Technical Articles
Be Visual! Use Official Icons and Samples for SAP Business Technology Platform Solution Diagrams
Abstract: The “SAP Business Technology Platform Solution Diagram & Icon Guidelines” (MS PowerPoint slide deck) makes documenting viable SAP Business Technology Platform solution implementations easier than ever before. It includes a comprehensive set of official SAP Business Technology Platform service icons, capability icons, graphical design elements and a set of sample diagrams. All these tools can be used to design SAP Business Technology Platform solution diagrams, schematics of different complexity, and to illustrate the work of SAP Business Technology Platform, its services, solutions and SAP products, and the ways of their use. Learn how to build your own diagrams for SAP Business Technology Platform end-2-end solution scenarios.
[UPDATE, 30.3.2021] Changed names and titles from “SAP Cloud Platform” to “SAP Business Technology Platform” for better findability and to reflect recent platform rebranding.
[UPDATE, 30.9.2022] Added download links for Icons collection ZIP file and for Terms of Use document.
Why SAP Business Technology Platform Solution Diagrams & Icons
SAP is dedicated to providing you the best approaches to realize solutions on SAP Business Technology Platform. As Sudhanshu Srivastava describes in his blog Rethinking enablement assets for the SAP Cloud Platform! our SAP Business Technology Platform Solution Diagrams and Icons make an important contribution to visualize best practices and architectures of end-to-end SAP Business Technology Platform solutions.
With the official set of icons, design guidelines and sample diagrams you can easily create your own SAP Business Technology Platform solution diagrams by using MS PowerPoint. They are intended to reach a better and faster understanding of SAP Business Technology Platform end-to-end solution scenarios as customer, partner, client, solution architect, project lead or developer by using graphical diagrams for visual learning.
Design Principles
The SAP Business Technology Platform solution diagram guidelines are based on a common iconography and graphical design that follow the SAP Business Technology Platform UX principles (Fiori 2.0). In this way we reach a seamless User Experience in SAP Business Technology Platform front-ends (e.g. SAP Business Technology Platform Cockpit, SAP Web IDE) and content assets including slide decks, blueprints or blogs (e.g. recent blogs from Murali Shanmugham) with consistent and intuitive metaphors by using shared icons and colors.
Using the Solution Diagram Guidelines in MS PowerPoint
To build your own SAP Business Technology Platform solution diagram follow these steps:
- Visit our wiki page SAP Business Technology Platform Solution Diagrams & Icons
- Download the MS PowerPoint slide deck SAP-BTP_official-solution-diagrams-and-icons_v01.pptx
- Download the SAP Business Technology Platform icons collection ZIP file (icons in PNG or SVG format) for use inside solution diagrams
- Follow the Terms Of Use for the SAP Business Technology Platform Solution Diagrams, Design Elements & Icons
- Find the icon, diagram design elements and sample diagrams that you need
- Create your own SAP Business Technology Platform solution diagram for own purposes including twitter, sap.com blogs, project documentation, interactions with clients or workshops
As of today MS PowerPoint is the only supported diagram format. Let’s have a closer look at the content parts inside the SAP-BTP_official-solution-diagrams-and-icons_v01.pptx slide deck:
Use SAP Icons & Logos
Behind the formal part with legal disclaimer, terms of use, readme and table of contents the first guidelines section contains various icons & logos as the main design elements
- [SAP Cloud Platform Capability Icons that are also used on the https://cloudplatform.sap.com/capabilities.html web page / NOTE 30.3.2021: outdated, no longer in use]
- SAP Business Technology Platform service Icons in two flavors, for diagrams with blue circle, for slides without circle
- SAP Icons for technical entities, devices, users etc. in neutral grey color. These icons are provided as image objects and are re-used from the SAP Icon font that is based on the SAP Fiori iconography.
- SAP Product Logos including the SAP Business Technology Platform Logo
- White-listed Third-Party Logos
Use Design Elements for MS PowerPoint Slides
In guideline section “Elements for MS PowerPoint Slides” you can find the visual elements that characterize the SAP Business Technology Platform solution diagram design:
- A Color Palette that is based on a subset of colors as defined by the SAP Fiori Design Guidelines
- Areas to depict various technical entities or parts of the end-to-end solution architecture and landscape
- Cardinality Markers to depict multiple occurrences of entities
- Text in Flex Grey
- Text in L0-blue, Emphasize & Semantic Colors
- Connectors, Arrows & Lines
- Numbers
Follow Author Guidelines
To make it easier for you to create own guideline compliant solution diagrams we added some helpful explanations:
- Do’s & Don’t
- Tips & Tricks
- Arrow Directions
- How to create Colored Icons in 5 Steps
- Comparison with SAP TAM Block Diagrams
- Community Support
Pick & Choose Sample Diagrams
In the next guideline section “Solution Diagram Examples” you can pick and choose from a set of 4 SAP Business Technology Platform sample diagrams which can serve as good templates for your own solution diagrams.
