My Experience with Fiori Launchpad Content Manager – The after story of Fiori Rapid Activation

After my Blog post on My Experience with Rapid Activation for Fiori in S/4 HANA 1809 FPS 02, I got a lot of questions from fellow Fiori practitioners.

The most common of them was, ‘How can we specify, that only selective Fiori apps will be available in the Fiori launchpad?‘

Well this is a valid question, because with Rapid activation, we activate all the apps linked to a Business role. Hence if we choose approx. 20 Business roles, then we would end up with around 300 apps. Off-course all the apps are not always required.

Here comes the Fiori Launchpad Content Manager tool, as a savior.

I first read about this tool from the wonderful blog posts of  Sibylle Brehm  and the LinkedIn posts from Jocelyn Dart.

(Psst… If you think this is going to replace Fiori Launchpad Designer, then you are not the only one. )

In this post I would like to share my experience with this tool.

The Transaction

The Content manager is accessible from the transaction, /UI2/FLPCM_CUST and /UI2/FLPCM_CONF for customization and configuration layer respectively.(Similar to launchpad Designer)

Preparing a Custom Catalog

After I activated approximately 500 odd applications in my system, I had to filter out the access for the end user. Hence out of principle I had to create custom catalogs and roles.

Well we still need to create PFCG roles like the old process.

But now we can efficiently and quickly create a custom catalog suitable for our Fiori needs,

We can also create a blank custom catalog and then add references of all the required tiles one by one, just like in the launchpad Designer.

But also in this tool, we can create a copy of a standard catalog. (That’s the path I took.)

We just need to put the name of the standard catalog in the Search field (in this case we use, SAP_PS_BC_PROJ_FIN_CONTRL)

Click on the copy button, and put a Z name to the new custom catalog.

This activity will be recorded in a customizing Transport Request.

Now we have a custom catalog with all the Tiles and target mappings from the standard catalog.

Now we need to do a simple pick and choose exercise. 🙂

(But Before you indulge in this exercise, please read the important advisory from Jocelyn, in the comment section of this blog.)

We need to select the application Tiles which are NOT required for your project, and then click on the ‘Remove Tiles/Target Mappings’ button.

Thus at the end of this Exercise you have a custom catalog with only the required application Tiles for your project.

Checking Services

Now that we have our custom catalog, we should check if all the services for the content applications are successfully activated in the system.

This can also be easily achieved by simply clicking a button. 🙂

To perform a complete checkup, select the option ‘Check Services for all Objects’.

The result of the check, will be displayed in the column ‘Service Activation Status’.

We can offcourse set a filter on the Service Activation Status column, to filter out the list of failed services Applications, and then investigate the reason for their failure separately.

OData service Failure

As I said in my previous blog, DO NOT PANIC!! when you see the color Red . 

In most cases, you will successfully be able to activate these services manually.

For more detailed investigation steps for OData Service failure, you can refer to my previous blog.

Catalog Assignment

When we have an all green status for all application Tiles in our custom catalog, Its time to assign it to a role.

This part is exactly the same as before.

We need to go to the transaction PFCG, 

Open the Z role and add the custom catalog to the Role Menu of the Role.

Save the role, and then generate the authorization profile.

While generating the auth profile for the custom role, a wizard automatically pops up, where the respective authorizations for the relevant authorization object’s org level of the added catalog should be provided.

And that’s it!!

We should now assign this custom role to the end user, and therefore they will get access to only some filtered apps. (And No one’s even gonna know you activated a lot more than meets the eye! 😉 )

Useful Tips and Tricks

At some point of your project, you might be asked questions such as,

1. How many Apps Do we Have in the system?
2. Which catalog is assigned to which role?
3. What about Custom roles?

These can be answered efficiently through FLPCM.

How many Apps Do we Have in the system?

In the Content Manager, we need to go to the Tiles and Target Mappings tab, and Check service activation for all objects, as described before.

Then add the following filters,

‘Tile/Target Mapping Matching Text’  as ‘Tile + TM’

‘Service Activation’ as Green

This would generate all objects that has a Tile and Target mapping and have a successfully activated service.

This would return the list of all successfully activated apps in the system.

This list can also be exported in a xlsx file,

Which catalog is assigned to which role?

This can also be easily answered in the content manager.

Simply in the Catalog tab, we need to select the catalog for which we need this answer, and then click on the button ‘Show usage in Roles’

This would show all the roles which contain this catalog.

These features also comes handy during error investigation.

To learn about some more cool features of the content manager, refer to the blog by Sibylle Brehm

What about custom roles?

A common question which was asked to me by my colleagues who also tried out rapid activation was,

‘Rapid Content Activation can activate services for all standard business roles. But what about our custom roles?‘

Thanks to Jocelyn’s comment on my blog, I came across a new tasklist called SAP_FIORI_FCM_CONTENT_ACTIVATION

This tasklist is delivered with the SAP Note 2813396 (It is also advisable to install the correction Note 2857546 along with it).

When executed from STC01, this tasklist looks a lot similar to the SAP_FIORI_CONTENT_ACTIVATION tasklist.

The Difference is that it enables you to select ‘Z’ roles created in the system to activate all the related services.

This is a really powerful tool, and proves really useful during initial configuration of a Fiori landscape.

My Inference

From my experience with both the Launchpad Designer and the Content Manager, I drew out the following conclusion.

1. The performance of Content Manager is much robust and stable as compared to that of Launchpad Designer. (I think we have all been annoyed when it took a while for the Catalog list to appear, while creating a Tile reference in the Launchpad Designer. 😉 And impatient developers like me, would end up clicking on a different catalog than required.)
2. I still feel that the look of Launchpad Designer is more modern and Fiori like, also since you can access it from your browser.
3. Unfortunately we still cant create custom Groups in the Content Manager, hence Launchpad Designer is still the only option here.

But Overall, with the modern tools like Rapid activation for Fiori and the Fiori Launchpad Content Manager, the total effort required for a Fiori landscape setup has reduced significantly, and its a lot more FUN 🙂