Installation of SAP Utilities Customer Engagement 1.0

Version 1.0 or 2.0

Although version 2.0 is already annonced during the International Utilities Conference in Copenhagen, it’s not yet available: the SAP support told me that it will be RTC in June 2013. Let’s see… 😉

Why is the version 2.0 so important for us?

Because currently with version 1.0 you logon in the app using your SAP credentials. Yes, this is from the Installation Guide, chapter 5.1.2:

This means, that currently you’ll need a SAP user for the end customer John Doe!

The SAP user will be mapped to a Business Partner (BP): in transaction SU01 you have to assign a business partner (BP) which then will be used for the mobile app.

What if you intend to mobilise all your 600000 customers? DO you need to buy additional SAP licenses? Anyone outside using this mobile app in production?

Installation Guide

So let’s install version 1.0 – but where to find the Installation Guide? The latest version of the document is now updated on SAP Service Marketplace:

service.sap.com -> instguides -> SAP Components -> SAP Mobile Applications -> Business to Consumer (B2C) Apps -> SAP Utilities Customer Engagement 1.0 -> Admin Guide

To be honest, I wouldn’t have found it in this place – thanks to SAP support for pointing me to this location.

In the first document version, the figures were missing – this is fixed now. As a side note: the corrected version has a different page size, but carries the same version number and date. How about version management?

Installation Steps

Briefly, the installation consists of these steps:

• install the Add-On in the IS-U system
• customize the Add-On in IS-U
• install Java Connector on the SAP Mobiliser server
• upload the product bundels to SAP Mobiliser
• configure SAP Mobiliser preferences
• install the app on the mobile device (here: iPad)
• configure the connection settings of the app

Deploying the Mobiliser bundles

The Installation Guide describes (chapter 4.1.6) that the bundles (JAR files) should be uploaded manually through a web form. This might be valid for testing, but it’s transient – if you stop the Mobiliser server, you can do it again.

So I’ve copied the JAR files to the respective folder in the Mobiliser home directory. This wasn’t mentioned in the Installation Guide.

Error configuring JCo preferences in Mobiliser

In chapter 4.1.3, we need to manually add some preferences though a webUI form. Boys, we’re in 2013 – why can’t we use a SQL script for adding these records?

If following the Installation Guide and entering the Description value, you’ll get this error:

Luckily, this was easy to solve: the maximum length of the description is 80 characters! This can be found in the depth of the Mobiliser logs.

JCo library missing in LD_LIBRARY_PATH

It was obvious to me that the CLASSPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH need to be set, and I did this in the file

     /opt/sybase/mobiliser/bin/setenv.sh

Unfortunately, this had no effect and the logs contained errors like “sapjco3.jar” not found. To fix this, I needed to add the following line:

     MOBILISER_OPTS=”$MOBILISER_OPTS -Djava.library.path=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH”

to add the shared library.

No test feature for JCo connection setup

You can add all the JCo preferences, but there is no Test button. As the responsible person, I’d like to have this feature. It would be better to test the connection setup and get an early feedback, whether JCo is working as expected, including the SAP permissions.

iPad hiccups

For our mobile test device, some additional setup was required. Wireless isn’t as easy as expected – perhaps I’m expecting too much:

• Connect the iPad via VPN to the internal company network – not solved yet, work in progress
• Today we’re using Ad-Hoc wireless network as workaround and share the network connection with a notebook
• The iPad email setup: failed to connect to the company Microsoft Exchange 2007 server (today we’re using IMAP as workaround)

Result

Finally we’re able to use this app. Here are some screenshots from the mobile app (version 1.0.10). The texts for Outage and Problem Report items are customized in IS-U and most probably will vary in your installation:

You can update the BP record through the mobile app, e.g. change the email address.

The changed email is shown in the BP details:

Future

We’re waiting for the new version, and expect that a user self registration will be possible. the current user management doesn’t seem feasible in a large scale production system.

This app will be the starting point for our custom developments.