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ThomasReiss
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
2,028

Joule is now generally available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition 2023. Joule saves you a lot of time when you need to refer to documentation, by giving you a concise summary and pointing you to relevant sections. It also helps you find the right application for well over one hundred navigational scenarios, as well as providing some transactional interactions for selected business objects. If you move up to Feature Pack Stack 2 (FPS2), you can also benefit from built-in collaboration, with the SAP Collaboration Manager now generally available with enhanced functionality. Talking about collaboration, FPS2 also enables users to initiate a chat or call directly from a contact card via Microsoft Teams integration.

This post covers:

  • Joule
  • New collaboration capabilities via:
    -  SAP Collaboration Manager
    -  Contact card integration with Microsoft Teams
  • SAP Mobile Start update
  • News for UI developers, web and mobile

If you want to see how good SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition now looks, across all the main product areas, then I thoroughly recommend that you have a look at the new online Product Tour.

In case you haven’t already seen these, do have a look at the user experience innovations which came with FPS00 and FPS01:

Joule

Users can save around ten minutes every time they need to refer to the documentation, by using Joule to give them a concise summary, created using generative AI. The response also provides three links to the most relevant sections in the documentation. We call this the Informational Pattern. Figure 1 below shows an example for someone working in sales, and Figure 2 shows an example for someone working in procurement.

Figure 1: Using Joule in sales to get help from the documentation, in this case asking “How can I make mass changes to sales orders?”. Alt Text: An image showing Joule on the left, with the query text and an eleven line response below it, followed by the option to expand to see the search results. On the right, an image of Joule is shown with the search results expanded to show three results, the first one called “Mass Changes of Sales Documents”, referring to the documentation of the app with that name. Each search result has a heading with three lines of explanatory text below it.Figure 1: Using Joule in sales to get help from the documentation, in this case asking “How can I make mass changes to sales orders?”. Alt Text: An image showing Joule on the left, with the query text and an eleven line response below it, followed by the option to expand to see the search results. On the right, an image of Joule is shown with the search results expanded to show three results, the first one called “Mass Changes of Sales Documents”, referring to the documentation of the app with that name. Each search result has a heading with three lines of explanatory text below it.

 

 

 

Figure 2: Using Joule in procurement to get help from the documentation, in this case asking “Can I configure a workflow for my purchase requisitions?”. Alt Text: An image showing Joule on the left, with the query text and a nine line response below it, followed by the option to expand to see the search results. On the right, an image of Joule is shown with the search results expanded to show three results, the first one called “How to Configure the Flexible Workflow for Purc…”, referring to the documentation. Each search result has a heading with three lines of explanatory text below it.Figure 2: Using Joule in procurement to get help from the documentation, in this case asking “Can I configure a workflow for my purchase requisitions?”. Alt Text: An image showing Joule on the left, with the query text and a nine line response below it, followed by the option to expand to see the search results. On the right, an image of Joule is shown with the search results expanded to show three results, the first one called “How to Configure the Flexible Workflow for Purc…”, referring to the documentation. Each search result has a heading with three lines of explanatory text below it.

With SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition 2023, users can also benefit from the navigational pattern for over one hundred use cases, in areas such as procurement, finance, sales, and service management. This pattern allows them to navigate directly to apps relevant to their query. You can find out more in this blog post:

 Furthermore, we provide some selected transactional use cases in these areas too.

 To find out more about Joule, have a look at the documentation:

Planned Innovations

As announced at SAP TechEd on October 8th, we have many plans for making Joule even more useful for users, as well as enabling you to build your own skills to extend what SAP delivers. As always, our plans are subject to change, but of course we hope to deliver as planned.

Some highlights are:

  • Joule for Mobile, built into SAP Mobile Start. As announced, this is planned to become available in November 2024.
  • Joule studio in SAP Build for building your own skills is planned to become available for beta testing later this year, and become generally available in Q1/2025. Get a preview by watching the recording of this TechEd talk:
    AD200 | Extend Joule with SAP Build and develop custom enterprise skills

Beyond that, we are working on having many Joule agents interact with each other, across our products – making Joule agentic. Also, to support hands-free interaction, we are working on integration with Siri, so that users can use voice to interact.

