Day: October 22, 2017

WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced advancements to the SAP Vora solution that will simplify deployment on a public cloud and increase flexibility when migrating between cloud, on-premise and hybrid deployment models.

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SAP Vora simplifies deployment on public cloud with the use of Kubernetes

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SAP Vora enables highly scalable computing of Big Data for on-premise and cloud-based data lakes

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SAP Data Network offers business scenarios as a service using SAP Vora

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Additionally, the live customer cloud service on SAP Data Network can now use the distributed computing capabilities SAP Vora offers to efficiently process large data volumes and reveal actionable business insights in near real time

“We are bringing together data transformation and business transformation on the same platform, uniting structured data and computed unstructured data to change the way businesses plan, scale and innovate,” said Greg McStravick, president of SAP Database and Data Management.

As more organizations move Big Data workloads to the cloud for increased flexibility and scalability, the new version of SAP Vora adopts containers to deliver SAP Vora as a container and leverages Kubernetes for simplified deployment and cluster management on public cloud infrastructure offerings. SAP Vora provides customers with the flexibility to choose among cloud, on-premise and hybrid deployment models, and they can migrate between these options easily and with minimal disruption.

SAP Vora is planned to support Azure Data Lake, hosted in Microsoft’s public cloud Azure. SAP Vora can load and distribute data files stored in Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). Other key features introduced in this latest release are an enhanced monitoring framework, support for Apache Spark2.x and optimizations for connectivity with the SAP HANA platform.

SAP Data Network Uses SAP Vora to Increase Business Value for Customers

The live customer cloud service on SAP Data Network combines expertise in Big Data, machine learning and analytics to deliver customers an end-to-end portfolio for data monetization as a ready-to-consume cloud service. Any customer implementation of the live customer cloud service, including at the U.S. division of Schindler Elevator Corporation, can benefit from SAP Vora 2.0 as it will be one of the service’s foundational components. For more information on Schindler’s implementation of the live customer cloud service, watch the video.

“We use SAP Vora to realize our accelerator data services that quickly process and curate industry and line-of-business-specific data for reusability in many business scenarios — thus enabling faster time to market for our customers,” said Helen Arnold, president, SAP Data Network. “SAP Vora 2.0 will play a role in further executing on our promise to create new business models and revenue streams for our customers by using one of the greatest assets of our time — data.”

For more information about SAP Data Network, watch this video.

For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapBigData and @sapnews.

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device — SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 355,000 business and public sector customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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In this blog we will see how to do an extension for the employee central integration with Cloud for Customer via CPI scenario. We will only look at the steps required on C4C and SAP Cloud Platform, integration service (CPI).

Extending CompoundEmployee API on EC side is out of scope.

Steps in C4C

Currently extensiblity is only supported for PersonalDetails node of the interface Replicate Employee from SAP Business Suite.

Adding an extension for Employee is a 2-step process in C4C. First, we need create and add an extension to the staging BO and then add the extension to the Employee BO.

To add an extension to the staging BO, open the OWL Employee Master Data Replication in the Administrator work center view. (Navigation Path General Settings->Data Integration-> Employee Master Data Replication)

In the Employee Master Data Replication OWL, select any employee and click on edit to open the OIF for the employee.

To add an extension via Key User Tool (KUT), Click on Adapt-> Edit Master Layout. 

In the instance floor-plan navigate to facet Biographical Data and under the Details section add a field

Now create a new extension field (in this example we are creating an extension field called Job Profile)

Select the newly added extension field and click on Apply, to make the field visible under Details section

Now we need to add this extension field to the web service. Using change property option click on Field Definition

Navigate to the EXTENSION SCENARIOS facet and add the field using the action button Add Field (You should be edit mode)

Now navigate to SERVICES facet and add the extension field to the web service. Make sure to add it both service HumanCapitalManagementMasterDataReplicationEmployeeMasterDataReplicationIn and HumanCapitalManagementMasterDataReplicationEmployeeMasterDataReplicationWithCodeListMapIn

Save the changes for the field, this will make the extension field available in the WSDL that we can map in CPI.

