Rapid Mobile App Development Starts Now with Addition to SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services
The SAP Cloud Platform Mobile services team is excited to be releasing a new product called SAP Enterprise App Modeler (SEAM) next month. SEAM allows customers to run, customize and administer select complex SAP mobile apps and will evolve into a Rapid Mobile App Development (RMAD) framework. This expands our Mobile Services offering by delivering a metadata-driven model for mobile app development.
In this blog, I’ll discuss how SEAM may be a good fit for you and your company. Mobile business apps are in high demand, and as more people continue to use their mobile devices for business related activities, the need for enterprise mobile apps also increases. In order to keep up with user requirements, companies can choose to buy an existing enterprise mobile application, such as the new SAP Asset Manager or build their own enterprise mobile applications.
Regardless of your choice, SAP Enterprise App Modeler provides the features needed to get you to the finish line faster. Here are a few of the features and benefits of SEAM.
- Enables developers and/or technical business users to easily create and customize applications without writing code
- Enables developers and/or technical business users to easily tailor SAP complex applications (e.g. SAP Asset Manager) to their business needs without writing code.
- Mobile apps built using SEAM can easily run offline and sync data when the user is back online.
- Aligned with SAP Fiori design principles created with Apple and provides an amazing user experience
- App runs natively on client
- Deployment of the updated application is done with a few clicks and the mobile client receives the updates without re-building or re-installing the application.
Customize Complex SAP Apps Today
If your company prefers to buy an app that provides the features your users have been asking for, SEAM is a customization framework for these complex SAP applications. SAP Asset Manager is the first SAP application built on top of the SEAM framework. SEAM enables your company to tailor SAP Asset Manager to exactly what your users need to be productive within the organization. SAP Asset Manager is a robust application that provides 85-95% of what a company is looking for. Your business can then customize the application with additional screens, branding, styling, actions, rules, and fields that specifically meets your needs. In the end, your business and end-users have an application that looks like it was custom created with your needs in mind.
The customization is coding-free, so there is a lower learning curve for your developers and technical business users to get up to speed on tailoring the application.
Stay tuned for Rapid Mobile App Development!
If your company is looking to rapidly build custom mobile applications, we will soon be launching a beta program of SEAM to provide a no code / low code environment for developers and/or technical business users. The SEAM application development environment (editor) will be an optional feature for Web IDE. The SEAM editor feature adds additional wizards, drag and drop UI elements, app templates and codeless building blocks that are used to rapidly create mobile applications.
SEAM will deliver the best of both worlds – fast, easy enterprise app development, plus full-featured, amazing apps that will make users happy.
If there’s anything I know for sure, it’s that the speed of business will continues to increase. Big data, cloud, and mobile all have a profound effect on business today. But the demand for apps can’t be met by “legacy” development processes. We are excited to be providing new ways to easily develop and customize apps at the speed of business.
I encourage you to meet the mobile team and check out demos of SEAM at SapphireNOW in Orlando next week. Learn more about this no coding experience to create and customize apps and stay tuned or contact me for more info on joining the Beta program.
Please come find me at SAPPHIRE if you would like to see this great new capability in action. I'll be there and am happy to show it off. Thanks Sue!
Hi,
I am hoping to see some capability on online and offline data synchronization of a SAP mobile app with SAP backend, something that UI5 applications have been lacking for quite sometime now.
Thanks.
Sukanta Rudra
Offline capabilities are built into the product from the very beginning and is one of our most important features.
How does a sap partner get involved with the beta program?
Just contact me. My email is in my profile.
The BETA program is for select customers and partners. We will be sending out information later this month or June for the BETA program.
Great announcement. Excited to see the metadata driven approach.
Thanks Sue, looks interesting. I assume that the apps still use the cloud build service like any other Fiori Mobile app? Is SEAM a design-time framework? That would make it more like a Web IDE template than Web Dynpro, for example?
Mike - great question. We are still looking at ways to incorporate the cloud build service into the SEAM model - I agree that there are synergies there. For the initial release I believe that customers will create the SAP Asset Manager app with a local SDK installation. Customers use SEAM as a design-time tool to modify the app, the result of that design-time exercise is then used to create runtime artifacts delivered via the App Update service to the SAP Asset Manager app.
Hi Sue, On what technology is offline based? SAP Mobile Platform / Mobilink ?