Do you still have a need for specialized tools for handling SAP Integration Suite?

It is a topic that comes up all the time. SAP customers have Cloud ALM, Solman or Cloud Transport management that they want to be using for all applications. What is the the overwhelming evidence that you should use a separate tool or you can use an existing tool for it.

As an SAP customer, you need to manage many different applications from S/4 HANA, Successfactors, and BTP services like Fiori, Build, or Integration Suite. If all of them need a special tool, you will have a hard time finding a common process.

What should enable you to decide to use a separate or custom app vs using the standard app?

I covered much of the same on this post two weeks ago. I think this can add some more perspective.??

Let me illustrate it with a recent example of the difference.

SAP Partner Directory UI.

This weekend, I saw the new UI for the Partner Directory. It enables you to work with the Partner Directory without using APIs/Postman. It has some nice features to help you understand your partners and edit them well.

This feature has been highly prioritized because it is needed for the Pipeline Concept. I don't think we would have seen it released in just six months since the release of Pipeline Concept.

You can see my short video of it here.

I could see a few differences where Figaf does make your life easier

• Make it easier to work with your XSLT. In the current UI you need to save the XSLT locally to view or modify them. In Figaf you can modify the XSLT directly.
• Debug the XSLT so SAP Cloud Integration comes with an XSLT 3.0 parser and it provides a lot of functionalities to use Java API and for instance value mappings. In Figaf you can just test this on the tenant and see the result of the query.
• Understand where each partner directory entry is used for which iflows
• Understand when a partner or parameter is changed and from what
• Be able to transport the Integration together with the relavant iflows.

There are some features that SAP could add, but some would probably be fairly expensive to add.

We added our first UI for Partner Directory in our 2405 (May release, 5 months ago) and have been adding a few new features to simplify the usage of the Partner Directory for each use case.

Transport process

So if you are working with pipeline and want to include them in your transports it is going to be a bit more challenge.

So you can now add the iflows to your SAP transport that can go thru the approval stages.

After it is approved and imported you would have the following steps.

1. Configure the iflow according to some documentation
2. Deploy the iflows
3. Create the Partner Directory entries.
4. Add security artifacts

This is the part that is hidden and probably the one that takes the longest.

All of this can be mastered with the help of Figaf making ti possible to create one transport to manage it all.

Alternatives

If you want better control over these artifacts, you can create a custom Git pipeline or some other way of delivering this. But that will require some additional steps.

So when should you consider a separate app instead of using standard tools

That is one of the questions in all organizations. It somehow has to be with the benefit for each type of app you can gain.

My criteria would be

• Is it possible to synchronize the deployment (notice with the manual steps that needs to be perfomed before it will work)
• Number of hours saved in the organization and will the business case be positive
• Can the tool enrich the main transport application to give a one overview
• Will it give us better governance
• Does it provide other functionalities that can simplify our life making it possible to deliver faster.

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For SAP Integration Suite I see you can set check mark on all the areas if you use Figaf

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