Using SAP Enable Now Launcher

In the 1905 release of the Cloud Edition, SAP Enable Now started its journey toward a Java-free product by allowing the ‘Desktop components’ Producer and Instant Producer to be launched via the SAP Enable Now Launcher instead of via Java Web Start.

To facilitate this, you first need to have SAP Enable Now Launcher installed on your PC. You can arrange for this to be pre-installed on all of your Author’s PCs, or they can install it themselves, via the Manager, as follows:

1. In Manager, select menu option Help > Download SAP Enable Now App Launcher. This will (usually) prompt you to run or save the installer file SAP-Enable-Now-Launcher.msi.

2. Click Run to start the installer. The following (standard Windows software installer) dialog box is displayed:

3. Click Next.

4. If necessary, you can change the folder into which the Launcher will be installed, but you should not normally need to do this. Click Next. The following dialog box is displayed:

5. Click Install. The Launcher is installed, and a confirmation message is displayed:

6. Click Finish.

Once the Launcher has been installed, you need to tell SAP Enable Now to use this, instead of Java Web Start. To do this, go into Server Settings in Manager, and select the new setting Use SENL Launcher, which you can find in the Miscellaneous section.

Now, when you click on the the Launch Producer or Launch Instant Producer link in Manager this will launch the appropriate .senl file instead of the .jnlp file, as shown below. (The installer creates an association for file types of .senl with the application launcher.exe – which is installed in the folder noted earlier)

1. Click Open. You may be prompted with a security warning similar to the one shown below (depending upon your browser and settings):

2. Select the Don’t show me this warning for this program again checkbox, and then click Allow. You should see the following message:

Once this completes, Producer or Instant Producer (as applicable) will be launched as usual.

While this does remove the need to use Java Web Start, getting SEN Launcher installed on every Author’s PC may be more effort than it is worth. In addition, many Authors may use a direct URL, possibly saved as a shortcut, or via a URL shortening service, instead of launching the desktop components via Manager (why would you access Manager if all you do there is launch another component?). You can probably build a URL for the Launcher (as the .senl file is loaded from the cloud server every time anyway), but I haven’t figured out the format of that yet (I’ll update this post when I do).