Hello there folks. That time has come around again to pull together a few links on some of the Fiori related stories and articles this week. Let’s get right to it.

Transactional Fiori App Certification by Chiranjivi R D I touched on certification of Fiori apps in an earlier TWIF episode 2014-31 where I pointed to a Partner Co-Innovation Workshop that mentioned certification of Fiori apps developed therein. Certification, at least to me, is not automatically a good thing. I’m strongly ambivalent (if that’s possible) on certification generally, of consultants specifically, and of apps particularly.

This week, this article on Fiori app certification was brought to my attention by friend and fellow SAP Mentor Tobias Trapp. It’s all about the certification of transactional Fiori apps built by partners. With Fiori, there’s great emphasis on the UX principles, and rightly so. There are also of course also the Gateway and Business Suite add-ons too, but for me the primary goal for certification in this area must be how the Fiori app works from a user experience point of view. My general certification ambivalence is then given a run for its money here; I for one do think that without some kind of standards enforcement, the Fiori approach may be diluted. I’ve seen apps that are purportedly “Fiori” but just don’t feel right.

Only time will tell. What is your experience of custom Fiori apps? Have you seen Fiori apps that, well, aren’t?

User Experience Sessions at TechEd: SAP Screen Personas, Fiori, UX Strategy, Design Services by Peter Spielvogel SAP TechEd && d-code, arguably the most important event in SAP’s annual calendar, is fast approaching. Already, the Las Vegas edition … which I like to call the “warm up before the main European event” :-) … is less than a month away. I noted the Fiori related sessions in a previous TWIF episode 2014-35 and just this week Peter Spielvogel from SAP writes this post detailing some of them. Ironically, he does this in the SAPGUI area on the SAP Community Network (SCN).

I pointed out in TWIF 2014-35 that there didn’t appear to be enough Fiori related sessions (although some folks on Twitter are complaining that all they hear about in relation to TechEd is Fiori and HANA, c’est la vie) but I’m hopeful that there will be at least some coverage in the “hallway track” and in the Code Jams and hands-on activities that run throughout the week.

In particular, I’d encourage you to look out for the SAP Web IDE stuff. This is the new name for SAP River RDE, which has also some history in the Web Application ToolkiT (WATT) and prior to that the SAP App Designer. What ancestry already! While some of us like to build Fiori apps from the ground up (coding view elements directly in XML, with our UI5 stickers adorning our laptops) there are a great number of people who need guidance. Guidance in both forms – technical, and design (see the certification piece earlier). And for these folks, and those looking for the right tools to extend existing SAP Fiori apps, the SAP Web IDE is something not to miss.

Introduction to SAP Fiori UX – an update I wrote about this course back at the beginning of August. Today, along with many thousands of co-participants, I’m well underway with the course materials, into Week 3. For those of you not taking part, here are the the topics covered:

• Week 1: SAP Fiori UX Basics
• Week 2: SAP Fiori UX Deployment
• Week 3: SAP Fiori UX Configuration
• Week 4: Securing SAP Fiori UX
• Week 5: SAP UI Tools
• Week 6: Extending SAP Fiori UX
• Week 7: Final Exam

Despite these topic titles, I must admit to having expected a little more on the “UX” part of the title. So far, I don’t remember seeing any real Fiori screen, much less an analysis of how and why it might have been designed that way, and certainly nothing about what lies underneath (the controls in the UI5 toolkit). But it’s still relatively early days, and I haven’t given up hope.

One thing I’m also not giving up hope on is the approach Open SAP will have to rectifying incorrect “correct” answers to questions in the weekly assignments. For those of you on the course (and therefore with access to the discussion areas), here’s an example of where a question was asked, with the officially correct answer actually being incorrect. (There are other instances of this happening on the course too, but I think those are down to oversights rather than anything else.)

The answer in question, so to speak, related to the deployment steps for frontend and backend Fiori components, and whether they were the same. Of course, with the variations on system landscapes, ABAP and HANA stacks, and even the deployment tools themselves, the answer is “no”. But this has been marked as incorrect by Open SAP. While in the grand scheme of things this hardly matters, to those taking the course, it’s both a matter of principle and an area that one would feel strongly about, being the type of person taking the course, i.e. one that enjoys exacting detail.

I’m sure that the Open SAP folks will sort this out before the course is over.

Before leaving this subject, I would also like to point out that the course content has been rather dry so far. For example, this week’s lectures entail the long winded description of configuration (especially in the area of role assignments in PFCG), only backed up by static slides. Unless I missed it, I didn’t see any actual real live screencasts of configuration in action. I don’t know about you, but I can only take so many slides with theory on them, I need to see things in action. As one of my favourite TV characters likes to say, “let the dog see the rabbit”!