SAP NetWeaver Business Client 4.0

Useful article from Ingo Deck at SAP. NetWeaver Business Client is a useful hub for starting organisations on their UX journey.

It is simply a fact that most end users of SAP solutions today continue to work with dynpro based user interface (UI) screens. More and more they face also newer user interfaces based on Web Dynpro, Floorplan Manager or even other UI technologies like HTML5/SAP UI5. Also a mix with custom or third party screens is often standard in a users’ daily business.

For exactly these end user scenarios the SAP NetWeaver Business Client (NWBC) provides a role-based, integrative single point of entry to the SAP solution space independent of the used UI technology – which the end user doesn’t care about anyway

While focusing on the integration of dynpro, Web Dynpro and SAPUI5 based applications also any kind of web-based content can be easily embedded and accessed by users. With this capability the NWBC can significantly facilitate the work with SAP solutions for end users by providing a uniform look and feel, one central point of access as well as personalization options.

In its current version 4.0 we listened closely to the feedback from customers that has led to improvements like:

• Reducing the NWBC real estate to allow more focus on the real content for a user
• Following well known browser paradigms with a tab based navigation approach or a new tab page – reducing training needs
• Offering a quick launch search field facilitating access of information and navigation for the user
• Harmonized user experience using the new CORBU theme across UI technologies
• Context based – non disruptive – enrichment of existing dynpro screens with new relevant content in a NWBC-rendered side panel

With all these new as well as the well-known existing capabilities of previous releases the NWBC provides a perfect option for customers to perform significant steps towards improving the user experience for their end users TODAY, while leveraging their existing investments.

This is all with very few effort needed. The NWBC is available at no additional costs and initial installation time and complexity is very low – anyone reading this can easily download (from SAP Service Marketplace) and install NWBC within minutes rather than hours.

NWBC provides a full screen view (like in modern browsers) which allows users to focus 100% on the content. The images below show options to combine the tabs and the search row into one, gaining more space for the content while keeping the instant access to your most important navigation elements.