When we released the SAP Fiori Client earlier this year, many of our customers immediately started asking for the ability to customize the application for their specific environments. Because we had released the application through the public app stores, for one of the supported platforms, we lost our ability to distribute source code or provide a way for our customers to easily customize the application. This also limited our ability to secure the application using the SAP Mobile Secure offering.
In many cases, some customers wanted to be able to change the application title and/or icon, but most customers also wanted to add one or more additional plugins to the application. Enabling camera support, enabling barcode scanning, access to contacts and more became common requests.
To accommodate these requests and to make the SAP Fiori Client a much more flexible solution, we’re providing an option that will allow customers and partners to create their own, custom version of the application. Beginning with the SMP SDK SP04 release, the SAP Fiori Client capabilities will be exposed as Kapsel plugins.
Included with the SDK will be an executable script a developer can use to create the standard SAP Fiori Client application which can then be customized as needed. Once the application has been created, the developer can customize the application’s icon, title and initialization code to accommodate the specific requirements for the application. The developer can add additional plugins to the application as well, adding additional capabilities to the application using whatever plugins are needed.
The SAP Fiori Client will continue to be distributed through the app stores – it will simply be a generic implementation of the SAP Fiori Client built using the new Kapsel plugins.