- SAP Business Technology Platform Solution Diagram Sample
- SAP Fiori Cloud
- Principal Propagation
- Weather Demo: Developed Using the “Bring Your Own Language” Concept
Additional sample diagrams can be found under SAP Business Technology Platform use cases.
The solution diagram guidelines have the big advantage, that the diagram design is also suited for white and black background styles with minimum modification. You only need to replace the logo image objects (to get readable texts in white or black), all other diagram elements can be kept untouched.
Sample diagram “3/ Principal Propagation” shows how to design a more comprehensive solution architecture that is characterized by various technical details like certificates, certificate authorities or identities. Just note that this diagram also makes use of colored icons (in addition to the standard grey icons, see LEGEND) as described in guideline section “Author Guidelines: How to create Colored Icons in 5 Steps”.
Terms of Use
As customer, partner, solution architect, project lead or developer working with SAP Business Technolog Platform you are invited to create your own solution diagrams for individual purposes including twitter, blogs, project document or interactions with clients e.g. workshops. For legal safeguard just follow the SAP Terms of Use found in document Terms Of Use for the SAP Business Technology Platform Solution Diagrams, Design Elements & Icons. These terms of use govern your use of these SAP Materials (as defined in the Terms of Use), and related Content and web pages.
Watch for Updates
The SAP Business Technology Platform solution diagram & icons guideline slide deck you can download from wiki page SAP Business Technology Platform Solution Diagrams & Icons will be regularly updated with new versions, e.g. to include new service icons, capability icons, sample diagrams or design changes. To follow these changes that are all tracked in the “version history” table just start watching this wiki page (see following screenshot …)
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Olga Werner for her excellent design work and creativity on the variety of service icons, capability icons and diagram elements. The realization of the new SAP Cloud Platform solution diagram guidelines would not have been possible without the constructive collaboration, inspiration and feedback of many distinguished SAP colleagues like Hamsa Buvaraghan, Thomas Bieser, Jeremy Good, Bernhard Groene, Dan Lahl, Claudia Pacheco, Matthieu Pelatan, Riley Rainey, Former Member, Matthias Steiner, Michael Van Cutsem.
And Now, Happy Diagramming!
Hi Bertram,
this blog post is the final milestone of the (external) rollout of the solution diagrams, and you & Hamsa and the rest of the team can really be proud of this achievement. It may look trivial to some, but within the big picture having a clear and crisp visual design language to explain SAP Cloud Platform based architectures does have impact from many angles!
Kudos & great job!!!
Cheers,
matthias
Hi Bertram,
thank you very much for this post. I hope it will lead to more precise and better to understand solution diagrams. I will definitely use them in my day to day life.
Andre
Hi Bertram,
thank you and your team for this amazing guide.
Are you guys planning on releasing the icons outside of PPT? We use draw.io and right now I take screenshots of your icons for our internal solution architecture.
Would be great if you guys can publish the icons stand alone.
Keep up the amazing work.
Chris
Hallo Christian,
I'm pleased about your positive feedback and also this interesting question on the "draw.io" support. I know draw.io but have not yet added it to out our backlog planning.
After playing around a bit with draw.io I can better understand your question on publishing our service icons and other SAP Cloud Platform solution diagram icons (e.g. the grey SAP icons) "standalone" as png files or even better directly providing them via custom "SAP Cloud Platform Icon" xmls (e.g. one xml for all "Analytics" icons, other xmls for the other capabilities and one xml for the grey SAP Icons etc).
The diagram design elements could also be added to another custom library xml with all styles (like colors, lines) preconfigured matching our Fiori design guidelines. This set of "SAP Cloud Platform Solution Diagram" library xmls could be imported via URLs to files on an SAP server. The sample diagrams could also be provided in the draw.io format. In the best case we would team up with draw.io to provide the SAP Cloud Platform Solution Diagrams out-of-the box with inbuilt standard "network" libraries.
All this needs further planning and actually I cannot provide more details. But the idea to support draw.io is very promising, so that we will have a closer look at it.
Best regards, Bertram
Hi Bertram,
that would be amazing. I keep my fingers crossed to see a SCP library within draw.io in the not too far future 🙂
Chris
Hello Bertram,
are there any news on this topic? We also use draw.io for architecture diargams that we embed in our arc42 (Bernot Starke) documentations.
Best Regards
Stefan
Hi Bertram,
following the blog, is there any update available regarding the draw.io support?
