SAP TechEd 2019 Takeaways: Fiori, The modern user interface
One of the main themes in TechED was still Fiori and the modern UI. The biggest announcement on the Fiori side was the new Fiori 3 design system and UI5 Web Components. Both aims to bring user experience to consistent, intelligent and integrated between all products. Consistency comes in Fiori 3’s new Shell design to all the different products (for example Ariba, S/4HANA, Analytics Cloud, SuccessFactors) which means the container of the applications and home page looks the same no matter the product customer is using.
Intelligence comes with home page personalization’s, dynamic content for analytics and briefings and with integrated digital assistant (SAP CoPilot). And integration, different products can be found in the same home page which eliminates the time-consuming navigation between different products.
UI5 Web Components brings the possibility to use the familiar elements from the Fiori and UI5 to web applications that are developed with other libraries, ReactJS for example. This means it is easier to have the similar look and feel in all the applications no matter what technologies may be under the surface which opens many possibilities to create even better user experiences and meet the needs of the customer.
Main take away from Fiori presentations was that, as we are moving more and more to the cloud systems and the more mobile usage, the future for Fiori is looking good and even though different solutions try to easily bring different functionalities and transactions to Fiori the need for custom applications is only rising.
The fascinating land of ABAP
As before, the ABAP Platform slogan was loud and clear: “Take your ABAP skills to SAP HANA and the Cloud”. The majority of ABAP related sessions revolved on these same topics, many of the sessions starting with the same roadmap overviews but fortunately focusing on different details.
As some sessions were a bit repetitive, it would have been wise to select sessions on a wider perspective to make the most of the time available.
Nevertheless, session contents were still excellent. Instead of focusing on optimistic greenfield S/4HANA implementations, which have now proven to play a lot smaller part, the focus was on conversions which still heavily rely on existing custom logic. The tools to analyze custom code readiness and execute the actual adoption to S/4HANA have evolved to the right direction and in the hands-on sessions it was possible to test this in practice.
The next huge step on ABAP roadmap was also strongly present: ABAP RESTful programming model and the expansion of ABAP development to SAP Cloud Platform. As interesting as this is, and with multiple presented usage scenarios, there is still a long way for this to gain ground in more than innovative PoC projects.
For a seasoned ABAPer TechED gave a clear vision on the future focus. ABAP is going strong and shaping to the needs of S/4HANA and Cloud. As long as you are following the new programming model, you are on solid ground for the near future. TechED in itself offered more than enough for an ABAPer and was definitely worth visiting.
