SAP Fiori Mobile – Microsoft Intune Integration is Here!

First published on CloudBlogs on May 17, 2016
We are really excited to announce the availability of some of work that Microsoft and SAP have been engineering together that ensures custom hybrid mobile SAP Fiori apps can be enabled with the management and security capabilities 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. This is why customers all over the world tell us that they want both of these sets of apps to securely share data and empower users to achieve more. Engineering this integration to be both empowering and secure took some thought and innovation; there were a few 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, ensure the corporate data is separated from personal data on devices, and apply security and protection to these assets. 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 that help guide users 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 can watch Senthil Krishnapillai (SAP's VP & Head of Development) talk more about this here . 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 Q3 2016 .  Microsoft Intune is the first EMM solution integrated into the SAP HANA Cloud Platform 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 hybrid mobile 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 hybrid mobile service for SAP Fiori. If a customer is an EMS or Intune customer, when they build their custom hybrid SAP Fiori apps, the Intune mobile application management (MAM) capabilities can be automatically added to the apps.
• The hybrid mobile SAP Fiori apps are then published to SAP’s enterprise apps store – SAP Mobile Place.
• The hybrid mobile 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. For the future, we will continue to invest to make the integration even more seamless.

These apps can be pushed to the users’ mobile devices, or the users can install the apps from the Intune Company Portal. Because Intune’s 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. Also, because the Office and Fiori apps are participating in the same MAM solution, they can securely share data on any device. Pretty amazing . From the customer’s standpoint, with a few simple configuration steps, any current or net-new SAP Fiori app can be consumed as a robust, highly customized, responsive hybrid mobile app. With Intune, your integration, deployment, management and data loss prevention requirements are solved almost automatically. There are a variety of really impressive SAP Fiori standard apps already available – you can check them out here ! Also watch this demonstration of how to build a custom SAP Fiori app with the Intune MAM capabilities auto-integrated into the apps. We are really excited about the opportunities this partnership creates for our customers, how it empowers end-users, and the way it gives IT the tools it needs to protect company data. This is just the first step in the SAP and Microsoft partnership, and we look forward to expanding it! Brad Anderson Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Senthil Krishnapillai Global Vice President, SAP