Best Regards, Florian
Hi Bertram,
also other popular cloud diagramming solutions like lucidchart.com would be nice. For comparison, all hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP) have published their own diagrams within both lucidchart and draw.io
Regards,
Harris
Hallo Harris,
that's an excellent question. We consider and evaluate supporting other "diagramming and drawing tools" for SAP Cloud Platform solution diagrams beyond MS PowerPoint. As of now I cannot provide a future outlook when other tools like draw.io or Lucidcharts will be supported. We seriously consider to boost and simplify our SAP Cloud Platform solution diagram adoption with additional tools. Customers with multi-cloud strategies need support for diagramming tools to depict multi-cloud architectures including SAP Cloud Platform.
Best regards, Bertram
Hello Bertram,
Very Interesting and useful!
Best Regards,
Sam
Hi Bertram Ganz,
is there any plan to support draw.io? It has become a good industry standards supportin already all big cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Goolge). When is SAP catching up with icons there?
BR
Lars
Not even at this point there isn't an updated version. This is so sad. We know you are slow at adoption, but still not even after all these requests?
Thank you,
Bogdan Popescu
Hi again,
have you planned on providing a "box" for multi-target-applications / solutions?
Cheers
Chris
Hi Christian,
you are hitting a very good point with "how to visualize SAP Cloud Platform 'solutions' and MTA files" inside our SAP Cloud Platform solution diagrams. So far our guidelines version 03 neither contain a grey "solution" icon (like for application) nor a design element or rectangle or another icon for an MTA file. I'll have a look at this question and will add these icons/elements to the next version04 coming in February.
Best regards, Bertram Ganz
Hi Bertram,
Thanks to you and your team for this great work. It has evolved so much in these past few months.
I'm developing some enablement materials this month that will include many Cloud Platform architecture diagrams -- I'll share the end results with you. I might have some finer point suggestions coming from that, but I have found the v3 version very usable as distributed.
Nicely done.
Riley
Thank you, Riley 🙂 I'm looking forward to your suggestions that will be appied to the next version v04 that is scheduled in February. Regards, Bertram
This is really helpful. I have been looking for something like this for a long time. Thank you for sharing this Bertram Ganz.
Hi Bertram,
any update on the draw.io support :)?
I have an un-official version for now but an official version would be great.
Cheers
Chris
Hi Chris, how are you?
Could you share the un-official library URL or if you found the official one?
Thanks!!
Cheers
Great work, and I especially like the author guidelines in the slide deck as well as the example diagrams - very useful! Thanks.
Bertram,
this is really good, thank you for this helpful guide!
I can see draw.io discussion above and I would ask similar question - are you going to create set for MS Visio?
Regards, Mateusz
As we are about to embark on our SCP journey, and using both draw.io within Confluence and Visio, I would very much support a more "importable" icon/shape set. It would be great to have the powerpoint deck as the design guide - but be able to use a more appropriate diagramming tool.
As much as powerpoint can be made to work as a diagramming tool, it is nowhere near as capable in terms of efficiency and finesse as something like Visio or draw.io
Hi Bertram,
I could not find an image (i.e. logo) for BW4/HANA in v06. Please let me know if I'm missing something. There are logos for many other products, but not BW4.
Thanks,
Mike
Hallo Mike,
we do not have such logos for all SAP Products. I try to add all existing SAP product logos to the solution diagram guidelines PPTX deck. For example there is a new logo for "SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud" I'll add to the next public guideline version. To reflect SAP BW4/HANA in your solution diagram without having a logo in place I recommend to use a normal text element instead, ideally with font "Benton Sans Bold", font size 14 and black color.
Regards, Bertram Ganz, SAP Cloud Platform PM
Hi Bertram, really helpful for technical diagrams, thanks! Is there also a way to get the colorful icons that SAP uses for marketing documents? As seen here: https://www.sap.com/community/topics/crm.html
That would be really helpful for sales & marketing documents.
Thanks,Stephan
Hi Stephan, you refer to the so-called SAP banded-color icons or pictograms that are broadly used in SAP collaterals (web pages, documents etc.) to reflect the SAP brand. These pictograms are not available for public reuse by non-SAP people. Best regards, Bertram Ganz
Hi Bertram,
thank you for your feedback, even though I had hoped for a different answer.
Best Regards, Stephan
Dear Bertram,
First off: Thanks a ton! Sharing this library with the partner / customer world is a great step!
Since it seems that SAP is not really making a leap towards integrating the elements into something like draw.io, what about providing the community with the necessary content to do it themselves? If the elements were available in raw SVG, I'm quite sure there would be a willingness to collaborate on an open source draw.io library.
What do you think about that?
