Mobile Application Life Cycle

The mobile application provisioning life cycle defines the process by which an enterprise gives users access to applications and other related mobility resources (enterprise data, network connections, and so on) allowing the application to mediate the user interaction with your organization in a sustained and controllable fashion.

• Create – The create stage consists primarily of package and application development, using SAP Mobile Platform-supported mobile data models and SAP Mobile SDK, or a 3rd party SDK and the SAP Mobile Platform REST API.
• Deploy – For applications that use mobile business objects, MBO packages are deployed to SAP Mobile Server to make a package available for a selected domain. It is either a development or administrative task, depending on whether you are in a preproduction or production environment.

  Once deployed, a package can be accessed and used by an application or managed and secured by a domain administrator. The application connection determines how the package engages and interacts with the SAP Mobile Platform runtime.

• Provision – Application provisioning is the process of moving the client application to the device. There are four key steps to application provisioning:
  1. Copying the application to the device.
  2. Installing the application on the device.
  3. Configuring the application.
  4. Securing the device.

  In the development test environment, client application binaries and their dependencies are provisioned to emulators or actual devices. Deployment to devices can be achieved by physically connecting the device to the developer's machine, and copying binaries using device-supported tools. Client applications should be tested in a test environment that emulates the production environment for complete end-to-end testing.

  For production scale deployment, application provisioning is managed using proven products such as Afaria. Afaria offers enterprise-class device application deployment and management features.

• Activate – Application activation -- part of the user onboarding process -- is complete when the application/user starts interacting with the system. From the application user standpoint, this is the automated series of events by which a user, without administrative intervention, can start quickly consuming services. This is actually a multi-step process coordinated by the administrator.

  Connection registration happens via SAP Control Center by defining the conection and setting connection properties. This process registers connections with SAP Mobile Server using the manual or automatic method and pairs the user, device, and application. When this pairing is complete, the application connections are activated.

  Following connection activation, the connection registration pairing is used to determine which connections and customizations are assigned. This assignment activates the application, allowing the user to interact with the system.

• Maintain – Maintenance is about keeping your mobility environment functional and mobile operations healthy. The result of maintenance is system reliability and the preservation and prolonging the life of mobility assets

See Mobile Application Life Cycle for comprehensive information about these stages.

Afaria Server is a recommended component of the landscape to provide enterprise level device application deployment and device management. With SAP Mobile Server, the solution supports end-to-end management and security of devices, and over-the-air (OTA) and push-based deployment of device applications.

Afaria extends SAP Mobile Platform functionality by providing additional device client management features for remote and mobile computing devices, including laptops, desktops, and handheld devices. When Afaria is licensed and implemented with SAP Mobile Platform, the Afaria management console is launched from SAP Control Center.