How to configure the Personalized Launcher in Mobile Portal

Hi,
this time I want to share some experience with activating and configuring the Personalized Launcher in our demo Mobile Portal. The Personalized Launcher gives the users control of the applications they want to see in their Mobile Portal launcher. Whereas before SPS 5 of Enterprise Workspaces 1.1, the Portal Admin had to provide a completely preconfigured launcher for every role, he now just configures a set of available content per role and the user can choose the most useful and his most frequently used applications from an application gallery.

To set up the personalized Launcher in our demo environment, I first had to activate it. That was pretty simple: I just changed the Portal Rule Collection to use one of two newly available portal desktop. There is one desktop for smartphones and another one for tablets in the two folders Smartphone Framework Content – Personalize and Tablet Framework Content – Personalize below Portal Content > Portal Users > Standard Portal Users. So, I just assigned the tablet desktop to device type tablet and the Personalized Launcher was active for my tablet demo.

The next step is configuration. For this purpose, you find two iViews in folder Portal Content > Portal Adminstrators > Content Administrators. The first one is called Mobile App Categories and allows defining categories for apps to help users find relevant content more easily and quickly. Just open the iView properties and enter for up to 20 categories a title, ID and order number  (1 being the first to show up in the App Gallery) each.

Next step is, of course, to assign the applications in the Gallery to the categories. This is done by entering the category ID/IDs to the property Mobile App Categories of the app iView.

This is what you will get as a result:

When users want to add an app from the App Gallery to their launcher, they click it and get a screen with an Add-Button plus a description of the app. By default, this text is stored in the description property of the app iView.

To add further properties that will show up in the app details, you define them in the properties of the second iView in in folder Portal Content > Portal Adminstrators > Content Administrators: Mobile App Configurable Properties.  Here you can add a title and a default value for up to three new properties.

Property values different from the default can be set in the Additional ‘Detailed View’ Property x: Value property of the app iView:

And here is the result (in the default case):

Everything really simple and straightforward.

Go ahead and try it.

Regards,
Sibylle

Note

The information in this blog refers to a feature that is deprecated.

For a list of deprecated features and possible alternatives that you can use instead, see SAP note 2204286.