Hi there,
I’m very proud to announce that as of today we have released a major feature release for SAP HANA Cloud Platform mobile services. You probably you have not noticed, but since January we have updated mobile services at the end of each month and provided some patches. This is true for the Trial as well.
But today is different. Today we have deployed a major feature release, which includes:
- SAP Fiori Support
- Staging Area
- Push Hub
- SAP Logon Ticket Support
SAP Fiori Support
SAP HANA Cloud Platform mobile services supports routing of Fiori Apps in proxy-mode adding additional Mobile Qualities to Fiori Apps (using Fiori Client, Custom Fiori Client or Packaged Fiori App). Fiori Client refers to the public Fiori Client App that is available here (AppStore, Google Play).
It can be used to consume a Fiori Endpoint URL directly or via HCPms.
Using the SAP Mobile SDK you can create your own version of the Fiori Client to customize it. For example, you want to create your own home screen icon, apply your own App signing or add any special behavior you want. This is what we typically call a Custom Fiori Client.
If you want know more about the the Fiori Client you should read John Wargo’s blog here: Introducing SAP Fiori Client 1.2.
The last option is potentially worth an own blog entry, but you can get an idea of what is meant by “Packaged App” when you read the blog about our Hybrid Application Toolkit, which let’s you build mobile Apps in the WebIDE and deploy them as Hybrid Apps to iOS or Android. In this latest scenario you are walking away from a Mobile WebApp consumed by the Fiori Client to a real mobile Application running entirely on the device – well, you still need to fetch the data from the backend.
Anyhow, all these three consumption options are possible with mobile services as of today.
But this is not all that we deliver. With this release we will extend our Client Policy to let you remotely enable/disable the mobile capabilities of the Fiori Client. So this allows an administrator in the Mobile Services Cockpit to remotely enable the barcode scanner plugin or disable the camera plugin for a given application.
Staging Area
If you have experience with the Hybrid App lifecycle and used the AppUpdate plugin of our SDK you know that you can easily update an already distributed App. With the new staging area you can allow developers to update a new version of your HTML5 content and assign this version to a specific group of people – we call them Testers – for access. This new version will only be available to the Testers and not to the public users. Once the Testers are ok with the new version, it could easily be moved to the productive area where the usual rollout process starts. This greatly enhances the rollout process and makes it more manageable. It supports an enterprise to deliver the user experience that mobile users are expecting today.
And this is how it looks like:
SAP Logon Tickets
In order to allow Single Sign On for SAP back-end systems HANA Cloud Platform mobile services will now be able to create MYSAPSSO2 logon tickets after successful authentication of a user. This is implemented in the way that the token will never hit the device and is entirely handled and stored on the server side. Once the trust between the SAP back-end system (e.g. a SAP CRM) is established a token, issued by the mobile services will authenticate a users request against that system. Since trust can be established between multiple systems this token will authenticate the users request against multiple systems
Push Hub
The Push Hub is a very special service. It is only meaningful if you have a mobile app, distributed via a public app store and many different enterprise customers use this particular app – so we are talking about reselling business now. This app now is signed with your push certificate or contains your notification API key and only you are allowed to send notifications to it. But the back-end systems of your customers are generating the business event that needs to be distributed.
The Push Hub is an abstraction service that allows you to store your push certificate/API Key there and point your SAP Mobile Platform or the mobile services to the Push Hub, which will be the hub for your notifications. The following picture explains the Push Hub:
The trial landscape will be updated as well, so that you can get your hands dirty with those new features.
Have Fun,
Martin Grasshoff
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