SAP S/4HANA content exposure and SAP Fiori launchpad content manager enhancements now also available with SAP Fiori front-end server 6.0

With the release of SP04 of the SAP Fiori front-end server 6.0, many interesting functions have been made available which before had only been available with SAP Fiori front-end server 2020 initial shipment and FPS01. Among those functions are improvements to the SAP Fiori launchpad content manager as well as the service to expose launchpad content on ABAP to the SAP Launchpad service on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP).

1. Exposure of Launchpad content

The SAP Launchpad service (on SAP BTP) increases user’s productivity and efficiency by enabling organizations to establish a central point of access to SAP, custom-build and third-party applications and extensions. Please see Thomas Hensel’s blog post for more details. Applications from solutions as SAP S/4HANA or the SAP Business Suite can be integrated, either manually or via content federation. With content federation, the so-called content providers expose their business content and role structures to the central Launchpad, which will make the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the content administrator on the SAP BTP side much more efficient.

With SP04, the SAP Fiori front-end server 6.0 now also supports the exposure of launchpad content so that it than be integrated into the SAP Launchpad service via content federation. As a result, SAP S/4HANA systems as of release 1610 can now also serve as content providers and expose their content to the Launchpad service on SAP BTP.

For more details, see Exposing Launchpad Content in the documentation.

2. SAP Fiori launchpad content manager enhancements

The following enhancements are now also available on SAP Fiori front-end server 6.0:

On the roles tab, you can now display the assigned groups and tile/target mapping combinations for the selected role. When clicking one of the Show… buttons (Show Catalogs, Show Groups, Show Tiles/Target Mappings), the lower part of the screen will change to display either the catalogs, groups, or tile-target mapping combinations assigned to the selected role.
On the Tiles/Target Mappings tab, there is also an additional button to display the usage in the role for a selected tile/target mapping combination.
A new tool for analyzing SAP Fiori launchpad content is now available: The launchpad content aggregator allows administrators to create an aggregated view of all SAP Fiori launchpad content assigned to a set of roles and of the ICF/OData services required to run the applications. They can also export the aggregated information to Excel for easier analysis. The launchpad content aggregator can be accessed directly from the content manager via GoTo > Launchpad Content Aggregator.

For more detailed information, please check out my blog post describing these new functions when they were released with SP01 of SAP Fiori front-end server 2020.

3. New app support plug-in tool

This new plug-in tool helps you to troubleshoot authorization issues and some configuration errors of applications running in the SAP Fiori launchpad. Once the plug-in is set up for a user, they get an additional entry App Support in their user actions menu, when an application is open. This entry enables them to access detailed app information and check for issues. For more details, please see Tobias Moessle’s great blog post.