Kapsel Enterprise Browser

At TechEd in Las Vegas and Amsterdam, SAP demonstrated an application we’re currently calling the Kapsel Enterprise Browser. The purpose of this application is to enhance the performance of SAP Fiori applications when running on a mobile device.

SAP Fiori is a collection of web-based applications, and as such may suffer from potential performance issues due to network latency and browser caching issues.  As mobile device browsers manage their own performance and/or memory footprint, any performance benefit a Fiori user obtains from the browser caching application resources between sessions is lost when the browser has insufficient space allocated for cache or arbitrarily and potentially randomly clears its cache. Once the browser cache is purged by the device, a subsequent load of Fiori requires that the entire set of Fiori application assets be downloaded from the server again.

Additionally, when a mobile web application encounters file attachments on web pages, on mobile devices, the user experience of opening the attachment for viewing (or even editing) directs the mobile user outside of the mobile browser context into a separate application for that purpose. This approach makes it difficult for mobile users to finish working with the attachment and quickly return to the browser context they were working in. This approach is functional, but not the optimal experience for mobile users.

The Kapsel Enterprise Browser application renders Fiori application content and provides more reliable asset caching (HTML, CSS, JavaScript files and more) and a streamlined attachment viewing process.  After the initial load of the Fiori application content, subsequent launches of the application will retrieve the Fiori assets from the application’s local cache instead of grabbing them from the server; this helps increase overall launch and runtime performance for the user.

The application can tell when an updated version of the Fiori application has been published to the server. When an update has been detected, the application will purge its local cache of Fiori application assets then retrieve the updated assets from the server – adding them to its cache in order to speed up subsequent application launches.

For access to file attachments within the Fiori application, the Kapsel Enterprise Browser implements native attachment handling capabilities which are more tightly integrated with the native application than is possible in current mobile browsers. What this means for users is that when then open an attachment

from within Fiori, the attachment opens in a window from which the user can close and more easily return to the Enterprise Browser application.

As you can probably tell from the Kapsel name, it’s built using Apache Cordova and Kapsel plugins. What’s the difference between Kapsel and Kapsel Enterprise Browser? Well, as I’ve written here before, Kapsel is simply a set of SAP Plugins for Apache Cordova. The Kapsel Enterprise Browser is a native application built using some Kapsel plugins which have been optimized for SAP Fiori.

The application we demonstrated supports Android and iOS 6.