Well, yet another week has gone by and we have new Fiori related content to consume. And I was reminded of that early this morning after seeing a tweet and a screenshot from Tony de Thomasis showing SAP Fiori for TDMS 4.0 – the scope of SAP Fiori apps is indeed widening further. The tweet prompted me to think about reviewing the data for my online SAP Fiori App Analysis tool** with a view to updating it. Do you find it useful? Let me know in the comments or via Twitter (I’m @qmacro).

**the data is hand-gathered, see The SAP Fiori App Analysis application for some background. Ideally SAP could make this data available and keep it up to date for us, right?

Anyway, on to the picks for this week.

OpenSAP’s Introduction to SAP Fiori UX, by Prakalp Phadnis, Elizabeth Thorburn & Jamie Cawley Well, that didn’t take long! SAP’s extremely popular and successful Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) system “OpenSAP” is offering a free course on SAP Fiori. Specifically, Fiori User Experience (UX). After all, UX is at the heart of a lot of what the Fiori philosophy is about.

I’ve said in the past that Fiori is “many things, including a state of mind”. I’m hoping that this course, which promises lessons on fundamentals, latest features, installation, configuration and best practices for extensibility, will instill in the attendee a sense of what good looks like, and help to prevent possible dilution of the Fiori concepts.

The SAP Fiori Launchpad has been added to the UX Explorer! by Elizabeth Thorburn In last week’s TWIF installment I mentioned the functional proximities of the SAP Fiori Launchpad and the SAP Portal, in reference to a post by Aviad Rivlin. This week SAP have taken another step towards surfacing info about the important Launchpad, by including it in the UX Explorer.

With the UX Explorer you can find out about different User Interface (UI) and UX products and technologies from SAP. While the current content for the Launchpad isn’t overwhelming, it is there, which is a start. And there’s a couple of things that stood out for me: It stated loud and clear that the Launchpad was built using SAPUI5 (yay for the teams and my extended family in Walldorf!) and is most definitely marked as “strategic” as relating to relevance for SAP’s own application development.

Elizabeth is one of the tutors on the Introduction to SAP Fiori UX course, by the way.

Partner Co-Innovation Workshop – Build Your Own Fiori App by Jeffrey D’Silva For me this post is a bittersweet one. The SAP Co-Innovation labs are running a 3-day workshop for partners, covering design thinking, Fiori design principles, UI5 controls and more, culminating in the attendees building an app. It’s not clear to me after reading the agenda and the description whether the app will be a mockup only (as detailed in the agenda) or complete and fully certified (as detailed in the description). My guess is that with two of the three days taken up with design (and rightly so), the result will be nearer a working mockup than something that has already reached SAP certification.

But here’s the thing: SAP Fiori and the underlying technologies (UI5 and OData) are the fundamental building blocks of much of SAP’s application future. So it’s not only important for SAP themselves and SAP partners, but for SAP customers too. What customers were (and still are) building and extending in the land of classic and web dynpro, the approaches and techniques used, and the tools and platforms relied upon, will be slowly but surely be superseded by Fiori, UI5 and OData flavoured equivalents.

Customers, ready thyself for Fiori flavoured development! And by that, I mean a different approach to source code control, version management, extensibilty, and more, as well as design and build techniques and libraries.

That’s it for this week, have a great weekend, and as always, share & enjoy!