Most of SAP business driven Companies know the pros and cons about patching the SAP landscape. Projects needs be set up, business users involved, developers and operation staff are required to stay longer and solve issues, due to incompatible customer-exits or enhancements. This effort, companies are spending in lifecycle of SAP landscapes is enormous! This in mind, SAP was rethinking the “Extensibility Concept” to a customer-friendly strategy. Together with the strategy moving things to cloud environments, this “new” concept is taking place and the starting point of the SAP Business Technology Platform.
“Keeping the core clean” – This is the main out-coming of the new extensibility concept by SAP and could be translated to “do not enhance the core with custom code”. The time for implementing exits and enhancements, in GUI selection-screens, reports or WebDynpro applications is over. Keeping the core clean results in a new strategy, splitting SAP-Code and Customer-made-Code into two different worlds. The idea of the SAP Business Technology Platform was born.
To be able to receive and install patches, new functionalities and opportunities from SAP for their own products – running onPremise or in the cloud – is one of the biggest challenges for the digital transformation. This can be achieved by placing your own business logic outside the ‘core’ of your systems.
Outside does not mean to run your code on the ‘Z’-Naming range of your product, e.g. your ERP solution. Your code has to run on a complete other environment. This is called “Side-by-Side”-Extensibility. Your application is running on “another side” but directly on the side of your SAP product.
Hiding and adding fields in standard apps running on the Fiori Launchpad results in ‘keeping standard’. But standard isn’t working always. SAP is providing you the ability to hide or add custom fields, also in products like SAP S/4 HANA Public Cloud tenants, were you do not even get access to the GUI Logon. Therefore SAP is using “In-App”-Extensibility. Within this part of the concept, you as a customer are able to change the UI in an simple, but also slightly way.