Diving into Features of SAP Build Work Zone

With SAP Build Work Zone there are varying features and strengths for you to create different types of business sites – the applications launchpad, homepages, administrative areas and workspaces.

Administrative Areas provide a designated space for managing content and engaging within a realm – for instance, a specific line of business, such as human resources, IT, finance, purchasing and so on. Area administrators gain access to a small but significant subset of system-level capabilities. In this way, they take on some responsibility from overloaded IT / central administrators.

Homepages are what all users see by default when they open SAP Build Work Zone as well as when they click on either the logo in the menu bar or the global menu entry for Home.

Homepages can be different for personas or roles. Additionally, homepages can be available to different member lists (= list of users) directly, providing even more flexibility in designing truly personalized experiences for the user personas you have in mind.

All homepages – 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. It is connected to a catalog of pre-built widgets that can be combined with custom-built UI integration cards to seamlessly mix and match application content with rich text, multimedia, and other forms of structured as well as unstructured data.

To support external stakeholders and scenarios, for instance suppliers or customers, there is also a dedicated feature for creating homepages for external users – clearly separating this experience from the design and content on the internal user homepages.

Workspaces are an important building block which enable, various use cases and provide a broad range of features, including content management, forum(s), and flexible page design.

Empowering all users of the system – administrators, citizen developers and regular end users alike – is one of the key areas where workspaces can shine. Depending on the system setup, every user can create / design the workspaces needed to solve a given business problem. While enabled features will vary per workspace, there are four types determining the overall experience.

In this demo you will see how SAP Build Work Zone Workspaces enables the creation of various types of workspaces and specifically one for a parental leave request process.

You can create and edit pages for your intranet and workspaces with a rich and visual built-in, no-code page editor – you can change and see the results immediately, no development skills required.

With SAP Build Work Zone, you can set up page access, translate, track changes and versions, and modify layouts with various pre-built widgets including SAP Fiori and UI integration cards.

UI integration cards can be created someone with more advanced technical skills using low-code or pro-code approaches, and then they can easily be used by citizen developers following the no-code approach to visual programming. These cards can surface data from connected SAP and third-party business applications and present the information on the page in various designs and layouts.

In addition to the capabilities covered in the previous lessons, SAP Build Work Zone includes a built-in launchpad. It enables you to harmonize access to different business applications for the users of your digital workplace – all in one place:

Integrate apps deployed on SAP S/4HANA on-premise, SAP BTP multi-cloud or ABAP environment.

Expose content of various content providers: SAP S/4HANA on premise, SAP Enterprise Portal or SAP BTP in a multi-cloud environment.

Enables individual application and application group widgets to be used across homepages and workspaces.

Now let’s talk about how to extend SAP Build Work Zone. First, you can extend SAP Build Work Zone with UI Integration Cards, which are like micro-applications for displaying business critical information from SAP as well as from third-party systems.

Second – workflows that leverage SAP BTP workflow. You can use already-created workflows from SAP Build Process Automation and/or create new ones that are directly accessible from within SAP Build Work Zone.

Thirdly, if combined, options one and two allow you to create so-called Guided Experiences. The UI Integration Card acts as a wizard-like experience to trigger a workflow in SAP Build Process Automation, providing a unified multi-step experience for the user that connects to different SAP and third-party backend systems.

Fourth, the Launchpad (Shell) plugins are in case of substantial changes to the SAP Build Work Zone global navigation header. Add icons or other modifications to the header to reference to another application, security/compliance document or other pieces of information – even role-based visibility settings.

Fifth, SAP Build Work Zone offers an integration with SAP Conversational AI allowing you to connect to one or multiple chatbots. SAP Build Work Zone users can then interact with the chatbot(s) to address many innovative scenarios for HXM, procurement, or even IT self-service requests (such as requesting system access).