, Zone profitability,

- Prospecting performance and prospector incentivation

As mentioned earlier, we brought to bear a number of technologies from mobile, big data and cloud. Here is a short list of what we used:

Used Technology:

SAP HANA
SAP HANA Cloud
Hana GIS Extension
Trillion Node Network Enabler
Sybase Mobilizer
ESP
Service On Demand

Data Services On Demand
Panorama iPad Analytics
Lumira
Visual Intelligence
SAP Mobile Platform
Android, iOS, Windows 8 Mobile

ASUG 2013 Day One - Education boxed in by keynotes

Jim Spath — Wed, 15 May 2013 02:11:41 GMT

1 |2 |3

After the morning keynote came the education sessions, followed by the afternoon keynotes, like night follows day. I'll let the "professional" bloggers opine about the one-person acts, and focus on the customer-driven content. And a bit about the mobile agenda app, and the obligatory conference wifi supply complaints.

Mobile agenda app

Figures A-1 and A-2 show the agenda app login, which, so far, has only need needed once today. I've had one update since installing it last week, and I believe another one is pending (for 14-May-2013). The Android store (OK, Google Play) shows 500+ downloads. That doesn't seem right with 10,000 attendees, but maybe so. The odd thing about the login is when I rotate the screen, the text on the Help and Log in button squishes out of legibility. The app generally seems to work best on portrait mode, but as I still cling to my clicky keyboard, I'd like to type in landscape.

Figure A-3 shows the show floor map. This zooms in pretty well, I expect, though the comments I heard was the paper map in the conference hand-out was, well, handier. I usually rely on the grid numbers, not to mention the banners most vendors fly as high as possible, to locate those I wish to find. During the few minutes I managed to spend on the show floor, I've found about half the booths on my list.

Figure A-4 has the primary menu, with "my agenda" right on the top dead center where I'd want the most frequently use button to be. In years past, I'd print a copy of my agenda for safety reasons, but this time I felt confident the app would keep my agenda (other than those off-the books sessions I still need to weave in) cozy and warm in my pocket.

Figure A-5 and A-6 show the next problem (after the login screen issue) - the vendors I had chosen to visit in the web-based agenda builder were not to be found. My sessions were there, but not my other plans. I put a list online, so I'll need to refer to that somehow to avoid getting back to the office without having dotted my eyes.

The last problem was my own doing - I have 2 copies of the app, one from last year, and one from this year, on my phone. Fortunately they're easy to distinguish since 2012's schedule had a Monday opening keynote, and 2013 started on a Tuesday.

Wi-fi woes

It's easy to complain about spotty wi-fi coverage, and I will, given this is the premiere event for one of the biggest software companies in the world. To have no coverage, or dead zones, for education sessions, or for the show floor, should make the event producers cringe. I had weak signals on the second floor, better on the second, but as most of the sessions I needed attend were on the second floor, I was sunk most of the day. Cell coverage was also weak on the show floor, but I'll lay that one on the cell carrier rather than the venue infrastructure. Figure B-1 shows the apparent workaround instituted by the management - add an express lane that costs an extra $13 per day. Since I couldn't justify that on my expense account, several times I resorted to my phone hot-spot, which, bizarrely, worked better than the phone service.

The Mobile Technologies track sessions

For variety, I'll work backwards from the end of the day to the beginning.

TheMIGroup Launches Mobile App Making Relocation Tracking Easier

Figure C-1 shows the sparsity of the crowd, compared to other sessions I moderated today. Maybe being last didn't help, maybe I didn't publicize this enough, but here was a success story of the Sybase/SAP Unwired Platform, complete with multiple device compatibility, and real world examples. The company manages national and international moves; they've got CRM and other SAP back-end components along with SAP Portal. The mobile app, demoed via iPads, has a portion of the portal feature set, and is designed to make life easy for people in stressful travel situations. What you want is a simple app, fool-proof, with easy help access. Their next phase is to incorporate expense management.

Rapid Deployment of Mobile Apps and Mobile Platform for SAP Business Suite

Yoram and Nir spoke about SAP capacity to deliver "cookie cutter" mobile app deployments. Though I drifted in and out of the room for other issues, the thrust is to standardize the deployment scenarios, testing and refining the instructions and guidance to eliminate the variance from customizations. Makes sense, generally, though their talk provided me with some quotable moments.

"Implementing a middle ware can be a challenge"

"It never ends when you install the binaries"

I'd probably rephrase the latter statement as "it doesn't end", given "it never ends" implies a Sisyphean effort we'd like to avoid.

Figure C-2 shows Nir.

The most astonishing part of the presentation (unless you count a slide that spanned personal devices from the TRS-80 to Androids) was a series of 16+ MB spreadsheets that chart project management details.

