SUP 2.1 and Afaria, need clarifications

[Former Member]

Hi,

my company is starting a project to implement SUP for HR approvals. Upon checking the license, we have bought license for SUP. All this is before I joined this company, so I wasn't involved with the procurement/licensing process.

We intend to have mobile apps on iPhone, Android and BB to apply/approve HR leave/claims/etc.

As I am unfamiliar with Sybase products, can anyone advise me if Afaria is mandatory? If we do not have Afaria, how do we get the mobile apps into the various phones?

2nd question is regarding licensing. We have 800 users in our company. We have purchased SUP enterprise developer license x2 and SUP mobility license x800. With this, does it mean we can use the standard mobile apps from SAP for iphone/android/BB for HR, or do we have to develop our own iphone apps?

Sorry for these very novice questions.

regards,

Nick

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi

Afaria is not mandatory and you can come up with various methods of loading the apps on the devices (blackberry or Android, a website to download the apps from should normally be fine) but Apple/iOS is a different case but if I would give my best guess, you probably need an enterprise developer account with Apple.

Copy from apple developer site:

Distributing Enterprise Apps for iOS 4 Devices

Commercial apps can be purchased, downloaded, and installed by users through the App Store. But if you develop an enterprise app that you want to distribute only to your employees, the app must be digitally signed with a certificate issued by Apple through the Developer Enterprise Program. You must also have an enterprise distribution provisioning profile that allows a device to use the app. Without a valid provisioning profile, the app wonu2019t open.

The process for deploying an in-house apps is:

Register for the iOS Developer Enterprise Program.

Prepare your app for distribution.

Create an enterprise distribution provisioning profile that authorizes devices to use apps youu2019ve signed.

Build the app with the provisioning profile.

Deploy the app to your users.

If your company is not planning to expand on the number of apps then you might be fine without Afaria.

Regarding licencing that is one area where normally you have to discuss directly with SAP/Sybase since they make so many different type of contracts depending on customer, country etc. Hopefully they did a good job and took care of all needed licences during the contract negotiations, including the ECC licences for those 800 users that might not be already licenced.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thank you so much for your detailed answer.

[Former Member]

Hi,

I have another question now from project management point of view.

If my company wants to implement SUP and Afaria and use the standard mobile app from Sybase -> Sybase Mobile Workflow for SAP® Business Suite, is a BASIS consultant expertise sufficient to implement the entire project successfully?

Also assuming that if the users are happy with the standard features, we can avoid development or programming totally in the project? Meaning we do not need to hire a SUP/Mobile App developer?

regards,

Nick

[Former Member]

Hi,
> I have another question now from project management point of view.
> 
> If my company wants to implement SUP and Afaria and use the standard mobile app from Sybase -> Sybase Mobile Workflow for SAP® Business Suite, is a BASIS consultant expertise sufficient to implement the entire project successfully?
> 
> Also assuming that if the users are happy with the standard features, we can avoid development or programming totally in the project? Meaning we do not need to hire a SUP/Mobile App developer?
> 
> regards,
> Nick

A standard SAP Basis consultant will struggle without some good training or good amount of time to have everything up and running. A portal/java stack Basis consultant will get up to speed quicker or anyone with good experience with working with SAP and networking/internet enablement. I don't have extensive Afaria experience but from what I hear there seem to be a lot of undocumented issues in deploying it, where having someone with experience really helps in getting it up and running smoothly.

The Sybase Mobile Workflow for SAP Business Suite is for mobilizing your current (or new) Universal Worklist workflows from SAP so it depends on that part being done inside SAP so you could say the heavy lifting is done inside SAP.

If users are happy with the standard then you will not need a SUP/Mobile developer on board, that is the theory at least. I would love to see someone who has actually implemented this confirm or reject that claim but as of now I can't imagine that being needed since there is no actual coding to be done.

[Former Member]

Browsing through the technical documentation again, it might be wise to have some support from an ABAP developer if the SAP Basis is not very comfortable with working with SE80. Surprisingly (to me atleast) you will need to create the RFC's yourself but Sybase provides good instructions, step by step.

Reading through this document: [Mobile Workflow for Business Suite 1.2 - Overview and Customization|http://www.sybase.com/files/White_Papers/Sybase_MobileWorkflowForSAPBusSuite_technical_wp.pdf] will give you more in depth information on what is required technically for deployment.

[Former Member]

What about the relay servers for SUP? Do we need to purchase them seperately like Afaria or are they bundled with SUP?

[Former Member]

Relay server is part of SUP and should be included in your license for that. to be 110% sure you could have someone check the contract since I have never seen an actual SUP contract and don't know how they are structured. The relay server is in a way a simple load/security/proxy type of addon to a webserver (IIS or apache) that I have never seen this type of server being priced seperately from the main server.

[Former Member]

Thank you once again Bjorn,

you have been most helpful.