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Darius
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert


Running the first SAP Build Apps for SAP Business One Hands-On in Walldorf in November 2022


 

Story Line:

  1. About SAP Business One and me

  2. What is SAP Build Apps

  3. What do I need to know if I want to connect SAP Business One ERP?

  4. What commercialization options are available

  5. What are the deployment options


 

About SAP Business One and me

Hi, my name is Darius Heydarian, I’m part of the Partner Solution Adoption Core SME team and I have been working for SAP since 2006 and dedicated my career to SAP Business One since then.

SAP Business One is a hidden champion at SAP, it serves the small to medium sized businesses as a single, affordable enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution from accounting and financials, purchasing, inventory, sales and customer relationships to reporting and analytics. It can be implemented on-premise or hosted on Windows or Linux and has a native windows client and a web client, based on SAP Fiori design principles and encapsulates SAP Business One core processes and business logic, which runs on almost any device.

My role: SME Global Content Strategy is focusing on partner enablement and attached pre-sales activities, ensuring that the SAP Business One ecosystem stays current and self-sufficient. I kicked-off the SAP Business One Community back in 2007 and had the opportunity to learn the technical implementation of SAP Business One. It allowed me to publish a solution template in the SAP Cloud Appliance Library, where you can deploy SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA for evaluation, demo and development for less than $1 per hour. As of 2019, the SME Innovation Program has been part of my daily life and has let me support partners in turning their customers into intelligent enterprises by consuming web services, running side-by-side with the SAP Business One core functionalities to fulfil the customer requirements of today.

With more than a million end-users, 75.000 customers and 900 partners there’s a huge ecosystem behind the solution which gets access to the latest SAP innovations, intelligent services and tools offered by the SAP Business Technology Platform.

Currently you are hearing a lot on SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP Build Apps, let me explain the hype and how SAP Build Apps and SAP Business One fit together.

What is SAP Build Apps

SAP Build Apps, the evolution of SAP AppGyver for enterprise is together with the free AppGyver Community Edition, a no-code / low-code tool which allows to develop standalone web or mobile apps by simply using drag and drop of building blocks to fulfill your customers requirements like playing LEGO. The development can be done by so called citizen developers, people which have a basic technical understanding, like writing simple SQL queries or formulas in Microsoft Excel will qualify. The outcome is astonishing and lets real (professional) developers baffle. As the development takes less time, efforts, and manpower.

What do I need to know if I want to connect SAP Business One ERP?

For SAP Business One partners there are only a few starting points and requirements necessary to understand, to successfully establish a connection to the SAP Business One Service Layer.

Exercise Prerequisites:

* The public demo environment, which is part of the Intelligent Automation OpenSAP course, will be sunset end of Q2 2023. Please connect to your own demo environment as of then.

Generic Prerequisites:

  • Database name must have capital letters only in SQL/HANA, e.g. SBODEMOUS, not SBODemoUS

  • CA trusted SSL certificate implemented with SAP Business One Service Layer /SLD*


* workaround for testing/development is to trust a self-signed certificate manually on the machine SAP Build Apps/ AppGyver is used.

  • Configure the following in the Service Layer Controller: https://<sld>:40000/ServiceLayerController/

    • CORS enabled with * wildcard as allowed origins in the Service Layer
      The wildcard can be replaced by the final domain name, when the app is being hosted

    • Add authorization in Cors Allowed Headers (required for low-code)





 

When setting up the data connection to SAP Business One, you need to select Basic authentication as Authentication Type and provide the following string construct as Username, like:
{"UserName": "manager", "CompanyDB": "SBODEMOUS"}

As Base API URL enter the service layer address, like: https://opensap.sapbusinessonecloud.com:50000/b1s/v2


As a last requirement, to allow SAP Business One user specific authentication, you need to assign this construct of username and database to the default authentication screen of SAP Build Apps


Get the full instructions in the exercises for a self-paced training or attend the 3 hours on-site hands-on workshop during the 2023 SAP Partner Summits for SME, where my colleagues and I can support you.

What are the commercialization options for partners and customers?


The SAP AppGyver Community Edition is a great starting point, it’s free to use, can be used for productive customers scenarios and has a strong community support, via the AppGyver Forum and the SAP Build Apps Community which are not subject to SLAs. Additional restrictions may apply.

The BTP version is available in the free Free-Tier Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG), Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) as well as subscription model. It provides support via SAP (for paid service plans) and has additional capabilities like using BTP Destinations as data source and supporting BTP Identity and Access Management (IAM) authentication for single-sign on (SSO). This is planned to be supported in one of the next feature pack releases of SAP Business One. An SAP Business One user can be bound to an SAP IAS User which is also used in BTP and can then authenticate to both via the same single-sign on .

Besides, the SAP Build apps standard version provides tooling to create no-code application backends using the built-in cloud functions capabilities, to craft solutions to be used standalone or together with your existing SAP Business One data models.

Developers have the benefit that SAP Build Apps projects can be shared and accessed by multiple developers.

 

What are the deployment options?

Apps developed by SAP Build Apps and the AppGyver Community Edition can be deployed as native Android or iOS mobile applications or exported as ZIP or MTAR (BTP only) to be hosted in SAP BTP Cloud Foundry or other hyperscalers and hosting providers. When hosted, the app can run side-by-side with SAP Business One and be seamlessly integrated to enhance the core functionality.


We are also looking into possible future developments to host the exported app on-premise using the SAP Business One backend via the extension manager.

Please get in touch with me by posting comments and contact: buildapps@sap.com for any inquiries supporting your SAP Build Apps journey.
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