Explaining the Architecture of SAP Build Work Zone

SAP Business Technology Platform provides a lot of powerful services used within the Intelligent Enterprise. Many of the services have a simple onboarding procedure and overall architecture. SAP Build Work Zone however is different in this regard: it consists of multiple architectural components. While some of them are optional (for example: SAP Business Application Studio), others are either included by default and/or are vital for even onboarding to the solution.

SAP Build Work Zone and SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone are SAP BTP offerings available on multi-cloud environment (powered by Cloud Foundry). The figure below shows the solution architecture and components relevant for both offerings:

Watch the following video to learn about the solution architecture of SAP Build Work Zone and SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone is detail.

It's important to highlight that both SAP Build Work Zone and SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone have the same architecture and baseline functionality. This is especially relevant since the introduced pre-requisite procedure to decouple SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone from SAP SuccessFactors HXM Core (BizX) and instead use of SAP Cloud Identity Services for user authentication & provisioning.

Note

The procedure to decouple SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone from SAP SuccessFactors HXM Core for user provisioning was introduced at the beginning of 2022. It’s well explained in SAP Note 3111415. If the implementation of SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone was done in 2021 or earlier, and decoupling is not yet done, it’s required to plan and complete this procedure!

This procedure is also relevant for new implementation projects of SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone that upgrade an existing SAP Jam system.

From a functional and technical point of view, the key difference between SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition and SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone is rich pre-delivered (and regularly updated by SAP) content for HXM scenarios. The content includes UI Integration Cards, Guided Experiences and Workspace Templates, and it’s well documented at SAP Help Portal for SuccessFactors Work Zone. Aside from the functional difference, SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone comes as a solution bundle with additional SAP BTP services included – whereas SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition is solely covering the Work Zone platform itself.

In the context of this unit / training SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition and SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone are used interchangeably unless stated otherwise.

The next lessons "unbox" solution architecture of SAP Build Work Zone in the form of different type of components:

There is one more component which has dual intention: SAP Workflow service. While SAP Workflow Management (WFM) is considered an optional component for SAP Build Work Zone, SAP Workflow (not the full WMF) is mandatory and commercially bundled for SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone.

Note

At the time of publishing this course, SAP Workflow (Management) was not yet replaced with SAP Build Process Automation in the integration context of SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition / SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone.

Depending on the SAP BTP offering, there can be a subscription as well as a service. SAP Build Work Zone comes with both:

In contrast to other SAP BTP offerings, it’s not enough just to create subscription in SAP BTP subaccount. Both SAP Build Work Zone and SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone have a dedicated onboarding procedure requiring to implement certain prerequisites and configuration steps before and after creating the subscription. The onboarding procedure for SAP Build Work Zone and SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone are documented on SAP Help Portal.

Onboard procedure for both SAP Build Work Zone and SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone consists of 4 steps:

Note

It’s not recommended to enable subscription for SAP Build Work Zone or SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone in SAP BTP subaccount manually. SAP strongly recommends following onboarding procedure to complete initial configuration.

Coming back to the difference between service and subscription, it’s important to understand the APIs offered by SAP Build Work Zone. Technically SAP Build Work Zone has multiple API layers:

The API layers involve different configuration steps and even have different target hostnames.