What's new in SAP BTP in January 2024

[David_Cresson]

SAP Business Technology Platform is a very active domain on the SAP world. SAP and the community publish lot of content and it is sometimes difficult to know all the sources or the new channels available. Thanks to this post, I will try to provide you a snapshot of what's happen in the BTP area in January. It won't be exhaustive but a good starting point to stay up to date on this quickly evolving platform.

SAP BTP

Let's start with the post from @cecihuergo on the live series which presents the last innovations on SAP BTP: What's New with SAP BTP - Quarterly Live Series

If you don't have 1h in front of you, you can also check the post from @cecilysorenson, SAP BTP Innobytes – January 2024.

Following this logic to keep the community informed SAP has also the SAP BTP Ask Me Anything Series which consist in a Q&A session on a topic. February session will be on artificial intelligence and January one was on Enterprise Automation. All detail on these 2 sessions here.

How to talk about Enterprise Automation without mentioning the article from @Manuel_Namyslo : How to get started with Enterprise Automation.

In January, a new series, SAP BTP Unveiled, started with session already planned for the whole year.

The release navigator released in September last year and continuously improved thanks to community feedback is doing the link across content above by providing a central place to browse the different source of content.

Cloud ALM

SAP Cloud ALM Team keeps his community informed thanks to different series of webinars. You can find the planning for next sessions here and the replays of previous ones there.

In January, 2 sessions happened to present the new features released in Q4 2023 for the operations and implementation.

@allam_drebes introduced the first part on how to provision Selenium Runner for private landscape while @MarcelBusu wrote a nice guide on how to setup events in the health monitoring application.

Blog from @BiserSimeonov doesn't talk directly about Cloud ALM but as the SAP Alert Notification service for SAP BTP service can be integrated to CALM, then the procedure can be used to have CALM event when failure happen in SAP Continuous Integration and Delivery service with all the advantages of the event management of CALM.

Finally, @RajeevP introduced the service CAS Core Operations service for Cloud ALM. 

SAP Build Process Automation

A great feature of SAP Build Process Automation is the ready-to-use packages covering different business scenarios and in January SAP released  new set of 19 content packages, 12 Business Content and 7 Learning Content. Detailed list can be found here.

@JesseSukhbayar published a detailed blog post on the new features released on January. In this blog  @svenhuberti introduced the decision functionality of the SBPA and how to consume it. What is the difference between SAP Build and SAP Build Code ? @FranziMickIT explains in detail what is the purpose of each service in the SAP Build and SAP Build Code: Comprehensive Tools for Novice to Expert Developers blog.

SAP BPA by Redwood will reach the end of mainstream maintenance at the end of year. SAP offers 3 options and @Jay2 explored the option around SBPA in the SAP ERP Job Scheduling with SAP Build Process Automation article.

SAP Datasphere

SAP Datasphere was active in January with not less than 2 versions released, 2024.1 and 2024.2. Changes on these 2 versions have been covered by @TuncayKaraca.

@CameronK provided another use case of a functionality released last year on the 2023.6 version: the replication flows:  SAP Datasphere Replication Flow from S/4HANA to Azure Data Lake.

SAC

2024.02 version was released on January for SAC fastTrack customers. Note the version 2024.01 was released in December 2023. @meganhoy covered the new features of these 2 versions in 2 blog posts here and there.

@francois_imberton came back in detail on one of new feature released in 2024.02, just ask which is a new query solution based on natural language and powered by IA.

@Padmapriya developed in a blog post a mission to integrate SAC, datasphere and SAP build App; another example that combining BTP services helps to build powerful solution.

ABAP Environment

First, a quick reminder: the 2402 release is coming soon, check the Maintenance Windows and Major Upgrade Windows for more detail and get the planning for the whole 2024.

Last customer and partner roundtable happened on the 23rd of January and next one will come on 27th of February.

Last year, the 2308 release bring a feature I waited for a long time: the possibility to hibernate the Abap BTP environment on demand or on schedule manner. In his post, @Burcu_Karlidag illustrate perfect the financial benefit to schedule hibernation when it is suitable for the environment.

Automation is key on many areas and testing is not an exception. @Mani_P_S guides us in our test automation journey on Abap Cloud. As we talk about test automation, I can only recommend you to read the posts of @OlgaDolinskaja on ATC on the abap cloud and specially this one which presents a good alternative of the onpremise central ATC.

Identity Authentication

SAP for Me is more and more integrated with the SAP ecosystem. A good example is this possibility to configure IAS tenant administrator directly from SAP for Me.

Note there is a change on the upgrade scheduling which moves from every second Wednesday, 10:00 UTC to every second Tuesday, 14:00 UTC.

Document Management Service

In the last release of the SAP Document Management service, SAP introduced a change in the destination configuration for the integration of SAP S/4HANA with Google Workspace.

The following properties have been replaced:

Old Property	New Property
Authentication: NoAuthentication	OAuth2ClientCredentials
Additional Property: google.client_id	Standard Configuration: Client ID
Additional Property:google.private_key	Standard Configuration: Client Secret
Additional Property:google.token_uri	Standard Configuration: Token Service URL

Action: If you are an existing user it's required to migrate your settings to the new setup. The updates are designed to enhance the experience for new implementations, ensuring a seamless and optimized setup.

For more information about creating destinations, see Creating HTTP Destinations.

Cloud Foundry

SAP BTP has been upgraded with version 35.1.0: Release v35.1.0 · cloudfoundry/cf-deployment · GitHub

SAP released the note 3333978 about the deprecation of weak client certificate chains.

Other Services

The features released on SAP Build Workzone during on Q4 2023 on this blog post. News on Integration Suite has been covered by SAP in their quarterly live and Innobytes series; @JingjingWang provides the procedure how to update the SAML metadata in open connectors.