Most of us in the Fiori community are familiar, either first hand or by association, with the on-premise Fiori implementation and configuration technicalities. I myself, supported the on-premise Fiori deployment model from an end to end enablement perspective and then later focused specifically on the Fiori Launchpad. I spent a lot of time working directly with customers to better understand how they need to use SAP Fiori so that I could help cycle their feedback to our development teams to improve our products. During my time focusing on the Fiori Launchpad a common theme among customers feedback was the confusing admin configuration – in the on-premise world, admins need to be in the Launchpad designer, the GUI, looking up t-codes and role names…you get the picture. We were told that while anyone can learn anything the current process was not intuitive and one, single admin environment is preferred.
Fast forward to the SAP Fiori, Cloud Edition deployment model and you can now see the vision of an admin environment is a reality! My personal favorite part of the Fiori Cloud Edition is the Fiori Configuration Cockpit (FCC), a tool used by admins to create new and maintain existing content for sites. If you haven’t found FCC in your extended demo account or read about it somewhere in the SAP HANA Cloud Portal SCN Page (some wonderful blogs there BTW) then be prepared to experience it now!
In order to cover FCC in and end to end scenario (and not make the blog post ridiculously long) I have divided the content into 3 posts:
| Link | Content |
|---|---|
| Part 1 | FCC Introduction & App Configuration |
| Part 2 | Assignment Packages, Categories, Groups & Site Settings |
| Part 3 | Role Assignment |
Accessing FCC from your extended demo account
If you haven’t played around with the demo yet and/or signed up for an extended demo account (what are you waiting for?!?!) then reference this blog to get started. Then login to your extended demo account, select the drop down next to your username and choose Manage Site. This will launch FCC.
FCC consists of 4 groups for admins:
- Account content - anything created here will apply to all FLP sites you have created. For example, if you have created a launchpad site for internal employees and another site for contractors then the apps, assignment packages, categories and translations you configure will apply to both sites. In the context of your demo account you will only have 1 site to work with.
- Site content - anything created here will apply only to the specific FLP site you're working with. For example, if you create a group for internal employees it would only be available on the internal FLP site, not the contractor site.
- Tools - this group is self explanatory. SAP provides quick access to tools that are useful for administrators to access quickly while configuring sites. These tools include Usage analytics, UI theme designer and HCP cockpit.
- Info - Similar to the tools group SAP added an Info group with quick links to the help documentation and the apps reference library.
For more information on the FCC entities and how they relate to each other, please refer to Inbal Sabag's blog
Account Content
Create App Tile is a wizard that walks admins through 4 steps to configure an app. Using create app tile the admin is required to walk through all configurations end to end and does not have the option to save and finish configurations later. The wizard is meant for new admins who need assistance understand the configuration flow.
Select Create App Tile to open the wizard
On the properties tab choose the browse apps button at the end of the App Name box.
'Browse apps' is a recently added feature that allows admins to quickly search for apps deployed to HCP and upon selection, the fields in the navigation tab will be pre-populated for you.
From the popup select an app, either one of the SAP standard apps or one you've extended and deployed to HCP then choose OK.
Notice the fields have been pre-populated for you.
Choose Next to navigate to the tile tab and design a static app launcher tile for the app you selected.
When you're satisfied with your inputs choose next. In your demo account, you have been assigned a group, assignment package and category named 'My Apps' by SAP. Since we haven't created anything else yet keep these defaults set to My Apps and choose Finish.
Upon completion of the wizard you will be automatically directed to the Configure apps tile and should notice a success message at the bottom of your screen.
The configure apps tile is meant for admins who are very familiar with the configuration process. The completion of the wizard redirects you here because if you want to come back and make any changes to the tile you configured in the wizard you would do so in the configure apps tile. You'll notice that it looks very similar to the Create App Tile wizard except it is not a wizard and offers the ability for admins to save their work and return at a later time to finish. Additionally, they can create a new app directly from here if they prefer not to use the guided flow.
Select the + sign from the bottom left
This time we'll configure a URL app type. Decide which of your favorite websites you'd like as a tile in your launchpad and then enter an app name of your choosing, I'm going to make an SCN tile. Notice the form factors on the bottom, something that wasn't included in the wizard. Since we're creating a URL app I'm going to keep the default of all form factors selected. Choose the Navigation tab.
Select URL as the app type and paste the URL into the URL field.
Choose the tile tab and design your tile
Choose the assignments tab and same as before, keep the default My Apps assignments and save your entries.
Select the Site Preview option from the bottom right. This will open a new tab to the launchpad, scroll to the bottom to see what the two apps we designed will look like to end users.
If you extended an app using Web IDE and deployed it to HCP this is a good place to open the app and make sure everything is working as expected and the look is what you wanted.
If you extended an app and registered it to the launchpad in Web IDE after deploying it to HCP then you would have to come to FCC to configure a tile to be displayed in the launchpad. In the next blog we will continue doing additional admin work by creating a content package, category, group and setting up our site. In the third blog I'll show you how you can assign users to your demo account.