Download the updated WSDL for the inbound service Replicate Employee from SAP Business Suite in communication arrangement Employee Replication using Intermediate Staging Area from SAP Business Suite

After downloading to your local system, rename the WSDL file. I have renamed it to Employee_Replication_In_extended.wsdl (it is important have .wsdl extension for the file).

To see the extension field add the Extended field to the Employee TI in the adaption mode in People Work Center.

Steps in CPI

For this blog we will manually replicate an employee from Employee Central, so we will add the WSDL to the iFlow, Replicate Employee manually from SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central in the CPI package SAP Hybrid Cloud for Customer Integration with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central.

Do note we need to use Eclipse tooling with Cloud Integration plugin to enhance the iFlow.

Refer to https://tools.hana.ondemand.com/#cloudintegration for installing required plugins for Eclipse.

Add the downloaded WSDL file in eclipse under src.main.resources.wsdl folder.

Open the mapping SFSF_COD_EmployeeReplication.mmap and replace the target element in the standard mapping with the target element from extended WSDL

Select the element (message type) EmployeeCompleteMasterDataReplicateRequest from the option

Now go to the definition tab and on the target element navigate to our extension element. (/ns0:EmployeeCompleteMasterDataReplicateRequest/EmployeeCompleteMasterDataReplicateRequest/CompleteEmployeeMasterData/PersonalDetails/ns12:JobProfile)

Here I am mapping it from a constant value (Presales Specialist), but in real scenario this can be mapped from an extension element of CompoundEmployee

Save iFlow changes and deploy the iFlow.

Outcome

Now in C4C, we can see the Job Profile extension field populated in the replication request.

Once the employee is replicated from staging area, you should be able see the extension field in the Employee screen as well.

For initial and delta load of employee data from EC, please make sure make the mapping adjustments in the iFlow Replicate Employee from SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central as well. http://bit.ly/2yyRr8P #SAP #SAPCloud #AI

The “[Status Update] Idea Place, features, and fixes” conversation in Coffee Corner [link to https://answers.sap.com/articles/294842/status-update-idea-place-features-and-fixes.html] has recently exploded with dozens of comments about the new Customer Influence experience. While I’ve done my best to stay on top of everything, that Coffee Corner thread has become difficult to manage — so we’ve decided to start a separate post to address all issues raised there. Since that Coffee Corner conversation was originally meant to consolidate news about the migration itself, it also seemed prudent to start a dedicated discussion via a blog post. In doing so, I can also invite members from the Customer Influence team to chime in.

To be clear: Based on feedback thus far, I fully anticipate some degree of dissatisfaction with the information below. Nonetheless, I have needed to make a few final statements here. Otherwise, the debate could continue endlessly. Still, by the time you finish reading, I hope you’ll have a better understanding of what’s happening and why (and what you can do about it) — even if you aren’t 100% happy with the details. The goal is complete transparency.

Design and technical issues

First off, thanks to everyone who took the time to share their feedback about the look and functionality of the Customer Influence site. As we announced during the transition period, we are looking for input, and we will work on a new release that takes your recommendations and bug reports into account. I realize you’ve heard this before (most notably with the SAP Community site itself), but we are consolidating all of your asks and observations. I’ll stop short of committing to delivery dates — as these things often slip — but I can promise you that work is ongoing to improve the Customer Influence site with a future release.

I hope you’ll take that as good news, but in the grand scheme of things, it seems that the look and feel of the site aren’t the biggest concerns. The biggest concern is what members see as a loss of privacy — particularly with the appearance of company names in profiles.

To understand why this information (i.e., company name) is now available, it’s important to understand how Customer Influence measures Improvement Requests (IRs).

A more formal approach

Please keep in mind that the primary purpose of Customer Influence (and Idea Place as it existed before) is to get customer input about changes to SAP products. SAP Community is a bit out of place in these sites, in that we are trying to gather feedback and ideas about improving an SAP.com experience. While the overall goal is the same (improvement), SAP Community isn’t a product, yet since it is part of the Customer Influence site, IRs for the community have been handled the same way that they are handled for products.

