Technology Blogs by SAP
Learn how to extend and personalize SAP applications. Follow the SAP technology blog for insights into SAP BTP, ABAP, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP HANA, and more.
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
Former Member

Intro

Some IT specialists are considering social media integration, but want more ideas where it can be used. We are three students doing a practical phase at SAP BPM. Our task was to find a use-case and to build an application for it. In this document we will present our solution.


Situation

Ann wants to buy a train ticket, but the machine is broken. She scans the QR-Code on the machine which generates a tweet with certain hashtags (like “#ticketmachine #1234 broken”). With this hashtag the machine can be identified. A BPM process searches for tweets about broken ticket machines and therefore finds Ann’s tweet. Sophie is responsible for solving the problem. From her task view she can send a reply tweet to Ann thanking for the report. This way she can stay in her working environment and does not need to open Twitter. Sophie evaluates the problem and sends a qualified technician to fix the machine. She can also search and react to other tweets about this problem. After the machine was mended she can send a tweet informing that the machine works again.

As proof-of-concept we have integrated our solution into the default Task Execution UI:

We also started creating a SAP UI5 application.

Technical Structure

To access Twitter we needed to implement the OAuth protocol. We created a servlet that works as a generic adapter which is compatible for every web site that offers OAuth authentification. Our structure looks like this. For further information about OAuth please refer to the official OAuth specification.

Outlook

Some tweets can be generated automatically. The person working on the problem still has the possibility to send tweets manually, but it might not be necessary. The following diagram shows what the process flow could look like. More actions like twittering “we are working on it” are automated and Sophie can concentrate on more important tasks.

We have mainly focused on integrating Twitter, however integrating other social media platforms like SAP Jam or Facebook is possible. The OAuth process would be similar.


Lea Poletin, Maiko Müller, Maximilian Rickayzen

2 Comments