Over the last couple of months I participated in the openSAP ‘Build Your Own SAP Fiori App in the Cloud – 2016 Edition’ on-line training. Reason to participate was to increase my practical knowledge on Fiori development, now that we intend to rebuild our business portal utilizing Fiori Launchpad and UI-technology. Although I already have practical SAP Fiori + Gateway experience in my role of solution architect for an App build for a large Dutch bank – this App even won the Bronze SAP Quality Award 2015 in the category ‘Innovation’ -, I wanted to renew my knowledge with the latest SAPUI5 technology state and also the tools that SAP now delivers. The tools encompass the full spectra, from design [SAP Splash and BUILD], to development [SAP Web IDE]
The structure of the openSAP training is first lectures explaining about the why and concepts of Fiori, Design Thinking approach applied for custom Fiori development, and how-to design and develop a custom Fiori App. A central element of the training is, as the title already states, to design and develop an own Fiori App. Applying the Design Thinking approach, and the tools that SAP provides. The first assignment was to design the App, both functional as visual specification – preferable via SAP BUILD. And the final assignment was to develop it as a real functioning Fiori App, build with SAPUI5 framework within SAP Web IDE.
The App I came up with is ‘ProcessMonitor’. Basically it serves as a headlights dashboard to watch the (non)progress of business processes that you have a stake in. Typical these are the processes that you’ve started, and await on their completion.
Design - mockups
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Develop - App | |
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A nice element of the course is mutual peer-reviewing. Each participant is requested to review at minimal the submissions of 5 of your peer participants. And it also implies that your own submitted work will be reviewed by at minimal 5 of your co—participants. I was pleasant surprised to hear that my Develop Challenge submission was flagged as extraordinary by one of my peer reviewers. Acknowledgement and recognition by your peers is one of the best there is…
And the App can be further extended on. A next useful functional addition to the App is the ability to monitor the (non)progress of projects in which you are not yourself direct involved, but still have a stake or even merely are interested in it’s completion. The idea here is that you can request a list of running processes – naturally complying to business authorization rules, you thus only can see the processes that you given your business role are allowed to see. And select from the list the process(es) that you want to ‘follow’. An example would be to 'follow' the progress of a budget approval process in your company that concerns a project you like to participate in.