Cheers,
Oliver
Hallo Oliver,
thank You for Your "thanks a ton" on our SAP Cloud Platform solution diagram guidelines. Indeed the integration of our SAP Cloud Platform service/other icon sets into third-party diagramming tools is still pending. We are currently updating the next version v09 guidelines slide deck (planned for end of Feburary) that's based on the new Fiori 3 (QUARTZ) design soon being applied to the SAP Cloud Platform cockpit. As this new design (mainly a slightly changed color palette) affects all service icons we decided to replace them (incl. the grey "other" icons like "application", "user" etc.) with SVG-objects instead of pasting normal image objects inside the MS PowerPoint slide deck. Consequently we are much closer to publish all SAP Cloud Platform service icons as ZIP-file with SVGs inside. Before doing this we first need to check the legal implications including the terms of use and support issues. That's the way to go and the next milestone before reaching a deeper, out-of-the-box integration with third-party tools like draw.io (that would also need the icons in SVG format). That's actually not a commitment but the future direction that's aiming to create SAP Cloud Platform solution diagrams more easily.
Best regards, Bertram
Bertram, this sounds like a great move!
I was surprised to see the icons currently not being SVGs but high resolution PNGs - well, that explains the file size of the presentation 😉
Once you figured the legal stuff, you may want to consider placing them in a public repository on Github - with the license included. Then, you can wait for what the community does to it.
You could also leverage PRs to incrementally improve integration without doing everything by yourself...
Dear Mr. Ganz,
Is there any planned or upcoming icons / stencils for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud? We have started to build architectural diagrams but I don't seem to be able to find DWC icons in the (otherwise) brilliant power point.
Now that I am at it, I wanted to thank you and your team, all these efforts you do makes our lives as architects much easier, and we can produce better and more streamlined designs.
Kind Regards,
Soren
Hi Bertram,
Is there any planned or upcoming icons / stencils for the SCP rebranding (BTP)?
Regards,
Fabiano Rosa
Hey Bertram,
Has there been any progress on the creation of Visio stencils using these icon sets? Complex solution diagramming in PowerPoint is not something we'd want to go back to.
Kind regards,
Tom
No. Not even by this date unfortunately.
Regards,
Bogdan
Hey Bertram, thanks for this, has there been any progress on the creation of Visio stencils? Also it would be great to get working examples in both Visio and Draw.io if possible.
Many thanks
Daniel
Hey Bertram, any progress for Visio stencils/icons? Also example diagrams in both Draw.io and Visio would be beneficial to expedite the process. Thanks Daniel
Hi Bertram,
Great to see you here!
I am now currently in the Customer Success team for BTP in APJ, where I need to draw diagrams regarding BTP services.
Just amazing seeing your article.
Best regards,
Alex
Hi There, I found this while trying to find current SAP BTP icons.
I clicked through the link provided but they have not been updated yet in 2022? While there be updated icons?
Hi Cailin,
New updates will be published soon. Due to the overall situation we experienced a delay in the availability of the icons.
This said we now have a set of new quality icons that follow the guidelines and after some final testing hope to be able to publish them during July / early August.
Best regards,
Carsten
Hi, The wiki page link seems to be broken..
It seems also to me...
Bertram Ganz. could you please check? Looks like this here is broken: SAP Business Technology Platform Solution Diagrams & Icons
Hi,
We are working on making the Solution Diagrams & Icons even more useful than before.
Unfortunately the Wiki page was removed to early and we will provide you with an update soon.
Until then please find:
The Icons: here
Terms of use: here
Presentation: here
Best regards,
Carsten Bönnen
Bertram Ganz. - This link is not working https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/x/shl7H
Hi,
We are working on making the Solution Diagrams & Icons even more useful than before.
Unfortunately the Wiki page was removed to early and we will provide you with an update soon.
Until then please find:
The Icons: here
Terms of use: here
Presentation: here
Best regards,
Carsten Bönnen
Hi Carsten Boennen,
Thanks a lot for the updated links. I suggest to also edit the original blog post and reference these links to make it easier to find the most up to date resources.
BR, Nico
H Carsten Boennen,
any update on the new experience?
Thanks!
Robin
Hi Robin,
We are in the middle of the process to make the icons available as open source and thus allow a much broader use of the iconography. This said we are right now finalizing the set of icons and hope to be able to provide them asap.
Best regards,
Carsten
Hi Carsten,
hope you are also in exchange with Geert-Jan Klaps who created Business Technology Platform solution diagrams and icons taken to the next level.
Best Regards
Gregor
Hi Gregor,
Thanks for the reminder. Right now we are working on getting the icons out there, but as part of the overall process we will get in touch too.
Best,
Carsten
Hi all,
Unfortunately we are not spared from the latest sick wave which leads to further delay in our plans for the solution diagrams iconography. We are working as fast as possible to get them out there.
Until then I updated the links to the original documents:
Iconography
Terms of Use
Guidelines
Best regards,
Carsten
Any update? Will the icons also be usable in Microsoft Visio?
Hello,
can you please provide the pptx template again?
The link you mentioned is no longer valid.
Thank you and regards
Max
Updated Links:
Icongraphy
Guidelines
Terms of Use
Hello
Was curious to know if a new home has not been found for official icons / best practice btp solution designs please?
Thanks in advance
Mike