SAP have announced a new tier of licensing for SAP Enable Now. In this blog post we look at what it is and what it might mean to SAP Enable Now customers.
Under current licensing models, SAP Enable Now licenses are ‘named user’ licenses (although they can be re-assigned), and are priced differently for on-premise and cloud editions. For the on-premise edition, Creators and Consumers are priced separately (with Creator licenses being significantly more expensive). For the cloud edition, there is only a single tier, covering both Creators and Consumers. This cloud model is simple, and allows the liberal use of Instant Producer by SMEs, Power Users, and similar users within the organization, as well as allowing anyone within the corporation to access SAP Enable Now content.
Increasingly, the primary consumption path is via SAP Companion (f.k.a. Web Assistant), connected to one of SAP’s cloud offerings, such as S/4, SuccessFactors, and so on. However, customers often provide access to (some of) their systems up to external parties. For example, a customer may use Ariba and provide access to this to their suppliers. And, naturally, they want these external parties to see the in-application help they are providing for those systems. The problem with this is that the external parties are usually not defined to the client’s Identity Provider for SSO – and even if they were, they would need their own SAP Enable Now license to be able to display the help content, and that quickly becomes prohibitively expensive – not to mention difficult to manage as suppliers’ personnel change without notification (to the end customer) and SAP Enable Now requires a separate login for every person accessing the content.
To resolve this problem, SAP has announced a new licensing tier called SAP Enable Now, cloud edition, consumption option for external workers. This model is specifically designed for external personnel (such as third-party suppliers using their Ariba system, in our example), allowing them to display (only) SAP Enable Now content through SAP Companion for a lower price. But there are a few things to be aware of here.
Firstly, this is an add-on to the main licensing agreement. It is not possible for a customer to purchase only ‘consumption for external workers’ licenses – they must also have a subscription for ‘regular’ cloud licenses.
Secondly, this type of licensing needs to be enabled in SAP Enable Now. There is a Manager setting (presumably in Server Settings – although details are vague at the moment) which needs to be activated to allow ‘external user access’, but this setting will only be available to customers who have purchased ‘external worker’ licenses.
In addition to this, the customer needs to define a one-off, special ‘technical user’ which has access to published content (only) in the relevant workarea(s). This is effectively a shared Userid (with the Userid and password being defined by the owning organization and communicated to the external party (or parties) as appropriate.
Technically, when a user of the application (such as Ariba) accesses SAP Companion, SAP Companion will first attempt to authenticate them via SSO. If this is successful (the user is an ‘internal’ user), access is granted and the help content is displayed. If this authentication fails, SAP Enable Now will check to see if ‘external worker’ access has been enabled, and if it has, a unique session ID will be generated for this user, and access is granted for this session. It’s important to note here that by default, SAP Companion authentication is performed as soon as the user logs on to the application. You can delay this check until the user actually clicks on the SAP Companion (?) button, by using the parameter readCatalogue=false. However, if you do this you’ll lose the ability to use the Show Instantly option for Help Topics.
Because this access is effectively via a shared Userid (the ‘technical user’), license counts are done on the basis of concurrent users – that is, the number of people accessing SAP Enable Now content via this shared Userid at the same time (effectively, the number of active session IDs) – with the highest number being reported back at the end of each day. The catch here is that the owning organization needs to determine what this number will be, and purchase the appropriate number of ‘consumption for external workers’ licenses in advance. The minimum purchase is 60 (sixty) licenses, and the minimum subscription period is 12 months. I don’t have exact pricing details, but that information may be available soon in the SAP Store.
From a developer / lead point of view, because these licenses are effectively ‘anonymous’, there is no tracking at the user level. However, you will see content consumption metrics in the Manager reports. So, you will see how often the content is being consumed, but not by whom (where it has been consumed by the ‘external workers’).
Finally, these Consumption licenses only allow content consumption through SAP Companion. Users can consume simulations and courseware linked via the Learning page of the Carousel, but they will not be able to access content directly via the Trainer, or via SAP Companion for Desktop.
The new SAP Enable Now Consumption License model will be available from (I believe) June 1st. As a way to increase adoption beyond your own organization, in a cost-effective manner, it’s definitely something worth considering.