Best Practices for Leveraging the Cloud-based Version of SAP Mobile Platform to Drive and Mobilize your Business Processes

Jens and I decided nearly after the fact that this session title could have used a little punching up. It does explain what the content would include, and the only thing missing was the "H" word. Thank goodness.

Jens had a concise presentation, covering what might belong in a "cloud" environment, the direction SAP development is taking, and ways of moving from current or older releases to newer ones. Good questions from the audience, and a few teasers to be answered in a Thursday session (3PM), but maybe a but skimpy on Q&A time.

Figure C-3 - Jens.

SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe and Forms Lifecycle Manager

We picked this session because we know forms are not going away, Adobe predominates in that space (how many apps do you have that can generate PDF?), and reading and writing forms beats taking orders manually, deciphering faxes, or a multitude of other I/O channels. I'd say the session was a bit dry, not surprising given the subject matter, but the crowd size was good and people mainly stayed to the end. Lots of good questions, and not too many three-letter-acronyms. Some, but not too bad.

Figure C-4 shows one of the more humorous slides of the day. While a few members in the audience dragged out their cell phones and tried to run the QR code into their bar-code reader, I took an image instead. Despite a bit of parallax, skewing from the angle, and just popping the image on the screen, my phone can actually decipher the contents from this blog post. Nicely one. I didn't click on the link though. Maybe someone more adventurous can give it a shot?

Errata

Figure C-6 shows a piece of HANA hardware, the only one I found lit and working, in several hardware partner visits.

Figure C-6 shows two of our hard-working ASUG headquarters team, Joe and Kaela. Kaela is the BITI team contact, for which she deserves a medal. Or badgification.

Wednesday and Thursday at 5:30 PM the SAP Mentors end-of-day wrap ups will happen at the ASUG Lounge Theater 2, on the show floor. Don't miss it.

Figure A-1

Figure A-2

Figure A-3

Figure A-4

Figure A-5

Figure A-6

Figure B-1

Figure C-1

Figure C-2

Figure C-3

Figure C-4

Figure C-5

Figure C-6

Figure C-7

TBD?

TBA?

A Real Gem from Sapphire: Announcing SAP Afaria, cloud edition

Milja Gillespie — Tue, 14 May 2013 06:42:35 GMT

Cloud computing has become an increasingly attractive alternative to on-premise computing for the enterprise IT market. Cloud solutions are fantastic alternatives for companies who like the ability to minimize up-front investment and have the flexibility to operate with a monthly subscription model. Today, at SapphireNOW in Orlando, SAP introduced a portfolio of mobile security solutions – including SAP Afaria, cloud edition - that will rock the enterprise mobility space. Secure mobility can now be a reality for companies of any size.

SAP Afaria, cloud edition is a complete SaaS-based mobile device management solution to manage the mobile workforce without the complexity and expense of an on-premise installation. Companies can secure their mobile devices through a subscription model with the assurance that all operational aspects, from security to upgrades to disaster recovery are handled automatically.

With the growing trend of employees using personally-owned (BYOD) devices in the workplace, regulating these devices is essential for protecting sensitive data and enhancing employee productivity. And who can resist the allure of full mobile device management capabilities - without costly staffing requirements, the burden of IT infrastructure and expense of an on-premise installation?

Offering Afaria as a cloud solution is an easy and natural option. Providing our customers with choice is a core goal across all of our SAP Mobile Secure products. It’s always preferable to have options, and in this case we have a great option for those of you who have embraced cloud computing. For customers that prefer to closely manage their IT infrastructure internally with on-premise solutions, Afaria’s “behind the firewall” solution makes sense. And for companies who like the idea of cloud but want their entire mobility infrastructure maintained by a third party, we also have many partners who offer full Managed Mobility services.

With the move to cloud in itself isn’t really game changing, the great news is the price. This cloud version will be available for a shocking low price of only 1 euro (or $1.11US) per device per month. Having this convenient, reliable and incredibly low priced solution eliminates the barriers to entry for any company of any size. Finally – security can be reality for all!

Quick highlights of SAP Afaria, cloud edition:

Provides the lowest per device per month cost possible
Provides a dedicated environment at shared environment cost
Maintenance, upgrades and support are all included as part of the subscription
Requires no initial investment for licensing, hardware or equipment
Can be deployed in under 15 minutes

A little more meat:

It's uilt on the latest version of SAP Afaria technology (Afaria 7.0 SP3, released March 31)
Includes the best way to see data - Afaria reports running in Business Objects web and mobile dashboards
Has enterprise integration provided with Secure SaaS Connector, requiring no inbound access to customer environment

Try it out!

If you’re in Orlando, come by the Enterprise Mobility Management table in the mobile campus. You can also go to SAPAfaria.com where you can get a free 30 day trial with the option to instantly turn your configured test-drive image into a live production system in the cloud. If you already use earlier versions of Afaria you can test this infrastructure to experience Afaria 7.0 capabilities before deciding to upgrade their on-premise deployment or move licenses over to
SAPAfaria.com.

