Low-code platform gives business users access to technology.
SAP is dropping a ton of news during their TechEd user conference as they work to give business users access to the SAP Business Technology Platform. Here are a few of the highlights:
Unleashing Business Expertise
SAP Build is a unified, low-code solution to empower business users of all skill levels to create and augment enterprise apps, automate processes, and design business sites with drag-and-drop simplicity. It offers:
A unified development experience with three previously separate solutions: 1) The SAP AppGyver® development environment (now called the SAP Build Apps development environment). 2) The SAP Process Automation solution (now called the SAP Build Process Automation solution). 3) The SAP Work Zone (now called the SAP Build Work Zone solution) – into a unified development environment. In addition to providing unified lifecycle management, security, and governance capabilities, the new development experience enables sharing of reusable application components, which helps reduce costs and accelerate development.
Visual cloud functions make it easy for users to build serverless application business logic and data models visually without administrating underlying data.
Continuous process monitoring and automation give business experts an X-ray vision of their processes, including potential bottlenecks, root-cause analysis, and suggestions for improvement based on industry benchmarks and best practices. New integration between the SAP Signavio Process Intelligence solution and SAP Build gives users over 135 automation recommendations based on process analysis, lets users monitor and optimize processes continually, and automatically runs automation in the SAP Build Process Automation solution as needed. SAP Build Process Automation includes built-in document extraction AI capabilities that have been fine-tuned for common business documents. Users can now also automate Google Workspace applications and use Google Vertex AI to automatically transcribe handwritten documents in SAP Build Process Automation.
Simplified business site development via a unified low-code development solution. SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition, now in beta, is the next version of SAP Launchpad and includes new low-code capabilities for creating custom pages and user interface (UI) cards to organize related information visually. SAP Build Work Zone, the advanced edition, is generally available today. The new SAP Start solution <crosslink to SAP Start news item>, the central Web-native entry point provided by SAP free of charge and out-of-the-box with all cloud solutions from SAP, can also be customized by using SAP Build Work Zone.
Improved collaboration between business and development teams. Developers’ complex custom code can be available for business teams to use easily and intuitively.
SAP application integration enables connections to and uses data from SAP and third-party applications without losing business context and meaning. Furthermore, SAP Build Apps is embedded directly into the SAP Service Cloud solution, allowing all users to build custom user interfaces that extend the capabilities of SAP Service Cloud.
SAP is also launching the SAP Builders program to help customers ramp up quickly on SAP Build and connect with their peers. The program facilitates learning with interactive hands-on sessions and hackathons and gives SAP and community experts a forum to share best practices.
Enabling flexibility for professional developers
Innovations in open-source technologies, user experience, and more support professional developers in their application development work by leveraging open-source technologies and frameworks of their choice. Innovation areas include:
Integrated development environment with Visual Studio code editor, which lets developers easily add open-source tools to support SAP software–oriented application development. The new integration of SAP Business API Hub into SAP Business Application Studio also makes it easier for developers to extend SAP applications and integrate them with third-party systems.
User experience via SAP Web Components is a new approach to enabling professional developers to provide enterprise-ready, SAP-supported UI components using any Web UI framework. These components give developers a consistent user experience across the full SAP product portfolio, regardless of the underlying technology. Additionally, SAP Mobile Services now supports new theming features from the SAP Fiori® user experience to help deliver engaging user experiences.
Integration between the SAP Document Management service and Google Workspace means developers can use Google Drive for content management.
Frameworks: Projects based on SAP Cloud Application Programming Model can now be developed on SAP BTP, Kyma runtime. Kyma cloud-native runtime – built on top of the open-source system Kubernetes – gives developers tools to extend, operate, and scale cloud applications. We are also adding multi-tenancy capabilities in the SAP Cloud Application Programming model, which will help partners scale their applications to multiple customers more easily.
Expanded feature set and new APIs for mobile development on iOS
The SAP BTP SDK for iOS is the premier method for creating secure, scalable, high-performance native apps that take advantage of powerful Apple hardware and software including the camera, location management, and on-device machine learning.
SAP BTP has helped Apple teams experience incredible gains in development efficiency, app performance, and scalability. With Swift UI and SAP BTP SDK for iOS, Apple built apps 40% faster than before, developing and deploying them to employees in as little as six weeks, and supporting tens of thousands of business users, while at the same time ensuring privacy and security at every point.
This year, SAP is introducing even more capabilities for SAP BTP SDK for iOS, including concurrency support for Swift, new APIs for Apple Watch and augmented reality, and a whole new visual language, theming capabilities, and accessibility improvements.
New developer extensibility for SAP S/4HANA Cloud
SAP now offers developer extensibility in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, ABAP environment, so professional developers can customize their environment to suit their needs. This capability provides unique benefits to customers running SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition: SAP S/4HANA Cloud, ABAP environment, now allows ABAP custom code, enabling developers to personalize the solution while benefiting from running standard processes that can be adopted rapidly.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition: SAP S/4HANA Cloud, ABAP environment, gives customers the option to build custom extensions within the environment of their SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, without impacting their ability to upgrade and do maintenance flexibly. This means customers can build custom ABAP codes close to their ERP system, without adding additional modifications.
Customers using SAP S/4HANA Cloud, ABAP environment, can choose to stay within the classic extension method or convert successively to this new approach.