Date: 14 Sep 2009
By John Patterson.
Traditionally SAP has not been known for its easy to use user interfaces and over the last couple of years there has been a real commitment to change this perception, resulting in substantial investment in terms of resources, time and money to develop richer alternatives, including partnering with companies like Adobe, IBM and Microsoft.
Many customers who have recently upgraded their SAP systems are wanting to take advantage of some of the newer technologies which were previously not available to them. One thing that SAP has done really well is building future proof, scalable, supportable frameworks for enabling processes, this point should not be overlooked when choosing to adopt some of these newer technologies.
Over the last couple of years HCM Manager Self Service (MSS) and Employee Self Service (ESS) solutions have gone through some major front end technical changes while maintaining the same stable backend logic. Starting off with the proprietary Internet Transaction Server (ITS) solutions, where SAP adopted a proprietary screen scraping as a mechanism of providing web enabled screens, the feedback here was the solution was too hard to use, extend and maintain.
The next stage of evolution was the Portal Based Java and the Java Webdynpro solutions where there was a conscious effort made to de-couple the screen logic and provide familiar tools to users like the Adobe Interactive forms. The feedback on this version was while the screens were a lot easier to use, extending and maintaining these solutions often meant more skills, time and effort increasing the total cost of ownership for customers.
With the advent of the Enhancement Packs (EhP) in particular Ehp2 and Ehp3 a lot of the Java Webdynpro (WD4J) applications, which required the Enterprise Portal, have now been ported to ABAP Webdynpro (WD4A).
Its development environment is second to none and getting better, tightly integrating the data dictionary with business processes. The BASIS platform and Web Application Server (WebAS) which are a core part of the NetWeaver solution has been around for a long time, are tried and tested, very scalable and leverages the investment SAP have made in ABAP over many years. WD4A is deployed on the WebAS ABAP Stack and can run independent of SAP Enterprise Portal, meaning a lot of blue-chip SAP customers are seeing the benefit of WD4A as a mechanism for developing Enterprise Wide Solutions, complementing whatever Portal solution they have. SAP is continuing to improve on WD4A's rich client by adding Ajax and Adobe Flex and Flash for enhanced user experience. With the porting of the Floor Plan Manager (FPM) from WD4J to WD4A, developers now have a mechanism for rapid application development with the WYSWYG tools FPM provides. Meaning consistent quality solutions can now be developed and configured as SAP does in a much shorter time frame.
HCM Processes and Forms available as of EhP2, leverage on the Personnel Change Request (PCR) technology that has been around for a long time, and are a combination of the Internet Service Request (ISR) Framework, Adobe Interactive Forms, Workflow, CASE Management and BADIs.
Where previously they were deployed through the ITS or Enterprise Portal via WD4J FPM, they are now deployed through WD4A FPM. It is important to note that the ISR Framework is proven, stable, and scalable, tightly integrating SAP workflow as a means for managing processes.
The ISR Framework detaches the business logic from the front end that enables it, giving developers the freedom of choosing from a variety of mediums - ITS, BSP, JSP, WD4A, WD4J and Adobe Interactive forms and this is true not just for HCM but for other process areas like FICO, Materials Management etc. Another important note is there are many existing applications, albeit written for other front end technologies which could be used to accelerate WD4A or Adobe Forms development.
SAP and Adobe have a very strong relationship, both at the business level and the technical level. SAP ship a number of PDF form templates as standard forms for to use, complementing SAP's Smartform and SAPScript offerings. They also ship the Adobe Form designer in both the ABAP and Java development environments. However, to develop inhouse forms or enhance existing forms customers will need some expertise in LiveCycle and need to pay some additional licensing fees. The Adobe Forms are very familiar to end-users and offer both online (through Webdynpro) and offline solutions for data entry.
One thing to be aware of is that Adobe Forms are not as tightly integrated to the ABAP runtime as say WD4A and therefore do not offer the richer client functionality, but are very suitable for simple forms and simple requirements.
CBH Group (one of Extend Technologies customers currently on ECC 5.0) chose to re-work some of the WD4J HCM Adobe forms into the ABAP Form designer. Essentially all this required was to change the configuration in the ISR to get them working. The process owner and power user, a HR Administrator, was very pleased with the solution using standard ISR transactions which ensured that the processes were completed in a timely manner. Migrating from Java to ABAP delivered business benefits on many levels.
Another of Extend's customers, CSR, have recently chosen to back port the Ehp3 WD4A FPM Travel Expense Management solution instead of using the WD4J solution. This has given them the ability to add Australian FBT requirements with a minimum of fuss.
SAP with the HCM Processes and Forms are positioning Webdynpro for ABAP, Adobe Forms and the ISR Framework as a long term direction. ISR Framework is a proven, stable, scalable platform for managing processes, out of the box comes with many applications which can easily be adapted. Adobe Forms is a very good option for simple requirements. ABAP Webdynpro combined with the Floor Plan Manager is a good long term option for more complicated requirements.
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