msc mobile emerging technologies blog

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There are different kind of risks a business traveler is facing. First of all most people will think of their mission and the risks it brings. They travel because they have to repair a machine, close a deal, deliver a training or push the business in a new territory. They always have the risk that their mission will fail. Not everybody is thinking about the risks not directly related to their business - taxation in other countries, immigration, customs, terror, natural disasters and health risks. What we present you today is falling into the last category.

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I have an Apple Watch since the first day and I do not want to miss it. There are two primary functions that I use it for - as a fitness tracker and an alarm clock. Could I live without one? Of course! It is convenient, but it is not as revolutionary as the iPhone was. But does it make sense to consider the Apple Watch for B2E scenarios?

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In April 2016 I visited the Apps World in Berlin. It is the first time I went to this event - I think sometimes that I am stuck too much in the SAP ecosystem - UI5, Fiori and the typical SAP solutions. I wanted to see what others are doing. As they had one track about enterprise mobility, this was the right event for me.

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It is our goal to make business travel as easy, stress free and save as possible. For that we have great solutions like Travel Plus for SAP and the Travel Compliance Monitor. With them it is easy like never before to get approval for your trip, make sure you are compliant while you are on the road and last but not least submit your expense report for fast payment.

But there are things that our software can not help you with, like for example how to best pack your luggage. The following infographic that we found on Quill.com will help you with that.

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There are a number of technologies that are becoming more and more important in the SAP world. Next to SAP's new flagship HANA we are talking about OData and SAP UI5. Therefore it is no surprise that SAP enabled their SQL Anywhere database to speak OData as well.

This blog will show how to enable the SQL Anywhere database to become an OData provider and how to consume this service from a locally installed WebIDE.

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Travel Management is around in the SAP ERP system since the late 1980s. This blog shows a brief history of the user interface of the travel management in the last 35 years.

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We discussed the synchronization of high data volumes for offline availability before. SAP has used a similar architecture with MobiLink, the Exchange Framework and SAP UI5 in what they called the SAAP - SAP Always Available Platform. Breck Carter has written a great blog post about it - SAAP Is Built On SQL Anywhere.  

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SAP offers more and more business processes that are running out of the box on mobile devices. This is done by rolling out a growing number of so called Fiori Apps. But also on the technology side SAP is catching up by introducing mobile friendly technologies like UI5, Gateway/Odata, SAP Mobile Platform and HCP Mobile Services.

These applications and technologies are great to mobilize 95% of all online and offline use cases, but there are exceptions where they are not enough. This includes:

1. Offline applications with a very high data volume (Millions of records or GB of data)
2. Offline applications which require a synchronization that is sub-second
3. Applications with an ultra-fast user interface

SAP has another technologies that they acquired together with Sybase and Syclo – MobiLink and the Exchange Framework. This blog will give an introduction an architecture consisting of the Exchange Framework, MobiLink and Apache Cordova. It will explain how they can be utilized to create solutions that can meet the three previous mentioned attributes.

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The shift from the PC into the mobile world continues - I just stumbled accross this article on US Today about Eli Lilly - they bought 15 000 iPads for their fieldworkers.

The world is changing faster and faster when it comes to the adoption of new technologies. According to this report by Cisco, in 2020 there will be more people owning a phone (5.4 billion) than people with electricity (5.3 billion).