Journey to SAP Fiori Launchpad on Portal

[harman_shahi]

Journey to SAP Fiori Launchpad on Portal

About 6 months ago, our company wanted to mobilize our ESS MSS functionalities running on the SAP NetWeaver portal. As we started researching, we found ourselves overwhelmed with the options available. In this blog, I wanted to share our findings and decisions that we made along the way.  I apologize in advance if I didn’t explain any functionality thoroughly, but this is how we approached the decisions given our company’s scenario.

Our Environment:

• Portal 7.4 SPS11
• ECC EHP7
• Separate Gateway with Fiori wave 2 apps installed (HUB deployment)
• We are also using Portal functionalities like Web Page Composer

DECISION : “Portal on Device” OR “Fiori”

Official documentation of Portal on Device is this:

"SAP NetWeaver Portal acts as a gateway to enterprise information systems and provides connectivity to SAP and non-SAP back-end systems. Using mobile Web browsers, you can access the portal from mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets. This capability is referred to as “portal on device”.

When you decide to implement portal on device, you need to create portal content that has been designed for mobile users and has been tailored for display on

mobile devices. Here, it is clear that Fiori is a must as it actually is the mobile content.

We also brainstormed the idea of using them together but ‘portal on device’ seemed inessential with introduction of SAP Fiori Launchpad on Portal.  We came to the conclusion that Portal on Device looks nice, but it only gets us 20% of our overall goal, and quickly dropped this idea to pursue Fiori.

DECISION: Fiori or HR Renewals Landing page or Both for ESS MSS

To be clear, these 2 technologies don’t necessarily serve the same purpose, but I just wanted to share where we saw the greatest benefits.

Our initial plan was to replace Portal’s ESS\MSS with HR renewal landing page, and Fiori would run independently on mobile devices.

We had begun with configuring both, but shortly shelved the HR Renewals Landing page. We have a HUB gateway deployment, and getting Web Dispatcher to run both Fiori and HR Renewals became very challenging. We got it configured by using multiple Aliases for Odata services, but looking at the complexity and ongoing support, we never pursued it.

Even though HR Renewals landing page for ESS\MSS looks the coolest of them all, we couldn’t commit for supporting both. And HR Renewals alone would not fulfill our mobile needs! So, we continued on our Fiori path.

DECISION: Launching point for Fiori? Fiori Launchpad or Portal Fiori Desktop?

Once we were pursuing Fiori, we had to decide the launching point for Fiori. Below are the PROS and CONS that we came up with.

SAP Fiori Launchpad on Portal

PROS	CONS
One URL - Same Portal URL from desktops and Mobile	Performance. Extra SSO from Portal to Gateway.
Utilize existing portal content. Example, we placed all help files in KM and created a Fiori Tile to show KM iView. We also could embed our Web Page Composer content.

Direct Fiori Launchpad:

PROS	CONS
Better performance	Two URLS – Desktop portal url, Mobile > Launchpad URL.
	Can only create tiles for Fiori.
	If Gateway is Hub, then New password for users to remember.

For us, the clear winner here was the SAP Fiori Launchpad on Portal. The features for Portal’s Fiori Desktop are being released fast and furious. I would highly recommend reading the this link, specifically the table that shows SAP Fiori Features Comparison in SAP NetWeaver 7.4 Releases

**NOTE: If you plan to use Fiori Launchpad on SAP Portal, I highly recommend the approach of consuming “remote catalogs” instead of consuming each app

individually in iViews.

Other Tips & Recommendations:

• Learn to troubleshoot Fiori (i.e. Client side Developer tools in Chrome); there are many other great posts on SDN that explain how.
• Always apply the Consolidation fixes for apps right after installing the app. Most of issues are covered by notes. And even if you don’t face any immediate issues, just apply the supporting notes to avoid redundant testing.

Conclusion:

NetWeaver 7.5 includes some key enhancements for SAP Fiori Launchpad on Portal, so our decision is looking good thus far.

I apologize in advance if I didn’t explain any functionality thoroughly, but this is how we approached the decisions given our company’s scenario.  I hope this helps…

Thank you.