Securing the Mobile App Tsunami: SAP Partners with Mocana

Milja Gillespie — Tue, 14 May 2013 06:32:35 GMT

Over the past several years we have witnessed major transformation of the corporate computing landscape driven by the adoption of mobile devices. But we’re still struggling with the need to comply with regulations and internal security policies. Today over 80% of enterprises in North America are enabling iOS or Android devices – initially to receive email, calendar and contact information, and increasingly for more advances enterprise use.

If the interest in mobility this week at the SapphireNOW conference in Orlando is any indication, the next few years will see an explosion in the development of in-house mobile apps that can shape better business results. Almost every company is already mobile or imminently going mobile. And they’re all building apps. This proliferation of mobile apps is a tsunami that will continue to create a pressure for enterprise IT to not only enable enterprise connectivity, but more importantly to build apps that meet the requirements of the ultimate customers: employees.

Breaking the Bottleneck of Mobile App Deployment

For most organization, the scarcity of mobile app development resources and the lack of general security expertise don’t set up IT well enough to respond to this challenge. There is a lot of work that has to go into certifying that mobile apps meet baseline security policies – it is time-consuming and expensive. The problem is way worse for 3rd party apps, where source code can be impossible to acquire and the level of security built into the app difficult to discern. IT professionals dream of a way to break the bottleneck of mobile app deployment and scale to meet the challenges of this tsunami. It’s time to make that dream a reality.

Introducing SAP Mobile App Protection by Mocana

To help SAP customers deal with the complex world of mobile security, SAP announced a partnership with Mocana, the leader in mobile application security. A new solution was announced today at SapphireNOW in Orlando as part of the SAP Mobile Secure portfolio of products. SAP Mobile App Protection by Mocana helps enterprises create “self-defending” apps for iOS and Android devices. The technology is pretty impressive – it automatically wraps fine-grained security and usage policies around individual mobile apps, basically making the app the managed end point. It allows you to pick and choose multiple layers of protection to add to any app. For example, you can easily add FIPS 140-2 certified encryption to protect app data-at-rest and app data-in-motion.

SAP Mobile App Protection lets you implement other security policies, too: for example, you can prevent any app from having information copied-and-pasted out of it, which is very important for data loss prevention. Another very cool feature is that you can enable any app to establish its own app-specific VPN connection with its own security settings to create a private encrypted and authenticated tunnel back to a specific enterprise resource in the cloud or at the datacenter. So instead of connecting the entire device via VPN, you are connecting at an app level.

I could go on and on talking about the great features of this new solution, but you can just as easily read the solution brief yourself. Even better, if you’re here in Orlando at SapphireNOW, stop by the mobile campus to join our Microforum discussions and Demo Theatre presentations on Mobile Security. You can contact me to set up a meeting onsite in Orlando or after the conference via phone.

SAP untethered in Manufacturing with Business Glasses

Joe Granda — Mon, 13 May 2013 18:11:13 GMT

Augmented Reality (AR) technology enhances our perceptions and improves the user experience in a revolutionary way. Our challenge is to transfer this technology to the manufacturing world. What if you could see animated instructions upon the reality and interact with them instead of using clipboards or going to a kiosk to enter data?

SAP and Vuzix are piloting an AR hands-free solution built for industrial applications while leveraging existing SAP investments. Enterprise information is visible right before the worker’s eyes while allowing the worker to stay focused on their work and environment. With data coming in real-time from machine-to-machine sensors and SAP systems, workers can respond quickly with unmatched situation awareness such as knowing what and where to pick inventory, receiving alerts and instruction to handle maintenance and getting safety messages to avoid accidents from a blind spot. These are just a few use cases where warehouse management, assembly, field installation, testing, machine tooling and repair operations represent a dazzling opportunity for the implementation of AR tools.

Our AR framework can create a smooth combination of real and virtual world, usable by experienceless workers. The joint AR solution is ideal for complex work as well as simple and repetitive work with high compliance requirements. Additionally, the goal of the partnership is to provide AR technologies to streamline processes, reduce mistakes, save time, and make it easier, faster and more user-friendly.

Additionally, we have only been working with Vuzix for three weeks now, which is a testament to the scalability of our apps and the capability of their hardware.

When you come to SAPPHIRE NOW Mobile Campus EAM and Field Service expert table, you will see a mock-up demo of warehouse picking via configuration of standard SAP solutions. A supporting video is also available that can be shared for future reference that illustrates better inventory and maintenance management with AR.

Related mobile SAP products include SAP Inventory Manager, SAP Work Manager, SAP CRM Service Manager, SAP Rounds Manager and SAP Machine-to-Machine Platform.