Extending your SAP Portal to Cloud And Mobile
In the recent ISUG (Israeli SAP User Group) annual conference, I had a session about extending your SAP Portal to Cloud and Mobile. The slide can be found below:
However – the point of the blog post is not to talk about how amazing my slide-fu is, its to tell the story of why I almost didn’t use the slides. In the two sessions before me in the “mobility and cloud” track there were two customer cases. The first one was from Coca-Cola Israel (CBC) who show cased a mobile application they developed using SAP NetWeaver Gateway (together with Yaad Oren)
The second one was from ORL (www.orl.co.il) who showed the amazing process (very similar to design thinking) they did to create four (4) mobile apps, using the Sybase Unwired Platform. Both customers did an awesome job in designed and implementing mobile application for their users.
And here is where I thought about ditching my slides – I asked the audience – what was common to both (success) stories? They both created an app. Maybe four. But that’s about it – The integration of this app into the rest of the employees’ content world was simply not there. In one case they just placed the app on the employees phone, hidden between “Angrry Birds” and “Temple Run 2” and in the other case they did the same, only did provisioning with SAP Afaria.
Using the mobile portal (at least ORL have an amazing NetWeaver Portal implementation) both could have tied their existing investments, their existing content management and unstructured content together with these cool new apps. Creating a mobile homepage from which you could launch these apps, in the context of your company news, mobile UWL and your documents is easy (see Aviad Rivlin ‘s latest blog).
I think that looking at the mobile portal as this orthogonal delivery channel for your mobile apps in addition to so much more solves a lot of questions as to when to use what. Use your mobile development platform of choice (hopefully its an SAP one 🙂 ). Bring together these applications with your existing roles and existing content, using the mobile portal.
Hi Yariv,
Thanks for sharing this. I am a little confused, why did you think to "ditch your slides" - I think you make a good point about leveraging the portal in addition to the "build an app" approach - do you think that these customers missed an opportunity?
Thanks,
Simon
Hi Simon,
I thought of ditching my slides since the real life examples given by customers were much better than me just reading from powerpoint. I think that the combination of the mobile portal with "build an app" together is really cool and it was quite surprising how all of these fit together during the presentations without me having to convince the audience just by showing nice screenshots.
Hi Yariv,
you've mentioned,
'mobile UWL'
Please provide a link to documentation on the mobile UWL.
I think mobile UWL will be the first of the killer apps for Mobile Portal, after Mobile UWL, we need the whole Business Suite Business Package (abap/java) which are currently available made available for Tablet and Smart Device Framework pages, ie Smart Device and Tablet friendly.
Something I mentioned yesterday, and which I will blog soon, is that I think customers/partners/perhaps SAP themselves, have not seen the opportunity that Mobile Portal is 100% bring your own device friendly, ie it is comfortable with a wide range of devices and as Aviad has said over and over, leveraging existing investment !
So, to re-iterate, Customers, can, by leveraging existing Portal investment, out of the box have SAP on any device supporting a BYOD policy - how cool is that ?
🙂
I will blog this soon, with nicer words and pictures, I think it's a revolution.
Imagine, a company wants to do bring your own device, the first question is, does the existing IT investment support bring your own device, with SAP Mobile Portal the answer is yes.
All the best,
Andy.
Hi Andy,
Thanks for the kind words. You can find more details about Mobile UWL here - http://scn.sap.com/community/netweaver-portal/blog/2013/05/03/extending-your-mobile-presence-with-the-sap-netweaver-portal in Aviad Rivlin 's blog. Its released as part of EWS 1.1 SP4. We already have several customers about to go productive on it (hope to showcase them in TechEd this year).
Hi Yariv,
I missed that.
Perfect, thank you, excellent news.
Andy.