Imagine it’s the year 2005: The burst of the dotcom bubble is becoming a distant memory, and with new technologies and greater broadband penetration, confidence in online ventures is growing rapidly. On April 23, 2005, a video titled "Me at the zoo" is the first one being uploaded to a previously unknown site called YouTube. Web 2.0, the "social web", comes charging out of the starting blocks, but is still in its infancy.
Some years before, the aged SAP R/3 GUI-based Online Service System (OSS) had been assigned a web-based "sibling": SAP Service Marketplace. In 2005, the SAP Support Portal spun off the SAP Service Marketplace and became the primary support channel. That same year, OSS was retired, and new applications replaced interfaces that had been in place for many years, sometimes decades.
It was the time of the Business Server Page (BSP) applications. Back then, these applications, executed in a Web browser rather than in the SAP GUI, were a state-of-the-art SAP standard product. The BSP programming model ensured optimum structure in interfaces and business logic.
Over the next few years, new tools and processes revolutionized the way SAP offered online support for our customers. SAP Incident Wizard cleverly combined the search for a solution with reporting a problem to SAP. SAP xSearch became the first holistic search tool at SAP, retrieving results from various repositories.
However, more than 10 years on, the technology of the BSP applications has become outdated and insufficient for today’s business world. Support for modern browsers is substandard. Repeated logons (caused by the distributed server landscape) have long been a nuisance that our customers have — rightly — complained about. Many applications had been added over the years creating gaps in integration and workflows, resulting in users monitoring several inboxes or having to invent their own workarounds to perform connected but unnecessarily complicated tasks.
With this customer experience in mind, almost two years ago, SAP embarked on a journey to design a modern replacement. Through conversations with and regular feedback from customers like you, we've
developed the SAP ONE Support Launchpad, a user-friendly platform to help make your support experience as simple and streamlined as possible.
The launchpad provides access to support resources in a single, intuitive interface. By using customizable role profiles, it displays only relevant applications and insights to ensure an efficient and user-friendly experience. Today, support users should exclusively utilize this fresh interface to access available support tools and applications.
For our trusted, but aged, BSP applications, August 15, 2016 marks the end of their working life. On this date, most of them will be retired. The features and functionality they offered are offered in their equivalent launchpad versions. However, we did not simply copy over the old applications into a new webpage. SAP seized the opportunity to reconsider the way applications should support you. Wherever expedient, tools have been merged into more powerful, more user-friendly ones. This is not the end of the journey; you may look forward to further exciting improvements.
Today, however, let us recognize and remember a decade of BSP applications. Here's to their well-deserved retirement!
