UCES vs SAP Multichannel Foundation for Utilities

[Former Member]

Dear Experts,

We would like to know the advantages of implementing SAP MFU over SAP UCES.

Can someone draw the comparisons based on the offerings by the two services.

Surely, we want something that should be device independent (can run on desktop/tablet/mobile) , an emerging solution and on which SAP will continue to invest as new developments/enhancements/refinements etc.

I've gone through a lot of blogs that explain / outline SAP MFU as SAP's new strategy to help utilities implement modern customer engagement applications.

But before coming to any conclusion, we would like to hear from the experts

BR,

Anurag

[Former Member]

Hi,

SAP MFU is the new strategy of the SAP department, who owned SAP UCES. Instead of offering a full operational frontend and investing continously in enhancements, the new strategy is to focus just on providing the interfaces to develop your own frontend. Instead of RFC you communicate using ODATA between client-side and server-side - basically just simple AJAX calls. Behind the scence you will still have somewhere the classic RFC interfaces which also UCES is using.

Right now SAP MFU will be the path very SAP is investing and not SAP UCES, but this does not necessary mean it is the best choice. ODATA is fantastic to enable device independent apps, but personally i have my doubt that a solution relaying on 100% pure AJAX / ODATA calls will be the answer for everything - we already experiened handicaps our company developed the first WCEM mobile app using pure HTML5 & ODATA, which is absolutely the same strategy as SAP MFU does apply. For me the best solution would have been to have still a classic application front-end like SAP UCES available that has ODATA enabled on top, so that you can choose between server-side and client-side ways to implement specific behaviours.

We already implemented that approach at two solutions my.bkw.ch  and my.groupe-e.ch.

But don't get me wrong, SAP MFU was choosen by SAP als better option as most of the clients decided to anyway implement their own front-end and just used the middleware of SAP UCES. That's because the SAP UCES frontend has quite a code history and would appreciate some refactoring. That's something i had to do myself but then it was quite easy to enable ODATA without extra work - but this means you need a very good expertise using UCES.

So under the bottom line SAP MFU might be for some clients the best and only option, but as i already stated i doubt that's for all the best as legacy support for older browsers is tough. It will be definetenly fun to use SAP MFU , but I highly recommend to analyze the situation for every client before making a decision. If you do not have any SAP UCES expertise available as it is quite a rare skill, then you might anyway go for SAP MFU.

Hope that helps?

Regards

[yevgen_trukhin · Accepted solution]

Surely, we want something that should be device independent (can run on desktop/tablet/mobile) , an emerging solution and on which SAP will continue to invest as new developments/enhancements/refinements etc.

Hi Anurag, i think the answer is Multichannel foundation for Utilities based on NW Gateway because it offers device independence with REST/Odata support and this solution is in development and has a roadmap.

AJAX/REST based application are industry standard: facebook, linkedin, netflix and many more applications are based on REST apis and HTML5.

In terms of feature set, Multichannel foundation offers similar functionality as UCES but also offers better integration with CRM: contract and quotation management processes, products. There is also support for features that were not offered in UCES: service notification, service order management, EDM integration, communication preference management, outage management and many others.

For the list of supported features, you can check here.

Now on top of foundation, there are 2 delivered UI templates: 1) desktop application developed with SAP UI5 (HTML5), 2) responsive design application that adapts automatically to any screen size and mobile devices (tablets, smartphones) which are examples how to use the foundation to develop UIs.

Best Regards, Yevgen