Automatic Sharing

You can use this feature to automatically share your pieces of equipment and the defined dependent objects with your connected partners in the network.

You can create sharing patterns in the Patterns section of the Network Authorizations application. Here you can add the business partners organizations for whom the sharing pattern applies and also select the relevant business objects that are to be automatically shared.

A business partner can be associated with only one sharing pattern in each scope of an organization.

A sharing-pattern-specific authorization group is created for each business partner maintained in a sharing pattern, and this is displayed in the Groups section of the Network Authorizations app together with your other authorization groups.

Sharing Supported for the Following Object Types for Equipment:

Equipment: Equipment header is always shared.
You must set the automatic sharing for all the dependent objects. By default, they are disabled.
- Model
- Attribute Values
- Indicator Values
- Documents: selection option for automatic sharing and privileges is available for each document type.
- Spare Parts
- Instructions: selection option for automatic sharing and privileges is available for each instruction type.
- Failure Modes
- Announcements: selection option for automatic sharing and privileges is available for each announcement type.
- Assessments (only available with a subscription to SAP Asset Strategy and Performance Management)

Prerequisites

Automatic Sharing must be enabled in Application Settings app under General Application Settings Organizational Configurations Automatic Sharing.
Your user ID has the roles SHARING_DELETE, or SHARING_EDIT assigned.

Note

The creation and editing of sharing patterns requires one of the sharing-related role templates described above. However, you need to be aware that if automatic sharing functionality is enabled, the sharing is automatically triggered – based on the configuration in your sharing patterns – with the publishing of a piece of equipment, that is, by an activity of users with EQUIPMENT_EDIT or EQUIPMENT_DELETE privileges. To avoid accidental sharing of your pieces of equipment, it is therefore strongly recommended that you roll out this information - before enabling automatic sharing - to all users in your organization to whom the respective role templates are assigned to.

Procedure

Open the Network Authorizations app.
Choose the Patterns tab.
In the New Sharing Pattern popup, provide an appropriate pattern name and description.

Note

As currently only equipment is supported as primary object for automatic sharing the Pattern For field is prefilled and cannot be changed.
Choose OK.

You are navigated to the sharing pattern object page.
In the Business Partners section, choose Add.

You can select the relevant business partners in the Select Business Partner popup and choose Select.

Note

Multiple business partners can be added to a sharing pattern, but a business partner can be associated with only one sharing pattern in each subscribed network product of an organization. If a business partner was already assigned to a sharing pattern in one subscribed network product, it will not be displayed in the Select Business Partner popup anymore.

You can also remove the existing business partners from the sharing pattern using the Remove button. However, they can still view the business objects that are already shared with them.

Note

The removal of a business partner does not affect the business objects that had already been shared previously with this business partner, but only future automatic sharing based on the updated sharing pattern.

In the Business Objects section, choose Edit to configure the automatic sharing. Select the business objects that must be shared along with the equipment. Set the Privileges (Read/Write) and Grant to Share flag for each of the selected dependent objects. Alternatively, you can use the Access Privilege and Grant to Share dropdown menus to perform the respective operations on multiple objects at once.

The equipment header is always shared by default. The sharing is initially disabled by default for the dependent objects and need to be actively selected within the sharing pattern.

Note

You can now automatically share image documents (documents that have no category assigned to them) as well.

If you have enabled the grant to share flag for an object or its dependent objects, it allows the business partner to reshare these objects. If a business partner with grant rights makes some changes on the shared object owned by you and publishes it, the object is automatically reshared with you.

Note

The modified and published object is not reshared with you, if the business partner has no grant rights and has not enabled automatic sharing.

Based on the sharing pattern defined by the business partner for their organization, the modified and published object is also reshared with all the other relevant business partners.
Click Save

Upon saving the sharing pattern, a sharing-pattern-specific authorization group is created for each of the maintained business partners, and will be listed in the Network Authorization Groups tab.

Editing Sharing Patterns

You can perform the following editing activities on a sharing pattern:

Remove a business partner

The removal of a business partner does not affect the business objects that were previously shared with this business partner, that is, business partners can still view these business objects. The removal will only affect any automatic sharing that is happening after the removal of the business partner.
Select/Deselect business objects

If business objects get added or removed from a sharing pattern, the changes will take effect when the sharing logic is applied the next time, that is, after the creation and publishing of a piece of equipment respectively the update and publishing of a new revision of a piece of equipment.

Note

Deselecting business objects will not automatically unshare. It will still be shared with those business partners with whom its already shared, but going forward after the deselection, any further changes on the object will not be shared.

For example, if an object abc is already shared with business partners B1(in sharing pattern SP1) and B2 (in sharing pattern SP2). You deselect or remove abc from SP1. Now, abc is still shared with B1 and B2, but only B2 will receive any further changes made on abc.
Change of the maintained Read/Write privileges

If the access privileges for a selected business object get changed, the changes will take effect when the sharing logic is applied the next time (see above).
Change grant rights

You can update the grant permissions (on & off) for a given object in a particular group. Making changes to the grant flag will not lead to unshare of the objects. The changes will take effect when the sharing logic is applied the next time (see above).

Examples:

Automatic Sharing Situation:

Organization A (OrgA) and Organization B (OrgB) are maintained as business partners on a sharing pattern (SP1).
Equipment E1, E2, E3 were shared based on sharing pattern SP1, upon initial publishing of the respective pieces of equipment.

Editing situations and effect on the initial business objects:

	Organization A	Organization B
Removal of Organization B from sharing pattern	E1, E2, E3 still shared	E1, E2, E3 still shared
New equipment E4 gets published and sharing pattern SP1 applied (with OrgB removed)	E1, E2, E3 still shared, E4 shared	E1, E2, E3 still shared, E4 not shared
Existing equipment E1 gets updated and new revision gets published (with OrgB removed)	E1 shared with applicable updates; E2, E3, E4 still shared	E1 updates not shared anymore; E3, E2, E1 (in its original sharing state) still shared

Organization A

Organization B

Removal of Organization B from sharing pattern

E1, E2, E3 still shared

New equipment E4 gets published and sharing pattern SP1 applied (with OrgB removed)

E1, E2, E3 still shared, E4 shared

E1, E2, E3 still shared, E4 not shared

Existing equipment E1 gets updated and new revision gets published (with OrgB removed)

E1 shared with applicable updates;

E2, E3, E4 still shared

E1 updates not shared anymore;

E3, E2, E1 (in its original sharing state) still shared

Example:

A sharing template defines that equipment are to be shared for Organization A with all documents with Read privileges.
Organization A is also part of another authorization group of the sharing template owner and in this authorization group Document 1 was already shared with Write privileges.
An equipment E5 – which contains Document 1 and Document 2 – is now shared based on the sharing template for Organization A with the result that Document 2 is shared with Read (based on the sharing pattern) whereas Document 1 is still shared with Write (based on the higher maintained privilege in the other authorization group that overrules the Read privilege from the sharing pattern).