1. Introduction

Who doesn’t know it…as an employee you probably also start your day at work with opening several applications, several browsers and several tabs to get the information that you need to fulfil your tasks. This cost yourself time, your employer money and is at the end not really satisfying in an end-user experience. These challenges can be solved, and productivity can be increased by providing an integrated digital workplace across multiple touch points – for example with SAP Work Zone (for HR). To provide this central entry point for employees it is crucial to integrate not only SAP software but also 3^rd party software like for example ServiceNow.

Therefore in this blogpost I want to show you how to integrate ServiceNow data in Work Zone (for HR) by using Open Connectors and Business Application Studio without any need of programing skills.

2. Concept of UI Integration Cards:

One way how to integrate these 3^rd party data to Work Zone (for HR) can be by leveraging UI Integration Cards. Integration cards present a new means to expose application content to the end user in a unified way. Depending on the use cases, cards can be easily embedded in a host environment, such as application, dashboard, or any HTML page. A variety of card types can be configured by a simple JSON configuration (schema) without the need to write code for UI rendering. In this way, even users without programming skills are being enabled to create new cards according to their special needs.

Note: If you want to learn more about UI Integration Cards in general please visit the following website:
https://ui5.sap.com/test-resources/sap/ui/integration/demokit/cardExplorer/webapp/index.html

The following simplified integration architecture shows you that data from various systems can be integrated via UI Integration Cards – such as SAP and Non-SAP as well as Cloud and On-Prem backend systems.

Now lets start with our own mission today and integrate ServiceNow data in SAP Work Zone (for HR). For this you should fulfil the following prerequisites:

3. Prerequisites

• SAP Cloud Platform Trial (we will use here Business Application Studio and Cloud Platform Integration)
  https://developers.sap.com/tutorials/hcp-create-trial-account.html
  • Business Application Studio (Trial)
    https://blogs.sap.com/2020/03/06/sap-business-application-studio-trial-in-sap-cloud-platform-assigning-roles/
  • Cloud Platform Integration (Trial, only Open Connectors will be used in here)
    https://blogs.sap.com/2020/08/07/sap-cloud-platform-integration-suite-trial-is-now-available/
• ServiceNow Trial
  https://developer.servicenow.com/dev.do#!/home

4. Create a ServiceNow Instance in Open Connectors

What are we doing now and why?  As a first step we need to establish a connection between our SNOW instance and Open Connectors to create the API documentation that we need later in Business Application Studio.

Open the Integration Suite from your SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit:

Within your Cloud Platform Integration Cockpit you will find the capability to extend Non-SAP Connectivity – namely the Open Connectors:

You accessed now your Open Connector Trial through Cloud Platform Integration. Browse in the connectors and choose “ServiceNow” from the catalogue. When hovering over the connector select “Authenticate”:

Enter the credentials of your Service Now instance / subdomain that you want to connect to:

Note: username and password is relating to your specific subdomain and not to your general trial account of SNOW

Go to the API Docs of your created SNOW instance and choose the request method you want to use. In my case the Get request:

After you hit the “try it out” button for the specific get request I mentioned above you will find the following response fields.

For now this is all we need to do on Open Connectors side. Go to part 2 of the blogpost to see how we will use these information to create a new UI Integration Cards that connects live to SNOW.

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Please note that this blog was published prior to the re-branding related to SAP Build portfolio, which was announced at SAP TechEd 2022. SAP Launchpad service and SAP Work Zone come together under the SAP Build Work Zone brand, with two editions: standard edition (formerly SAP Launchpad service) and advanced edition (formerly SAP Work Zone).

You can learn more in this announcement blog post: SAP Build Capabilities Explained | SAP TechEd | SAP News Center

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