Here is a joint blog we published with Brad Anderson @ Microsoft to highlight the integration of SAP Fiori Mobile with Microsoft Intune.
We are really excited to announce the availability of some of work that Microsoft and SAP have been engineering together to ensure that custom SAP Fiori apps can be enabled with the management and security capabilities that come in the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS ).
SAP has an incredible portfolio of apps. One could argue that Microsoft is the gold-standard for the productivity tools that the world uses, and SAP is the gold-standard for the business apps. Thus, it makes sense that customers would want both of these sets of apps to securely share data and empower users to achieve more! And that is exactly what we hear from customers around the globe!
Engineering this integration to be both empowering and secure took some thought and innovation. There were a couple key customer requirements we had to think through together:
- Organizations want their users to be able to access all the data and apps their employees need, and they want to ensure the corporate data is separated from personal data on devices and has security and protection applied to it. This is important for helping protect company assets as well as removing/wiping company data if necessary – all without touching any personal data.
- Organizations want to empower their users to be able to re-use the business data across all business apps via capabilities like cut/copy/paste, but limit or prevent cut/copy/paste from business apps into personal apps. These are key data loss prevention requirements to help guide user to keep the company data protected.
- Organizations want their business apps to be tailored specifically to their needs (something SAP has a rich history of doing).
Together, Microsoft and SAP are delivering a solution that meets all of these customer requirements – and we are unique in delivering this. You may remember that SAP blogged about this collaboration back in November, and today we’re announcing that the technology enabling these integrated scenarios is in public preview @ SAPPHIRE NOW and will GA in early Q3 2016. Intune is the first EMM solution integrated into the SAP HANA Cloud Platform Fiori Mobile integration framework.
Here’s how it works:
- SAP has developed SAP HANA Cloud Platform mobile service for SAP Fiori. This is a cool service that enables SAP customers to easily generate custom SAP Fiori apps enhancing the SAP Fiori user experience with mobile qualities and significantly improving the usability while leveraging the investment customers made to deploy SAP Fiori applications. I think this is a tremendous innovation from SAP.
- The Microsoft Intune App SDK is encapsulated in a Cordova plug-in that SAP has integrated into the mobile service for SAP Fiori. If a customer is an EMS or Intune customer, when they build their custom SAP Fiori apps, the Intune mobile application management (MAM) capabilities can be automatically added to the apps.
- The SAP Fiori apps are then published to SAP’s enterprise apps store – SAP Mobile Place.
- The SAP Fiori apps can then be downloaded and published to Microsoft Intune where IT Pros can manage the full application lifecycle, including native MAM controls. In the future, we continue to invest to make the integration even more seamless.
At that point the apps can be pushed, the users’ mobile devices or the users can install the apps from the Intune Company Portal. Because the Intune MAM capabilities are integrated into custom SAP Fiori apps, they have the same level of in-depth management as other apps like the Office mobile apps, Box and Adobe Acrobat. Intune adds value to the capabilities that ship in iOS and Android to enable the top two customer requirements above. And, because the Office and Fiori apps are participating in the same MAM solution they can securely share data on any device. Very cool!
From the customer’s standpoint, with a few simple configuration steps, any current or net-new, SAP Fiori application can be consumed as a robust, highly customized, responsive mobile app. With Intune Integration, deployment and management and data loss prevention becomes a breeze as well. There are a variety of SAP Fiori standard apps available already (it is an impressive list) go to this link!
Here is a view of building a custom SAP Fiori app with the Intune MAM capabilities auto-integrated into the apps.
SAP Fiori Mobile - Microsoft Intune integration video
We are really excited about this partnership. And even more excited about the empowering environment that this delivers for end-users, while also delivering what IT needs in protecting the company data. This is just the first step in the SAP and Microsoft partnership. We look forward to continuing to expand the partnership.
Senthil Krishnapillai Brad Anderson
Global Vice President - SAP Corporate Vice President – Microsoft