New SCP Portal Feature – Business Content Option

[pjcools]

It has been a while since my last blog post so thought I would write a really small one to get back into the groove ?. While a pretty simple option, it is a nice one for Portal site administrators.

In the latest updates of the Portal Service in SAP Cloud Platform there is a new option to restrict configuration options to your own business content rather than all applications delivered as part of the SAP Business Suite or S/4HANA systems. I must admit, I have always thought that once you include all of the SAP standard apps delivered as part of the Fiori Cloud Edition there is a lot of noise that you have to wade through when performing administrator tasks for the Fiori Launchpad. So this feature is very well received! The new Business Content option allows you to limit this noise. I will describe the feature in this blog.

This new feature is available in the Fiori Configuration Cockpit – after you select a specific Portal Site.



To check this feature select the [Portal] service in the SCP sub-account as detailed above. This is part of the User Experience offerings. The following screen will be displayed.



Select [Go To Service] as displayed above.

This will display the standard Portal Administration page.



Select the [Site Directory] to display a list of sites to maintain.



Choose the [Edit] option to configure the specific Portal site.



You will be presented with the Fiori Configuration Cockpit which is already defaulted to show the Custom content only.



On the right hand side you can see the label – Custom Content only. This is highlighted above. This is as a result of the selection on Business Content which is set to [Custom Content Only].  You will also notice a low number of applications even though this site does include the Fiori Cloud Edition applications.

This feature is extremely useful as your custom applications can often be lost in the total number of applications that are included in your portal site after including the standard Fiori Cloud edition applications. Additionally, this is even more important when performing extensions on existing applications. If an app has to be modified it is often difficult to find out which one is the correct application.

The Business Content selection is made across ALL sections of the Portal site but is mainly related to the Content Management section. If you navigate to the Content Management section you will see the Apps, Catalogs, Groups and Roles limited by this selection. If I select the Apps you will only see the Custom applications that have been created OR extensions to standard applications that have been made.



In the Business Content drop-down you can toggle between Custom Content or Content imported from SAP Business Suite or S/4HANA backend systems as part of the Fiori Cloud Edition subscription.

You can see this below.



When you select this the entire Portal site will be defined by this selection. SAP Business Suite apps, catalogs, groups and roles will now be shown and will be ready for maintenance. NOTE: This also includes the Custom Content! 



This will also reference the Content Package selected for this portal site. As you can see above I have selected the SAP Fiori Cloud for Business Suite offering which includes 53 Fiori Cloud edition apps (plus the 2 custom). The Business Content options will be defined based on the subscription selections so if you have applications also brought in for S/4 HANA there will be a 3rd option defined in this drop down. As I noted above, when the SAP Business Suite option is selected it will also include the custom content that has been created which I think makes perfect sense.

In summary, this is a really nice feature and does help in the administration activities of a portal site. This was a recent addition….so check it out now and provide your feedback on this feature. Will be glad to hear your thoughts and experiences.

Thanks for reading!

[fernando_sanchez10]

Hello Phil!

Awesome content! Do you know if we can try this from the trial account?

 

Thanks,

Fernando.

[pjcools]

Thanks Fernando, unfortunately this is not available on the trial account mainly due to the fact that there are no S/4HANA or SAP Business Suite subscription packages available. You would need to purchase a subscription to be able to experience this functionality.

Thanks for reading!

Phil

 

 

[alvaro-achin]

Hello Phill. Nice post.

I have a premium account but the service Portal is not available in subaccounts that I have created.

Can you help me please?

[pjcools]

Hi Alvaro

Not sure what a premium account is - can you please elaborate. If the Portal Service is not in the list of services then you don't have a subscription for it so you may need to add this to your licensing and subscription list.

I would also post a question on the community rather than posting in this blog post itself.

Let me know how you go - I can help you after this is provisioned.

Thanks & Regards

Phil Cooley

[cmos]

Hallo Phil,

I really liked reading your blog post. But as the others have already mentioned, this feature does not show up in our account. It is not a trial account and we are already running portal sites using the enabled service. Only the top bar shown in your screenshots is not available.

Have you enabled additional services besides the portal service or have you done some additional configuration to enable the feature?

Hopefully, you can help me out.

Thanks in advance.

Christian

[pjcools]

Hi Christian

Thanks and glad you enjoyed reading it. OK - have you actually got custom applications that you have created so that you actually have Custom Content? Have you also enabled the SAP Business Suite or SAP S/4HANA packages? Just trying to get some more information from you in order to assist.

If you can show me a couple of screenshots of what you are seeing that would be great. In answer to your question there are no additional services that need to be activated to enable this feature but you need to have custom applications available. If you have not then create one from a Template using the SAP Web IDE Full-Stack environment and deploy to the SAP Cloud Platform subaccount. This should then activate the Custom Content only option.

See how you go and let me know your progress.

Thanks & Kind Regards

Phil Cooley

[cmos]

Hi Phil,

thanks for your reply. Currently, we are running custom apps only on our portal site. As you mentioned, we created them using the Web IDE, deployed them to our subaccount and configured the portal site to run them.

But what do you mean by "SAP Business Suite or SAP S/4HANA packages"? As far as I know, nobody has enabled those. How can I check, if at least one of those packages is active?

Thanks again

Christian

 

 

 

[pjcools]

Hi Christian

Not sure of the SAP Cloud Platform subscription you have but as part of the SAP Fiori Cloud subscription you get access to standard SAP HTML applications. They appear under Subscriptions however initially you need to enable them. There are 74 applications delivered by SAP. You enable them in the Portal Service configuration and can add them to your specific site.

In the specific site, choose Content Packages and you can then add either SAP Business Suite or SAP S/4HANA. I have included a screenshot for you. You basically need to Activate the package – depending on what your backend system is. 

Once this is active you will see the Business Content dropdown have 2 values - Custom Content Only and SAP Business Suite or SAP S/4HANA. 

Thanks & Kind Regards

Phil Cooley

[cmos]

Hi Phil,

obviously our subscription is missing some packages as the menu entry "Content Packages" is not available (see screenshot)



I guess, I have to look for a solution in our cloud subscriptions e.g. contact SAP directly.

Thanks

Christian

 

 

[pjcools]

Hmmm, interesting christian.mosblech - can you check if you have Solutions in the SAP Cloud Platform cockpit for the actual subaccount? If that does not exist then yes definitely would check that your subscription has been set up properly. To be honest I thought all subscriptions included the Fiori Cloud Edition apps - meaning that 74 applications would be activated for your company.

Contact SAP and see how you go. Good Luck!!

Thanks & Kind Regards

Phil

[Juliuspereira]

Hi Phil,

When I enabled these apps a few weeks back in a dev sub account I was able to see the business contact dropdown. However today I do not see that dropdown any more. I still see the apps deployed in the FLP but in the Content Management I do not see the dropdown nor the apps there.

I see the apps under the subscriptions as well. 

The problem im facing is, Im deploying these apps in a production sub account now and do not see the apps in the content management. When I preview the site, I see all the apps. But I need to see them in the content management section so that I can assign them to the proper catalog, groups and roles.

Do you know if anything has changed on SAP’s side? I will report this to SAP but thought I'd check with you too. 

Thank you

Julius

[Juliuspereira]

I reported this to SAP and they fixed it.

Thank you

Julius