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Customer onDemand – Part 3

Guus Dorenbos, 29 augustus 2012

Extending the Customer onDemand Userinterface

In last weeks blog I highlighted the implementation steps of a Customer onDemand project. As is the case with most SAP CRM implementations you will face business requirements that are not in the standard solution. During the implementation but also after go-live, you might need to enhance the application to facilitate these business requirements. In this weeks blog we have a first look on the Customer onDemand application enhancement tool. With this “Key User Tool” we can easily adapt the user interface.

Key User Extensibility vs. Cloud Developer Studio

Before we have a closer look at the Key User Tool, I must point out that CoD has a more advanced tool called “Cloud Developer Studio” which is actually the CoD’s inherent SDK. The Cloud Developer Studio is used to design new Business Objects or a complete new Work Center but also for Integration purposes via Web services. Both tools combined offer great flexibility to extend the Customer onDemand solution.

Example

As an administrator with the proper rights You have the option to enter the Adaptation mode. The yellow-grey bar at the top indicates clearly that you are in the Adaptation mode.

Click on AdaptàEdit screen


Changing the screen lay out

In the pane on the right you see which tabs are visible and which tabs are available. In this example I will add the Chart tab. To reorder the Tabs you can use the controls just above the Tabs table or you can just drag the Charts Tab next to the Overview tab.

To change the order of the sections you can also drag a section to where you want it to be.
When you click on Save in the right pane, you can try out your changes before publishing them. When you are happy with your changes click on publish. Take note that, if authorized to do so, users can change the lay out of their screens themself via the Personalize option. When you want to publish your changes you can decide if you want to overwrite the personalization for all users. Finally leave the Adaptation mode.

Custom Fields

Lets assume you want to add an extra field in the Header. In this example we want to add a field called Green Energy Index with the values A to E.
Again the Accountscreen is opened in the Adaptation mode. In the adapt pane, select Headerwhich highlights the Header in the left side of the screen.
In the Adapt pane you see the available field but also the option Add fields.

For Field type we use List and add the values A to E. Note that you can maintain Field labels, Tooltips and values in different languages. Save the changes for testing. The field is created at the bottom of the Header pane. Just drag the field to the desired position. Finally choose publish if you are satisfied with the results.

When you scroll down in the adapt pane you can click on Further Usage you can decide if you want your new field to be available in for example Templates, Data sources and Reports or in a Central Enterprise Search.


These are just but two simple examples of how you can enhance Customer onDemand to your needs. Lets summarize the possibilities:
Capabilities:
  • Re-order fields (vertically) in the header layout
  • Re-order section groups within Facet
  • Create New Facets
  • Re-order Facets
  • Re-label Facets
  • Re-label Fields
  • Re-order fields in a dataset view
  • Define Sorting and Group By for fields in dataset view

There are however some limitations in that you can not adapt every view but cetrtainly the most common views such as:
  • Account
  • Contact
  • Competitor
  • Lead
  • Opportunity
  • Target Group
  • Campaign
  • Employee
  • Product

Still this goes further than the end user personalization options for screens. One Final mention is the ability to add standard mashups and web services such as Google News, BI reports or other customer specific web services. The next image shows a standard mashup of Reuters Latest News

How does a Customer Specific Solution make it to the productive system?

When you’re a SAP CRM professional you may have noticed that when saving and publishing the screen adaptations there was no Transport request pop up. So how do these enhancements find their way to a productive system?
To answer this you need to have a test tenant in which you develop your customer enhancements. If you use the Cloud Developer Studio you can download the Customer Specific Solution to a local file and upload it to the productive CoD tenant. A quick and easy way is to do the development of simple stuff again in the productive tenant. 

Again these are basic examples but it gives you an impression of the adaptability of SAP Customer onDemand. Personally I see parallels with the Application Enhancement Tool (AET) of SAP CRM on premise. Of course there is always room for improvement. For example Customer onDemand could do with a proper transport mechanism, in case you use the Key User tool.

SAP Customer onDemand

This concludes a series of three blogs dedicated to SAP Customer onDemand.  I have introduced you to a couple of aspects of SAP Customer onDemand. I hope I have raised your interest in this new SAP Cloud solution. SAP is rapidly adding more and more functionality to the solution. Wether stand alone or integrated with SAP ECC and SAP CRM on premise will form a formidable advantage over other CRM cloud solutions.

Once again I would appreciate your thoughts on this topic. Should you have any questions or remarks you would like to share please use the comments section for this. You can also contact me by e-mail (guus.dorenbos@acorel.nl)


Guus Dorenbos

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