Plug your app into B1 web-client !

Authors: Gianluigi Bagnoli, Yatsea Li

We all know that SAP Business One is a very successful ERP for the SMBs. As of today, more than 65K customers trust it to run all the aspects of their own business, from core financial, sales, purchasing, warehouses, customer relationship management, production, and so on. Besides, SAP Business One is a very powerful platform that SAP partners leverage to extend it with solutions, solutions, solutions.

These days the word “solution” implicitly means “intelligent solution” – which in more down-to-earth words means “a-bunch-of-code-running-somewhere-on-the-web-providing-intelligent-services-to-customers”. That can be a predictive algorithm that correlates the time of delivery of a parcel with weather forecast and traffic condition, or a blockchain keeping track of the movements of items, or an image-recognition algorithm that recommends were to pick grapes in a vineyards.

We have plenty of real-world examples like that, but the common point that all this code shares is that at the end of their intelligent business process they need to expose some choice or analysis or suggestion to a user. And of course from a user point of view it’s much better to see this in the same SAP Business One environment that they use daily with a consistent and coherent user interface.

Until today, that was done by using the very rich SAP Business One desktop, plugging into a Form the UX of the intelligent solution. Basically the user could see seamlessly integrated SAP Business One views with the solution view. But you may ask yourself, what about now that SAP is adding a new web-client to the old good desktop ? Will partners still be able to leverage the very famous loosely-coupled approach to build solutions and integrate them into SAP Business One user experience ?

As you can imagine the answer is yes, and this integration works around the same principles as of today.

• There’s an iceberg of code running somewhere in the web, on a separate cloud, doing very cool processing to extract valuable information out of the field.
• The tip of this iceberg is a web app that expose this information to the final user.
• This web app is integrated into the SAP Business One web client in a Tile inside the web-client itself. That brings together the simplicity and clarity of the loosely-coupled approach together with the need to integrate the two different UX in a single UX.

Let’s see a preview on how that will look like. In this short video you can see a Fiori-based app running on SAP Cloud Platform. You can see the app first accessed standalone and then integrated into SAP Business One web-client. As both web-client and the app have a Fiori look-and-feel and that provides a seamless integration between

Keep in mind that this is just a preview of what will come soon in SAP Business One. If you want to know more about it please feel free to join the SMB Innovation Summits where we will show how it’s done.

See you all soon !