EEWB & AET

Both EEWB (Easy Enhancement Workbench) and AET (Application Enhancement Tools) tools are used to add custom fields to any CRM object. Going back to history, EEWB was provided by SAP from CRM 4.0 (I only started working from CRM 4, not sure if it existed before) and was very handy tool to add new fields on CRM 4, 5.  EEWB was mainly used by developers as it still required some technical knowledge for adding fields. AET has taken the wizard to next level by enabling to directly add fields on CRM UI. AET is quite easy to use and was mainly designed with the idea to simplify adding of custom fields to any CRM object. Any person with fair amount of CRM knowledge can use AET to add custom fields.

I like both of these tools and worked extensively of EEWB. Using EEWB, I added fields. Then I created tables, tabstrips and included those custom fields on the Additional Data tab in CRMD_ORDER. This was possible as we were still working on GUI and I could play around in any way according to the requirement. We can’t add tables using AET as of now. If SAP can provide this option in the future releases, that would be great.

Below are few things that I want to highlight about these two tools.

1.       Any custom fields added using AET doesn’t exist on Additional Data/Customer Fields Tab on CRMD_ORDER. This is a bit strange and I really didn’t understand why SAP didn’t provide this feature. I know SAP wants to drive CRM only through web UI. But still I would like to have this feature of displaying custom fields added using AET on GUI as well. This is the only concern that I have with AET.

2.       AET has made life much simpler if we want to add dropdown boxes, Search Helps, Currency and Quantity fields.  Using EEWB, it was a bit more complicated in having these features.

3.       Using AET, we can reuse the custom fields in other objects. This is really cool thing which prevents us to recreate the same custom field if required in any other object.

For now, I’m enjoying AET more than EEWB. AET is future ahead for adding new fields. Maybe AET will have the capability to add assignment blocks directly some day.