How to Work with Fiori Launchpad as a Consultant or Expert User

Introduction

i am doing a lot of S/4HANA presentations and workshops with Fiori 2.0. In most of the cases, we are creating nice role-based Fiori launchpad pages for the business users, which are using a few Fiori apps on a weekly or even monthly base, so they have a nice user-experience, maybe even on their mobile devices.

but to do the configurations and development for the project, i used the native SAPGUI and not Fiori. if someone asked me why i don’t use Fiori my excuse was something like i have tousands of transactions and don’t want to create a role or personalize my home screen just to perform a transaction which i might only use once in a year… (not to say i am using SAPGUI since 20 years and i am too old to learn something new?)

as a fact, assigning all available Fiori tiles to a user does not really bring up a nice workplace for a consultant (SAP_ALL for Fiori…)

on the other hand the new WebGui with Fiori 2.0 is very fast, so why not give it a try!

Self-Test

i created a Fiori Launchpad for my daily work as a sap consultant/developer and from now on i want to use the  ‘Fiori Launchpad First‘ and see how far i am coming… hopefully i also get some input from other consultants about ideas/features and limitations and their experience, so this launchpad is able to grow in features 🙂

i am also sure that upcoming Fiori releases will bring new features to support this.

So how does it look like?

Key Features are:

‘Frequenty Used’ section in the ‘Me Area’: this is SAP Fiori Standard and creates kind of ‘automated favorites’ by collecting the last used fioris and transactions.

‘Create New Session’: use ‘Duplicate Tab’ function of Browser to create additional Sessions

‘Easy Access Menu’: First Tile in the My Home is the easy access menu, so i can start any transaction from here

‘Workflow/My Inbox’: ok thats pretty Fiori standard here, could be any kind of approvals like CHARM, TimeSheets/Expenses…

‘Consultant KPIs’: any interesting monitoring KPIs can be inserted here by using the ‘dynamic tile’ and odata/CDS, examples could be: number of short dumps, open Transports, Number of logged in User, hana free memory, tRFC errors, ABAP Proxy errors, hana custom code worklist, …

I think I have to start thinking of kpis that help me in my daily work or link this to solution manager?

Easy Access Menu Tile

this is basically transaction code /NSMEN, so i have created a fiori catalog with the transaction SMEN.

when clicking on the easy access the traditional SAPGUI Easy Access Menu is shown:

from here i can use my existing favorites, call any transaction code (ad-hoc), basically everything i did so far in the SAPGUI.

remark: the first time calling sapgui i have to select more/GUI Actions and Settings/Show OK Code Field, to have the TransactionCode available.

Create new Session

right-click on the browser-tab and choose ‘duplicate’

App-Finder

i can combine all this with the app-finder and easy access menu of the app-finder:

as explained in the wiki

https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/SAPMOB/How+to+Enable+SAP+Easy+Access+Menu+for+Fiori+Launchpad+Step-by-Step

Quick-Links

in our environment, https://<hostname>/fiori always brings me to the launchpad of each system.

in /NSICF it is possible to define external aliasses for fiori and gui

so i can add quick-link-url’s to my browsers favorites:

direct links using:

sematic objects:

/fiori/shells/abap/FioriLaunchpad.html#PurchaseRequisition-create

transactions:

http://fiori/shells/abap/FioriLaunchpad.html#Shell-startGUI?sap-system=LOCAL&sap-ui2-tcode=SE10 (setup of easy access menu as described in wiki above required)

other links:

as i am in the browser i can add WebIDE, SAP Cloud Platform and so on

Work with different SAP Systems

Example DEV/QAS/PRD Environments:

i can choose between one Launchpad with different aliasses (One Easy Access Tile per Backend System), or one Launchpad-Url per System/Client (same as End-Users)

remarks:

webgui: if your webgui does not work as expected, check out for newest kernel as there have been some bugfixes for specific gui controls.

release: i am currently using S/4Hana Release 1610 with FPS1 (Fiori 2.0, Gateway 3.0, NW 7.51)

next steps:

so i am very interested in your feedback/ideas with this approach and also keep you updated about my experiences with this way of work.