SAP Screen Personas Technical FAQ from TechEd

Demo/trial/developer accounts

One of the questions that came up in every session was whether there was a way to try SAP Screen Personas before it comes to market in December 2012. We have started the conversation internally and are optimistic that we will have a solution soon.

Performance

Many people asked the performance impact of SAP Screen Personas compared to the standard SAP GUI. The SAP GUI has been optimized over the past many years. All else being equal, nothing will beat the SAP GUI.

But, all Is not equal and SAP Screen Personas can provide two distinct performance advantages.

1. Since the solution allows you to remove fields from the screen, you can reduce the amount of information that needs to get rendered on the screen. This can improve performance. The mitigating factor is that if you add many additional screen elements, you will counter this advantage.
2. SAP Screen Personas allows you to add scripts to the screen that perform several process steps at a time. For example, if you add a way to enter data on the start screen, you can automate its entry on the subsequent transaction screen, bypassing one screen. Similarly, you can merge tabs together and further reduce the number of round-trips to the back-end. Depending on the latency of your network, this could have a significant performance impact.

Sharing flavors/control

Our design goal was to make personalization easy enough for an end-user with basic PowerPoint skills. As you saw in our demos, we have achieved our goal. That said, we have heard many different views on how IT will deliver personalized screens to their business users. Here are the two extremes – everything in between is possible.

Full end-user control

Some IT departments want to empower their end users and give them the ability to modify screens however they want. “What if the user makes a screen that does not work?” you may ask. One IT manager replied, “They can always revert to the standard screen and this will force them to learn how to do it correctly.” A harsh view, to be sure, but we are presenting one extreme vantage point.

Full IT control

Other IT departments do not want to worry about supporting a screen that they have never seen before. So, they plan to build personalized screens for different departments and push them out to the different groups. The end-users will, of course, provide input, but IT will make all the changes.

In between

Most organizations will adopt policies that are between these two extreme positions. SAP Screen Personas allows users to share flavors with each other. IT can lock certain fields and define exactly what fields they allow the end-users to change. This ensures that IT controls what is important while giving their users some ability to make changes that make their life easier.

In all cases, we recommend that only experts use the advanced scripting functions.

Language support

SAP Screen Personas supports English and German. What this means is that the labels in the SAP Screen Personas toolbar can appear in either of these languages.

So, what can you do to create personalized screens in other languages?

Using SAP Screen Personas, you can write labels in any language you choose. If you need to support users in different regions, you can build separate flavors in each language.

SAP Screen Personas pulls screen label and layout information from the backend systems. So, unmodified SAP labels appear in the source language. If you change screen layout using SAP Screen Personas, these will appear in any language. But, if you change “sold-to party” to “customer”, then “customer” will appear on the screen in that position, regardless of what language the rest of screen appears.

Tablet / mobile access

No, the current version of SAP Screen Personas does not work on the iPad.

It does work on the new Windows 8 tablets. This was part of the demo we gave at the start of Demo Jam.

Licensing

We will license SAP Screen Personas separately. Ask your account executive for details.

How can I gain expertise on this solution?

Practice makes perfect. The best way to become an expert on personalizing screens is by making lots of them. As mentioned above, we are working on establishing a demo environment where you can experiment and hone your design skills.

Transports

Most SAP developers think in terms of dev/QA/production. So, we build SAP Screen Personas to fit into that environment. You can design flavors in your development environment. Test them with end-users to ensure that the new screens improve the user experience as expected. Then, roll them into production.

Does this work with transaction screens?

Does this work with all transactions

While many of the demos we showed were modifying the start screen, you can personalize any transaction screen. In fact, the demo was changing a transaction as the start screen is the SMEN transaction.

SAP Screen Personas works with SAP “core ERP” systems or any SAP GUI screen you can use via a browser.