Enhance the Digital Workplace Experience using SAP Work Zone – Understanding the Admin Role concepts

This blog series will cover some of the key concepts of SAP Work Zone and will also hep you familiarize with the steps required to setup SAP Work Zone and integrate it with UI Cards and applications.

In this blog post, I will be sharing my experience around the role concepts in SAP Work Zone.

SAP Work Zone can be managed and maintained by different administrators within an organization.There are several administrator types which are made available with different level of access.

You will be able to find all the different type of admin roles in the SAP Help documentation. Here is an extract of the same.

Company Administrator : Access full range of capabilities with the administration console and configure SAP Work Zone according to organization need.

Area Administrator: Manage area content, collaborates within the designated area and has a smaller but significant subset of company administrator capabilities.

Think of areas as departments within your organization where you would like to have an admin to manage the users and contents within the area.  You can have additional pages within the Home tab for each area (which will be demonstrated in this blog post) as well have widgets/UI Cards specific to the area.

Support Administrator: Access a subset of functionality available to company administrators to support them and lessen their workload.

Apart from these Admin roles, there is also Page content Administrator who can only modify page contents either at the Company level or at the Area level.

Ensure you have the right groups assigned to your users in your Identity Provider as they will be mapped to the SAP BTP Role Collections when the users logons into SAP Work Zone. More info in SAP Help documentation.

For this blog post, I have created several personas which I will be using here to demonstrate how the role concepts work.

When setting up SAP Work Zone, you will define all your users in your Identity Provider and replicate them to SAP Work Zone as user. The below image is from the administration console of SAP Work Zone. I have logged in as a company admin to view the settings. The company admin can manually change the user type to a Support admin or a Page Content Admin using the edit options in the below screen.

Let me show you how to you setup your Home page (at company level) which will show up to all the users. Navigate to the “Area & Workspace configuration” and click on the “Manage Home Page” button in the Home page menu.

You will be presented with an option to customize the home page as well as add additional tabs and re-arrange the tabs. On the right hand side, you will have the options to edit the page and customize the layout. I have added a Welcome tab to provide more info on SAP Business Technology Platform. Using this approach, you can add several tabs under the Home menu which will showup to all the users.

I have created two Administrative areas – One for Finance and another for HR.

I can switch to the Finance admin area and add members to it. For this example, I have the below three users assigned.

As mentioned above, the Area admin can maintain members, themes and UI Cards specific to the area. Whereas the Page Content admin can change page contents (only those associated with this area). I have also added an end user called Jack within the Finance area.

Similarly, I have a HR Administrative Area with 3 users – Area Admin, Page Content Admin, Jack (end user)

Before showcasing how the Area concept works, let me show you how Page Content admin & Support admin function.

When I login as a Page Content Admin, you will see that this user gets to see all the tabs defined under the Home page. This user also has access to edit and customize the home page (which will be visible to users across the company). The Page content admin has no access to Administration console.

When I login as a Support Admin, they get to do almost everything as a page content admin and have access to the administration console (as shown below)

As you can see, the Support Admin has a subset of Company Admin capabilities

When I login as a Finance Area Admin, I get to see the same home page as well as the ability to switch the page view for Finance users and add additional tabs.

Just like editing the home menu, I now have options to add additional tabs and re-arrange them. For this demo, I have added a tab called “Finance – Procurement Tasks” and added UI Cards related to this page.

The Finance Area admin also has access to the admin console to manage the configurations specific to the area.

When I login as a Finance Content User (who has page content Admin role), notice that this user automatically gets the procurement tasks tab in the Home menu and has the options to only customize this tab. This user will not have any administrative rights.

I have used the same approach as a HR Area Admin user and created a Home page tab called “HR – Self Service Info”.

This tab should be visible to any user who is also a member of the HR Admin area.

When I login as Jack who is an end user who would generally be added to different areas, I get to see the contents of both Finance & HR (as Jack is a member of both these areas). Jack will not have access to customize these pages and would only be able to consume the contents.

I hope this blog post helped you to understand how you can have contents specific to the roles/areas which you can setup within SAP Work Zone.