SAP Mobile Start: Use the Business Info Widget to monitor your business directly from home screen

Hey everyone,

SAP Mobile Start is the native entry point to SAP universe. It gives you access to a site defined on the SAP Launchpad Service of the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) and provides a seamless mobile experience by integrating with device features like widgets. In this blog, I would like to describe how to use those widgets and keep track of your business directly from the device home screen!

To make use of widgets you need to meet the following prerequisites:

• Fully configured site in SAP Launchpad Service on BTP
• Enable the feature flag for Widgets in Mobile Services (see Step 0.)
• At least one monitoring tile deployed and working on this site
• iPhone / iPad with SAP Mobile Start app connected to this site

Once these prerequisites are met, you can proceed with the following steps to configure your widget.

0. (Prerequisite) Enable the “GlobalWidgets” feature flag within SAP Mobile Services

To allow or prevent users from adding widgets to their home screen, there is an feature flag within Mobile Services that can be toggled by admins. For example an admin could prevent users from showing critical business information (from Business Info Widgets) directly on their home screen.

By default this flag is disabled. To make use of SAP Mobile Start’s powerful Widget functionality you will need to activate it. For that, access the SAP Mobile Services of your SAP BTP Subaccount.

To access the SAP Mobile Services, you will require the MobileTenantAdmin role collection. (You should have created that during your first setup – the collection consist of the MobileAdmin role that should be available in your subaccount).
Once you have the role access SAP Mobile Services by composing the URL like this:

<subdomain>.m.launchpad.cfapps.<region>.hana.ondemand.com/mobileservices/Admin/index.html

The easiest way is to do it is to take the URL of the Site Manager as a basis.

Within SAP Mobile Services Navigate to the “Mobile Settings Exchange”, scroll down a bit to the feature flag section and press the toggle switch for the GlobalWidgets. Don’t forget to save your changes.

1. Make sure you have set up a monitoring tile

Open the SAP Mobile Start app on your mobile device and check if you can see at least one monitoring tile on the Application tab. The most common example would be the tile for the My Inbox app, which shows the count of tasks:

Example of monitoring tile in SAP Mobile Start

NOTE:

It’s currently a restriction of SAP Mobile Start, that monitoring tiles only support the retrieval of numbers with data that returns a simple count. This could lead to issues if your data source returns e.g. an XML-Object instead of a simple count.

See this SAP Note on current SAP Mobile Start restrictions.

2. Add an SAP Mobile Start widget to your home screen

The widgets delivered by SAP Mobile Start can be added via the default widget options of your operating system. For further reference see these support pages on how to add widgets:

• For iOS devices on iPhone and iPad.
• For Android devices here.

Additionally find the instructions below:

• Long press on an empty space of your home screen and wait for the edit mode to become active.
  • IOS: You should now see a “+” icon at the top-left. Click on it to get into the widget selection. (Note: on iPad widgets can only be added to the widget section on the very left home screen)
  • ANDROID: You will see a context menu coming up. Press Widgets to get to the widget selection:
    
• Search for “Start” and select the right entry to see the different widget options.
  (Note: You don’t see Start in the widget selection if no site is registered)
• Currently there are two different widget-types available:
  • the Business Info Widget to mimic your monitoring tiles
  • and News Widgets available four different sizes
• For our purpose of making dynamic business information available, make sure to select the Business Info Widget. On iOS press Add Widget, on Android long press the Business Info Widget preview and drag it to your home screen.

  

Note that the tile shown in the selection is just a sample, you will be able to configure it with your own business app in the following step.

3. Configure Widget with your Business App

After Widget selection you need to select a business app as data source.

While on iOS the widget will just select and show an availble monitoring tile of your Site by default, on Android you will be asked to select a monitoring tile right after adding it to your screen.

On both operating sytems you can change the data source anytime later by long pressing it. Select Edit Widget on iOS or the edit button on Android and select the Business App of your choice. (e.g. My Inbox). For that you will see a list of all monitoring tiles that are defined on the connected SAP Launchpad site.

4. Make use of your widgets

Now you can use the widget to monitor your monitoring tiles from your home screen. You can directly navigate to the respective business app within SAP Mobile Start by tapping on the widget. It’s also possible to add multiple widgets to monitor many tiles at once.

Thanks for reading this blog!
I hope you can use SAP Mobile Start widgets for easily monitoring your business and for quickly accessing your favorite apps. Which monitoring tile would you foresee getting used the most?