What are DX Services?

What are DX services? DX services are tools to manage role-based access to information and apps, create personalized and engaging workspaces, improve discovery and sharing of data, and extend functionality of systems by leveraging platform connections.

Let’s put the description of DX services in the context of how you would use it. As a citizen developer, DX services capabilities enable you to create personal, team and project workspaces and to adapt to market conditions faster, by:

• Delivering a contextual and consistent digital experience that allows people to access all the resources they need in one place in a harmonized way versus inefficiently switching between multiple applications or screens.
• Enabling users to use drag-and-drop customization to personalize their digital workplace and enrich it with the resources and workflows they need to maximize productivity.
• Accelerating creation of new digital interfaces with pre-built templates and a business user-focused page design experience.

With DX services running on the SAP Business Technology Platform, you can integrate your business processes and applications with the flexibility, scalability, and breadth of support you need to successfully extend or build innovative applications.

DX Services Portfolio at SAP

Looking more closely into the portfolio of DX services, SAP primarily focuses on two products that are both provided on SAP Business Technology Platform: SAP Launchpad service and SAP Work Zone.

While both offerings share a common technology foundation and capability set, they aim to address different use cases depending on the required scope:

• SAP Launchpad service allows you to create an (SAP) application-centric entry point, providing a harmonized user experience layer that integrates applications, tasks, and notifications. The setup and configuration process provides an IT administrator-centric experience, allowing for flexible role-based setups.
• SAP Work Zone provides they key features you get with SAP Launchpad service, plus capabilities that enable you to combine the application-centric experience with web content, documents and knowledge sharing as well as user engagement in discussion forums, feeds and more. It empowers administrators, citizen developers and end users alike to contribute and create engaging, modern experiences.

For this unit we will focus on SAP Work Zone with its extended capability set, because it is targeted towards citizen developers and other non-technical business users.

SAP Work Zone is the focus of this unit, so let’s have a look at the main capabilities at the "heart" of this tool. Here is a brief demo of what SAP Work Zone looks like, to give you the right context to continue with your learning.

• An application-centric launchpad experience with an extended feature-set that allows integration of SAP and third-party business applications from both cloud and on-premises deployments.
• A modern "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) page editor with a grid-based layout and a selection of pre-built widgets and custom cards for creating modern workspaces, or "home" pages, for different personas and use cases.
• A set of tightly interwoven features for enabling use cases around user-generated (web) content, communications, and engagement, including:
  • User-managed workspaces
  • Discussion forums
  • Knowledge bases or news feeds

We will have a closer look at the capabilities that you, as a citizen developer, can leverage for creating your own spaces, pages, and more at a later point of this unit.

In addition to the core components of SAP Work Zone, we also provide default components and optional integrations:

Default Components

Several components based on SAP BTP are integrated out of the box and provide platform-level capabilities, such as central identity and access management across SAP solutions, or functionality to create customized themes to adjust the look and feel of your solution.

Optional Integrations

In contrast to the default components, based on your use cases and requirements, you can optionally add several integration scenarios that don’t come pre-integrated; these include SAP as well as third-party products. An example for such an optional integration scenario would be building your own chatbot leveraging SAP Conversational AI. From a commercial perspective, such services are not included when you buy SAP Work Zone, nor are they required for deploying it.

A more detailed view on the different options for product extensibility – which will usually be leveraged in collaboration with pro-code (professional) developers and system administrators – will also be provided in a dedicated lesson.