 If you haven’t watched it live, then have a look at the replay of the TechEd talk by our AI leaders:

New Collaboration Capabilities

With Feature Pack Stack 2 we introduce the following new collaboration capabilities.

SAP Collaboration Manager

SAP Collaboration Manager allows users to:

  • Take notes when using an application; these notes are pinned to the application, and are listed in the Relevant Chats tab when a user has that application open in the same window as the SAP Collaboration Manager.
  • Ad-hoc chat with colleagues, directly in the SAP system.
  • Share and annotate screenshots; a link is provided to the recipient with which they can navigate directly to the UI where the screenshot was taken.
  • Share the business context.
  • Upload and share files.

Figure 3 shows an example where a user Jones Davidson has created a chat with a colleague Alyssa Arnold and shared a screenshot along with a request to her to take a look at the two open sales orders in the screenshot.

For a closer look at some of the above features, watch it in action here in an SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Editions 2308 system (what is shown is now available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition 2023 FPS02):

Figure 3: Using SAP Collaboration Manager to chat with a colleague and share a screenshot  Alt Text: An image showing a list of three sales orders selected in the Manage Sales Orders app, and SAP Collaboration Manager as an overlay on the right showing the chat text and the screenshot image.Figure 3: Using SAP Collaboration Manager to chat with a colleague and share a screenshot Alt Text: An image showing a list of three sales orders selected in the Manage Sales Orders app, and SAP Collaboration Manager as an overlay on the right showing the chat text and the screenshot image.

Beyond the above features, users can now also:

  • Mark their favorites, and filter by them (using the Favorites tab).
  • Set chats to unread.
  • Add and share insight cards from My Home.

These features are shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: On the left: SAP Collaboration Manager offers tabs for “Recent chats”, “All Chats” and “Favorites”. You see the star indicating a favorite; the blue bar on the left of the second chat indicates that it has been set to unread. On the right: an insight card added to a chat.  Alt Text: An image showing two screenshots of SAP Collaboration Manager. On the left, showing “All Chats” tab with a list of three chats. The second entry in the list is marked as unread, and has a star indicating it is a favorite. On the right, showing an insight card with a vertical bar chart embedded in the chat.Figure 4: On the left: SAP Collaboration Manager offers tabs for “Recent chats”, “All Chats” and “Favorites”. You see the star indicating a favorite; the blue bar on the left of the second chat indicates that it has been set to unread. On the right: an insight card added to a chat. Alt Text: An image showing two screenshots of SAP Collaboration Manager. On the left, showing “All Chats” tab with a list of three chats. The second entry in the list is marked as unread, and has a star indicating it is a favorite. On the right, showing an insight card with a vertical bar chart embedded in the chat.

Contact card integration with Microsoft Teams

Users can now initiate a chat or call with Microsoft Teams directly from a contact card in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition 2023 FPS02. This feature is also available for SAP S/4HANA 2023 (on-premise) with FPS02.

Figure 5 shows two examples for this: using it directly on the My Home page to contact the creator of a task, and using it to contact a customer directly out of a sales order.

Figure 5: Two examples for how you can initiate a chat or call from a contact card via Microsoft Teams – from a To-Do card in My Home (upper image) and from a sold-to party link (lower image).  Alt Text: An image showing two screenshots of popovers next to links referring to contacts -  for the ToDo card the contact is the creator of the task, for the other one it is the sold-to-party of the sales order. Each popover contains a section for initiating a Microsoft Teams collaboration with icons for chat, audio call and video call.Figure 5: Two examples for how you can initiate a chat or call from a contact card via Microsoft Teams – from a To-Do card in My Home (upper image) and from a sold-to party link (lower image). Alt Text: An image showing two screenshots of popovers next to links referring to contacts -  for the ToDo card the contact is the creator of the task, for the other one it is the sold-to-party of the sales order. Each popover contains a section for initiating a Microsoft Teams collaboration with icons for chat, audio call and video call.

SAP Mobile Start

Users like to feel in charge, and a good way to support that is to let them define their favorites. The My Home page provides this feature and, as we saw above, the SAP Collaboration Manager has introduced this capability too.

Now also SAP Mobile Start lets users very easily define up to six favorites, two of which appear on the start screen next to a “See all” link to show all six. Figure 6 shows you what this looks like.

Figure 6: SAP Mobile Start lets users define their favorite apps / tiles.  Alt Text: Three screenshots of SAP Mobile Start are shown. The one on the left shows the start page, which now has a “Favorites” section at the top, above the “Latest To-Dos” and “Insights” sections. The Favorites section shows two apps, each with a KPI shown as a number; on the right it has a “See all” link. The image in the middle shows all the favorites, in this case three are listed. The image on the right shows a list of all apps which can be selected as a favorite.Figure 6: SAP Mobile Start lets users define their favorite apps / tiles. Alt Text: Three screenshots of SAP Mobile Start are shown. The one on the left shows the start page, which now has a “Favorites” section at the top, above the “Latest To-Dos” and “Insights” sections. The Favorites section shows two apps, each with a KPI shown as a number; on the right it has a “See all” link. The image in the middle shows all the favorites, in this case three are listed. The image on the right shows a list of all apps which can be selected as a favorite.

Find out more about this, as well as the new capability to upload and download attachments from tasks in this blog post:

October 16th update: SAP Mobile Start V2.0 is now available, supporting Spaces & Pages to group your applications; cards from SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition; Situation Handling standard framework capabilities; and enhancements to task handling as well as optimized layouts for larger screens, as provided by foldables and tablets on Android. Check them out in this blog post:

News for UI Developers, Web and Mobile

The major news for UI developers for both web and mobile is that SAP Build now supports ABAP Cloud, and not just CAP (Cloud Application Programming model) for other programming languages such as Java and JavaScript. Get a comprehensive overview in this blog post from Michael Ameling:

Providing Joule skills is also a powerful way to enhance the user experience – I covered our main planned innovations there in already in the “Planned Innovations” part of the above Joule section.

News for Web Developers

Alt Text: Image of the white UI5 logo on a blue background with the text “UI5 linter 1.0 New Release” below it.Alt Text: Image of the white UI5 logo on a blue background with the text “UI5 linter 1.0 New Release” below it.

The main news is that UI5 linter 1.0 has now been released and is generally available. It is a static code analysis tool which helps ensure that you have good quality code, and which saves you a lot of time debugging later by catching issues up front. It can check for problems such as the use of deprecated UI5 libraries, framework APIs etc. as well as the usage of global variables and possible CSP violations. Find out more in this blot post:

I would also like to point you to the updated SAP BTP Developer’s Guide, where we have now brought in user experience design advice, as well as restructuring it to cover Explore, Discover, Design, Deliver and Scale & Run phases:

The developer’s guide recommends using SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori elements, built on OData services, for developing UIs. Should you not be able to follow this recommendation because you have existing applications using different protocols or frameworks, we have options to help you nevertheless:

For friends of ABAP, we recently introduced the ability to create Fiori elements apps directly from within the ABAP Development Tools (ADT). Find out more here:

News for Mobile Developers

The main news for mobile developers is the latest releases of the mobile SDKs, as well as the integration of the Mobile Development Kit into SAP Build Code. Here are links to find out more:

For a deeper dive, watch the recordings of the Devtoberfest sessions on developing mobile apps:

Final Words

I hope you are as excited about these new user experience innovations as I am! FPS02 brings quite a few additional new features beyond user experience, discover all of them here:

If you like what you see here, we encourage you to upgrade to FPS02, so that you can run your business even better with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition 2023.

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