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3 ways SAP is bringing mobile and cloud together

3 ways SAP is bringing mobile and cloud together

TAKE NOTE(Insights into the SAP solution and technology)

Don’t think of SAP as just an ERP or CRM vendor. It’s bringing together two technologies of the future, today.

Today, we come to you with three new ways that SAP is combining cloud and mobile technology in advanced ways.

As you might already know, SAP has developed it’s own enterprise-friendly alternative to free cloud storage such as DropBox or Google Drive. It’s called SAP Box. This up-to-2-GB storage service gives SAP Global IT more control and security than public services, while retaining the ease-of-use of a DropBox.

Using SAP Box, employees today can sync documents between iPhone, iPad and Windows PC. Coming soon is an Android app, according to SAP CIO Oliver Bussmann. Bussmann says he still intends to make SAP Box available to external customers.

While SAP Box provides good security, sometimes you need even more…as in the case of confidential financial documents for members of SAP’s Supervisory Board (equivalent to an American corporate board of directors).

Vendors like Citrix would argue that the only way to guarantee data security is to keep documents off the mobile device and store them only on a server.

But there’s a huge cost in usability. Financial documents can be very long, making them clumsy to read and hard to access on the go when in the cloud.

Enter the SAP Board Docs app for the iPad.

SAP Board Docs provides an extra-secure sandbox for users to view and download files on their iPads. To secure the documents locally, users must enter an additional strong password on top of the device password.

The use of a sandbox means that users can use the app either on a company-owned and managed tablet, or on a personal one, too.

SAP Board Docs was built using Sybase Unwired Platform, Sybase Relay Server, SAP Gateway and in the most secure area, the SAP internal ERP system powered by SAP Netweaver.

In use internally since April, SAP is building a demo version that like the SAP Box, it plans to market to external customers.

The final way SAP is combining cloud and mobile is with its Afaria mobile device management software.

First announced in May, Afaria is today available as a Web-hostedsoftware via the Amazon Web Services cloud.

Combined with Afaria’s 7.0 fresh UI and the 14-day free trial offer, it is now much faster and easier to test drive Afaria to see if it works for your firm.

Being in the cloud also lets your firm avoid the cost and labor of installing your own server to run Afaria.

Customers will still need to have an Afaria license, and additionally, pay usage fees to Amazon.

If you’d prefer to go 100% cloud and subscribe to Afaria instead, you can go to an SAP partner such as Verizon, Orange and others.

 


 

UNDER DEVELOPMENT(Information for ABAP Developers)

A Guide to the New ALV Grid Control – Part 1

Within an SAP system there is a lot of data that needs to be reviewed, maintained, and interpreted. You know what I’m talking about — inventory data, controlling data, accounting data, employee addresses, and so on and so forth. The bigger a company, the greater the amount of data that needs to be output for review and analysis. Within the context of certain applications, the terms “output” and “list” can be synonymous…. READ MORE

Q&A(Your Questions answered)

Q.Can anybody help me in understanding the meaning of factory method in abap object? what is the importance of this?

A. Seems like more and more developers are interested in Design Patterns.

Without the use of Design Patterns, Object Oriented Programming is never going to give fruitful results. There are so many patterns that are proposed and being proposed. If you are not learning simple and common Design Patterns, one day you will hit the dead end or you will spend time reinventing the wheel. To have a good knowledge in Design Patterns, I would suggest you read Design Patterns: In Object-Oriented ABAP.

The Factory is a basic pattern, included in many other more specialized patterns. We might also see it as definition of a family of patterns.

According to Wikipedia – “the factory pattern is a creational design pattern used in software development to encapsulate the processes involved in the creation of objects.”

Whenever the client (Caller) does not produce an object itself, but has to call a method of a class (static) or an object (instance). it is a factory. There are many reasons why we wouldn’t use the CREATE OBJECT statement to create an object, but they can all be summarized as shifting responsibility from the client (Caller) to a factory class or an object.

These are a few possible motivations to replace direct object instantiation with a factory:

(1) Creation of an object requires a lot of code and we want to avoid redundancy code.

(2) The client (Caller) needs an object without knowing its class. It utilizes polymorphism:
The object must implement an interface or it must be an instance of an abstract class (or a superdass).

For example, the client needs an animal and the factory might return a cat or a dog. They both meet the client’s requirement (because they are both animals). but it doesn’t (need to) know in advance which one of them it will get. The decision is complex and not of concern to the composing object (client). However, the factory class (or object) knows the algorithm and the client will get the proper object returned.

(3) The object needs special initialization with information not known to the client. The factory will have this information and the client will get the properly initialized object.

(4) The factory needs to keep a certin level of control over the object. The client will use the object, but the factory will “keep in touch” with it for some reason. Say for taking care of the objects lifetime, or synchronization with other objects, or possibly dispatching a generic method call.

A real life example – The new Advanced List Viewer (ALV) object model class CL_SALV_TABLE (a wrapper around the good old CL_GUI_ALV_GRID) can only be instantiated by use of its own factory method, which is even called FACTORY. (see below)

DATA : go_salv TYPE REF TO cl_salv_table,
gt_spfli TYPE TABLE OF spfli.

SELECT • FROM spfli INTO TABLE gt_spfli .

cl_salv_table->factory(
IMPORTING r_sal v_tbale = go_salv
CHANGING  t_table = gt_spfli ) .

go_sa l v->display( ).

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