With Idea Place, we were a bit more informal. It was initially designed for open innovation with anyone (customers, partners, prospects, students, etc.). Customer Influence, however, proposed a more closed-circuit approach for customers and partners — with the expectation that anyone who submitted a request or voted for one was truly committed to a change to an SAP product. And when we decided to retire the Idea Place Product Sessions and move some to the existing Customer Influence site and process, we also opted to keep the Customer Influence approach intact.

As you can imagine, changing products should only happen when true demand exists — which is why the stricter Customer Influence approach seemed more pragmatic. Using an informal process — akin to what is common in social media — didn’t seem to best reflect the level of demand and commitment that new development efforts require. This is also why down votes don’t appear in Customer Influence.

Down voting

Idea Place had both up and down votes (similar to “likes”) for most sessions. Customer Influence had a different notion. Users “registered” their support for an IR and if that IR was delivered, the user made a commitment to implement it. In such a situation, down voting isn’t really relevant, as the whole point is that votes are committing to an implementation. Again, this is a situation where SAP Community doesn’t quite fit the product model of Customer Influence, but the process does still allow us to see how firmly committed people are to IRs for the SAP Community site. (As an aside, we did research on Idea Place whether to keep down votes and found that they were not used. Only 0.5% of votes migrated had down votes. Beyond this, down votes didn’t provide much more value than a critical comment and simply not voting. There had never been a focus on the bottom-most voted items in Idea Place.)

In short, we won’t be bringing down voting back. While I appreciate that certain vocal members of the SAP Community value down voting, it just doesn’t work in the bigger picture of Customer Influence.

Company voting

In the Coffee Corner thread, posters noticed a drop in IR votes — meaning that an idea which had x votes in Idea Place may now have fewer votes in Customer Influence. This is because votes are counted by company, not by individual.

The reason for this goes back to the need to measure actual commitment to a change. If an individual from a company makes an IR, he could ask his colleagues to stack the votes in favor of that request. Counting votes by company prevents this unfair voting. Put another way: By grouping by customer/partner, we ensure that we serve the largest customer base – and not one customer/partner that managed to get the entire team to vote on the same IR.

With that said (and as acknowledged earlier), the SAP Community session in Customer Influence is an odd duck as it is not about an SAP product. As feedback is more representative of individual participation vs. a company, we will switch the SAP Community session to votes (non-company) only.

Privacy concerns

This doesn’t fully address the issue of showing a user’s company name. Even though company name was always displayed in Customer Influence, we should have taken into consideration that company name was not displayed on Idea Place and that users had the option to hide their company name in SAP Community. We simply didn’t anticipate that this would be an issue, as we never experienced it during the 7 years that Customer Influence has been live.

Since votes are counted by company in Customer Influence, the site needs to show this information for a user in a session. Again, showing the company name gives a clear indication of a firm commitment to an IR. The intention of Customer Influence is to create a manageable, prioritized backlog of IRs for SAP Product Managers, to serve the largest possible customer base. Displaying company name encourages a stronger commitment to implement the feature, with the expectation that the voters would be early adopters for rolling out the new feature.

By switching to individual votes in the SAP Community session (instead of company votes), we can remove a user’s company name from the session’s votes tab. But since users can continue to participate in other sessions, their company names will still be seen elsewhere in the site — including on their profile pages. Which means that we have not addressed all of the privacy concerns raised in the Coffee Corner conversation. (BTW, that conversation included a comment reporting a bug which displays a user’s email address. Fortunately, this is a rare occurrence — but still an unacceptable error. We are working to resolve quickly.)

Removing yourself from Customer Influence

While I have explained the rationale for why a company name appears, we are mindful that the Customer Influence audience has now changed however, if you wish to avoid sharing company name and participating on Customer Influence, then you can request account deletion via influencing@sap.com.

Moving forward, we will continue to track all feedback and work to make improvements to the Customer Influence site. For now, we will take the steps outlined above and share updates as they become available. http://bit.ly/2yzCCTw #SAP #SAPCloud #AI

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