iOS App: Production Insights for SAP

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Aesthetically, this was probably one of my most enjoyable projects. I spent a considerable amount of time designing and working with users on understanding their needs, and then subsequently transforming those needs into requirements and into the app design.

The app displays Work Centers and then displays the production orders, and their details assigned to the each of them. This allows supervisors to quickly and easily oversee the production orders, and their progress toward their targets from their mobile device such as an iPad or iPhone.

Production Insight for SAP gives production and operations managers, planners and personnel an overview of manufacturing performance and progress on their iPads. The user can also take pictures of quality issues, or machines and easily email to collegues or maintenance for MWO repairs. The app also has a “timelime” feature which shows a history or events, notes, photos and emails created, which gives a clean overview of the tasks and history tracking. read more

Communicating with other iOS apps using URL Schemes

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When I started developing iOS apps a couple of years ago, I was concerned that enterprise apps were going to quickly succumb to the world of development scope creep. Since the apps were fairly focused and provided a single function or process solution, what if the business wanted more? For example, you have a CRM app displaying your customer contact information and some high level details regarding order history and credit limits, but what if the user wanted some additional details from your BI solution drilling down into historical orders and profit analysis? Well, in that case, you had a few options: 

1) Extend the scope of the app – by adding functionality and options, sometimes a reasonable option if the scope is not excessive or the functionality is relative to the app. In our  above example, probably not. read more

zSCN – A iPad SCN Community Reader

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After spending a couple of months traveling in 2012, I wrote a personal app for reading and following content created on the SAP Community Network. Although it was slightly buggy and ghetto, I found it way faster than firing up my MBA to check if a comment or something helpful had been posted in my local Netweaver Gateway hangout. I spent the last +- 6 months using the app and after reading a few comments on the new Idea place and in the forums, I decided a couple of others may find it helpful and set out to build a user friendly version. 

Now on to the app …. firstly, starting up the app you are presented with a list of spaces (thanks to Jason Lax for creating a helpful list here!), secondly, the app uses the RSS feeds from each SCN “Space” to curate the content, each time you select a space the content is cached on the device (in a little SQLite DB) and refreshes each time the space is opened. You can also select the number of items which are downloaded in each category (blogs, documents and forums). After logging into SCN using your SCN username/password, it will download your spaces, people and saved content. Keep in mind that you cannot “save” or create content from the app, since the SCN API’s are not currently publicly available (I am hoping for some change on this!). However, each item can be selected and the original content will be displayed on the website where you can login and respond/comment. You can also easily email the item to a friend in need, or tweet it if you are a social butterfly 😉  read more

iOS App: Blaze for SAP Netweaver Gateway

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A couple of months ago I was working on creating services for a SAP App store app called Production Insight for SAP. While working on the app I constantly found myself using RESTClient for Firefox to test, debug and view the attributes of my service while I was developing in XCode. Eventually I pulled up the metadata and service implementation on my iPad and used it as a second screen for reference. This made my life much easier. After having done this a couple of times over the past few months, I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to create an app which not only lets you view the service and its details, but also save requests, test them against multiple servers and also view the details easily. Which is why I built “Blaze”, it does all this and a little more. It is a free app and available in the app store as of yesterday, if I could put a “demo” or “beta” sticker on it: I would. (but apple won’ approve anything like that!) for all you “gatewayers” out there, please test it out and let me know what you like and don’t. My intention is to create a iOS client for gateway which is useful to developers like myself. The app can also handle other OData servers and services like Netflix and XS Engine from HANA. read more

S2F – Building a custom iPad app using Netweaver Gateway

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S2F is a blog series around building custom native iOS apps using SAP Netweaver Gateway, you can read Part 1and Part 2, as well as the introduction from talk at TechEd in Las Vegas.

Last Week Guy Stoffer, put together a great blog outlining how quick and easy it was to create an iOS app using the SAP Netweaver Gateway Tool for XCode. The tool creates proxy classes and even handles the security which makes creating a starter gateway app simple. In my previous post covering my talk at TechEd in LV, I mentioned I would show an alternative to using the Gateway Tool for XCode and this blog outlines this. read more

2012 SAP TechEd and MOB205

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Well …. TechEd has passed and it was a great time. InnoJam was probably the best experience and I managed to be a part of a great collaboration which was fun from the start – I will blog a little about our solution in some of my free time in the coming weeks, but back to the topic at hand, since this was my first time as a speaker at TechEd I was slightly intimidated and anxious … my session was on Friday at 8:00AM, the night after the 3 Doors Down concert and I was skeptical if *anyone* would even show up 🙂 . The morning came, and to my surprise, the room was full and even had multiple people standing at the back. I was impressed so many people attended, and showed that my investment of time and resources into the enterprise mobility space over the last few years was worth the effort. The presentation went well and thankfully I had the “Demo Gods” on my side connecting from the Venetian (iPad) to Amazon Web Services (Gateway) to Walldorf (ES Workplace) and back 🙂 . After the presentation wrapped up I had great comments and questions from the audience but ran out of time answering all of them, I figured I would share the premise of the presentation here for everyone and hopefully encourage more companies to take a few easy steps to start their journey into the mobile enterprise. read more