Across SAP, and specifically SAP Business Technology Platform, there are a number of central services available to support different technical and functional scenarios. Some of these services are even included in different SAP (cloud) subscriptions and therefore, don't come with any additional license cost. The focus of these services typically revolves around either technical or functional usage.
Technical and Functional Central Services
Looking closer, the following services within these two categories are currently in scope, or part of the product roadmap.
Check supported products & platforms for prerequisites.
First, the more technically focused services target to improve the experience of system administrators. Regular business users will normally not be aware of, or interact with these services.
- SAP Cloud Transport Management
- This service enables administrators to create transport requests with scoped content and deploy them using SAP Cloud Transport Management service. For SAP Build Work Zone, the scope is restricted to business apps, groups, catalogs, and roles.
- Cloud Integration Automation Service
- Cloud Integration Automation Service is a framework that provides partially automated configuration procedures to integrate scenarios for SAP cloud-to-cloud and hybrid solutions.
- SAP Cloud Identity Services
- This service is the central cloud-focused identity and access management service across SAP. In the context of SAP Build Work Zone, both the Identity Authentication (IAS) and Identity Provisioning (IPS) components of this service are critically important for handling authentication, as well as user or role lifecycle management. Given the significant importance and complexity of this topic, this will be covered in a dedicated security unit.
- Custom Domain
- This service allows the replacement of the standard domain of an application or service on SAP BTP, with a more customer-specific (user friendly) one.
As for the more business user-oriented or functional services, meaning services a business user will interact with directly, there are again, several items worth highlighting:
- SAP Mobile Start
- Native mobile application for both iOS and Android, currently allowing connection to content from SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition, Notification service, and SAP Task Center.
Note
At the time of course publication, the integration of SAP Mobile Start with SAP Build Work Zone advanced edition/SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone was not available, but part of the planned product roadmap. - SAP Companion
- SAP Companion is planned to be part of any suitable SAP application, to drive the user onboarding, enablement, change management in a proactive, and intelligent way. It takes users by the hand and helps when the users are struggling, allowing them to increase their productivity and the software adoption. For SAP Build Work Zone, this integration currently supports SAP S/4HANA and SAP Build Work Zone itself.
- Notifications
- Notifications make users aware of a situation that requires timely action or attention. Notifications appear under the bell icon in the shell bar, at the top right corner. Supported notification providers are SAP S/4HANA, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and SAP BTP Cloud Foundry (custom HTML5 apps), and SAP Build Work Zone itself.
- SAP Task Center
- A key aspect of creating a central entry point is providing unified access to approvals, tasks and to-dos. Already, SAP Build Work Zone is integrated with the so-called My Inbox, as part of the SAP Workflow Management. The scope of this inbox is however, restricted to SAP BTP workflows.
Therefore, SAP Task Center is available, which enables integration across different SAP applications to provide a single entry point for end users to access all their assigned approval tasks.
In addition to surfacing tasks from other SAP solutions, SAP Task Center can also show tasks and approvals from SAP Build Work Zone itself.