SAP Mobile Documents Strengthens the Position of SAP NW Knowledge Management

[Former Member]

With great interest we at btexx have followed the SAP Announcement of the new product “SAP Mobile Documents” at the Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona.

BARCELONA — To meet heavy demand for simple, highly secure file synchronization and sharing in the enterprise, SAP today announced the SAP Mobile Documents solution. The new mobile content management solution aims to help increase user productivity by providing a single entry point to personal business documents and corporate content via any mobile device.... Read more here.

We got especially interested as we found out that the on-premise version of SAP Mobile Documents is based on our beloved SAP NetWeaver Portal & Knowledge Management. 

The last couple of years we at btexx got really tired by all the false assertions & rumors that the SAP KM is dead. Because we are sure and proved it in many customer situations/projects that the SAP KM is a great and powerful platform to build scalable and user friendly solutions, like the btexx documentManager, which is by the way also available in a free version. 

In Germany we have the saying "Totgesagte leben länger/There's life in the old dog yet". For the KM it seems to be true. From our point of view the new product offering from SAP will strengthen the position of the SAP NW Portal and especially the KM.

Why SAP KM is a great choice for Document Management

• Enterprise ready architecture, which provides a stable and scalable operation
• Extensive set of document management features are shipped within the SAP NW Portal Licence
  • Versioning, Subscriptions, Classification/Meta-Data Management etc.
• Powerful configuration options and a granular/enterprise ready authorization concept
• Good integration possibilities for 3rd party-content via repository manager framework
• Availability of social functions like comments & rating years before these features got popular through social networks
• Lots of feature enhancements with the SAP NW 7.30 Portal stack
• Open API to extend and tweak the KM to your needs

     Following an example as to how the user interface of the SAP KM can look like:

How SAP Mobile Documents can add value

With SAP Mobile Documents existing SAP Portal/KM customers will have a great possibility to leverage and extend their investments in SAP NW KM for their mobile workforce. From our point of view this product seems to be a really good candidate to go mobile. It's far less complicated than the other SAP Mobile Solutions and provides an immediate added value for customers, e.g. that IT departments have finally an answer to the risks of the usage of free filesharing platforms like dropbox for corporate content.  

 

SAP Mobile Documents On-Premise Architecture

Basis of the on-premise scenario is the SAP NetWeaver Portal based on the Java Runtime Environment and the SAP Knowledge Management (KM) as document storage. Furthermore it's also possible to integrate other CMIS enabled content providers like SharePoint document libraries into SAP Mobile Documents.

Source: help.sap.com

As runtime platform the latest portal versions are used

• SAP NetWeaver 7.3 Support Package Stack 09 or
• SAP NetWeaver 7.3 including Enhancement Package 1 Support Package Stack 05.

Here you see an example how mobile users can access different corporate documents stores (SAP KM & SharePoint) via the native iPad App:

Source: SAP Mobile Documents Overview

I am looking forward to the upcoming Ramp-Up of SAP Mobile Documents to testdrive and extend our btexx SAP NW best practice portal sotric with mobile document management.

Best regards and looking forward to your feedback!

Michael