You’ll probably recognize it. Looking at today’s modern apps, receiving instant notifications is one of the things that changed the way how we are informed about breaking news and tasks. Now this is also possible with SAP Fiori.
If we look it from a procurement perspective, nowadays managers, who need to approve a shopping cart, will be notified with an e-mail that can contain different kind of information so that they are able to approve the shopping cart. These are the so-called offline approval e-mails and can be seen as an instant notification about a certain task.
With the introduction of the SAP Fiori apps, managers can use the Approve Shopping Cart app to approve shopping carts. However managers need to open the app manually in order to retrieve the pending tasks. But wouldn’t it be nice if a manager receives a push notification instead?
Unfortunately the standard SAP Fiori Client doesn’t support push notifications. The standard SAP Fiori Client works against the Fiori Front-end server and/or SAP Gateway directly, but when you route a Fiori application through the SAP Mobile Platform (SMP) server, additional capabilities, such as Push Notifications, will become available to the application.
This is managed by Kapsel, which is a set of plugins that are available from SMP 3.0 SDK SP04. The Fiori client and/or app can be wrapped within Kapsel, so that it can make use of push notifications.
Though running SAP Fiori apps through SMP has a side effect on license cost. SAP Fiori is available for free within your SAP license, however running an app through SMP will increase the license cost per user. This could have a negative impact on your business case, if you want to introduce SAP Fiori within your company. In my opinion push notifications are a fundamental part of a business process which is depending on approval steps. Here are notifications essential!
Push notification aren’t only available through SMP. There are alternatives available. A good example of a 3rd party solution is the SAP Fiori Notifier Add-On. The configuration is an Add-On to your SAP system which you can use with your SAP Fiori installation.
Though if you decide to implement push notifications either through SMP or with a 3rd party solution, you probably don’t want to send offline approval e-mails to the manager anymore to avoid inconsistencies in approval tasks. Approval tasks will not be removed from your mailbox, when they already have been executed through the app.
This becomes possible as a continues improvement within SP8 of SAP SRM 7.0 Ehp3, where you can switch off the e-mail notifications for different kind of business objects, such as the shopping cart and the purchase order. Another benefit here is that it also reduces the e-mail traffic within your organization and has positive impact on tables which are using this functionality.