After completing this lesson, you will be able to:
Watch the following video to learn about Administrative areas.
In this context, the administrative area setup can provide both additive (that is, combined with company area settings) as well as overruling (that is, overwriting global settings) capabilities. An example of the additive scenario is the home page feature that will be covered in the next lesson – users will always have access to the aggregated set of home pages across all the areas they belong to.
The home page is another building block of SAP Build Work Zone, where users are presented with content that would be most frequently used. It is the default landing page when SAP Build Work Zone is first launched. It is the first menu item in the top navigation bar and the only item that cannot be disabled or hidden from the top-level menu bar.
All home pages, regardless of company or other area, share the same grid-based layout options and a powerful "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) page editor. Designing the home page requires no programming or extensive IT knowledge. It can be designed by regular end users or citizen developers. To support external stakeholders and scenarios, for instance suppliers or customers, there is also a dedicated feature for creating home pages for external users. Home pages can be created for full access users (all users in your company) and for external users (if external users have been configured for your work zone) from the Home Page Management screen.
To organize your work and interactions with other users, certain tools are provided by SAP Build Work Zone, if they are enabled for your workspace.
NoteThe following are several types of home pages that are designed by different personas:
SAP Build Work Zone makes it easy for users to keep current with a collection of posts called feeds. Feeds display a constant update of activity shared by the users, the subscribed workspaces, and fellow members on the platform.
Members have access to the following types of feeds:
There are several ways for users to interact with their feeds. They can share an update from the text box at the top of the company feed or from a workspace feed.
A post can contain different types of content. For example, users can share documents, blogs, videos, photos, forum topics, and general status updates. Users can address workspace members, colleagues, public member lists, or specific business records (for example, learning items) using @mention or they can include tags in a feed item to help others find their post. As users interact with a post, the most recent activity is displayed at the top of the feed.
Workspaces are a big part of SAP Build Work Zone. There is so much you can add to your workspace including flexible page design to help you get your work done, bring together data and best practices, and enable you to communicate and interact easily with your colleagues and teams.
Only a workspace administrator or a workspace member can create and manage the workspace by adding content, use planning tools to plan and coordinate projects, add business applications, cards, widgets, and more. They can also create blog posts, wiki pages, and links. To work together with users in a workspace, you must join the workspace as a member. The members of a workspace can communicate with each other using the workspace feed or forums and they can use the pages of the workspace to share information and content.
Let us learn about Workspace Templates and Workspace Page Types.
Any SAP Build Work Zone user with proper access can add several types of content to their home pages or workspace overv depending on the requirement. When a page is opened in edit mode, immediate access to the no-code Page Designer tool is provided, which enables the user to design pages with no web development skills required. They can copy and move content between the company and area home page, add new content, and download or delete selected content items. The content which is newly added is stored in the home page repository.
While designing a home page is like designing workspace Workpages, the following are some notable differences:
As mentioned earlier, home pages and workspaces come with pre-defined widgets and cards, which can be easily integrated. These cards and widgets can be aligned on the page via drag and drop, resized, and configured according to the desired layout. The changes are automatically saved even before publishing or saving it as a draft.
Let us learn about Widgets and SAP UI5 Integration Cards
The out-of-the-box Web Content Card can also be added to embed content from any web page to display on a page or workspace in SAP Build Work Zone.
Custom cards that have been developed in SAP Business Application Studio can be uploaded and activated by the administrator via the Administration Console. Once activated, they will be visible in the Widgets Gallery, which can then be added to SAP Build Work Zone pages.
SAP Build Work Zone offers a lot more than just creating or updating content. Business content can be transported between different services, for example: SAP Build Work Zone, SAP Cloud Portal, SAP Launchpad, or SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone services, environments like development, test, or production, or between SAP Build Work Zone instances across different sub-accounts and data centers. Content items such as home pages, workspaces, and workspace templates can be transported between SAP Build Work Zone tenants by simply exporting the content from the source system and importing the exported file back into the target system.
SAP Build Work Zone includes a built-in launchpad. Users in the digital workplace can access all the business applications (SAP and non-SAP) they have permission to view on the Applications screen, at the top menu bar of the work zone.
Let us further learn about accessing business applications from launchpad.
The applications are displayed in an embedded launchpad as tiles on the screen, divided into Groups mode or Spaces and Pages mode, depending on the settings for a specific work zone. Each tile contains a title, subtitle, and may display additional information.
Apart from the business apps, there are other apps that cannot be found in Content Manager. These apps are present in the App Finder, which is basically a catalog of all the apps that a user is allowed to see.
Note
Explanations about Manual Integration and Content Federation:
Integrate apps deployed on SAP S/4HANA on premise, SAP BTP Cloud Foundry or ABAP environment
Expose content of various content providers: SAP S/4HANA on premise, SAP Enterprise Portal or SAP Business Technology Platform on Cloud Foundry
We saw that the Content Manager is part of the Work Zone Manager. Let us explore a little bit about the additional features of Work Zone Manager. The Work Zone Manager contains the following screens:
You can leverage the capabilities of the underlying SAP BTP (Business Technology Platform), like Identity Propagation, to eliminate the need to set up additional security roles for SAP business apps.
Enrich digital workplace and user experience by adding SAP Fiori apps and SAP Fiori app groups to the pages and workspaces.
Provide access to relevant information from thirst-party apps by developing and adding UI Integration Cards to the pages and workspaces.
Some of the key features of the Applications menu (Launchpad) are as follows:
Watch the following video to learn about workflow capability and My Inbox feature.
However, there is currently a restriction which SAP Build Work Zone has: The My Inbox application currently provides access only to workflows and notifications from SAP Workflow service.
The approval tasks from SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Fieldglass, and other SAP solutions can be aggregated and consumed centrally by another SAP BTP service – SAP Task Center. SAP has developed SAP Task Center, which is a standalone aggregated approval workflow app. At the time of this course publication, SAP Build Work Zone has no integration to SAP Task Center yet. Once integrated, all of the inbox items can be accessed directly and efficiently from SAP Task Center.
NoteNow that you have understood the different building blocks within SAP Build Work Zone, you might wonder "When to use what?" The answer is simple: "It all depends on your organization's setup", yet you might make a choice after looking into each building block's key features and capabilities. For example, if you want to broadcast any company-related information or announcements, you can do that via home pages or expose business applications via the Applications tab. The figure outlines some of the key features and strengths of each building block in a nutshell.
Watch the following video to learn about SAP Build Work Zone Personas.
SAP Build Work Zone provides the flexibility to configure your working environment.
To access your account settings, perform the following steps:
It allows you to configure the theme or display setting, home page, or the Applications launchpad page. It also provides an option to choose from a list of preferred languages, date format, time format, or choose to configure more advanced features such as workspace notifications frequency, custom feed filtering, calendar settings, away alerts, and much more.
To organize your work and interactions with other users, certain Tools are provided by SAP Work Zone, if they are enabled for your workspace.
The following pages are available from the Tools menu:
