SAP Screen Personas TechEd Summary (and Preview)

Thank you to the hundreds of people that attended one or more of our SAP Screen Personas sessions at SAP TechEd Las Vegas. We look forward to meeting more new people at SAP TechEd Amsterdam. There were many great questions from the audiences; we saw them falling into several key themes:

• Use cases
• Architecture
• Performance
• Fit into SAP User Experience portfolio

SAP Screen Personas co-inventors Tobias Queck (left)
and Sebastian Steinhauer demo the product.

Most of the sessions were “networking” sessions in which someone from the SAP Screen Personas product team spoke about some aspect of the solution, usually in conjunction with a live demo. The exception was the 2-hour in-depth lecture. We have posted the slides from this session (CD108), although is really a case of “you really had to be there”, as we spent more than half of the time going through a detailed demo to show how to build screens, write scripts, merge tabs, make global changes to all screens, and manage users.

How Customers are using SAP Screen Personas

In all the sessions, we provided many examples of how customers are using Personas to simplify their screens to make users happier and more productive. A great example is how SAP IT is using SAP Screen Personas to create an accrual cockpit, which provides information in a much more intuitive way. Martin Lang did a great job of sharing this story from the vantage point of a customer. You can view the slides from the SAP IT session on SAP Screen Personas at TechEd.

SAP Screen Personas architecture

There were many questions about Personas’ architecture: how it fits into the NetWeaver ABAP stack and how the different components work together to deliver more intuitive screens to the user’s browser. We have attempted to address those questions in this document that describes all the SAP Screen Personas components and what they do.

Performance

Many users asked questions about how performance of screens in Personas compares to SAP GUI or Web GUI. We have covered this topic previously on SCN, so I will keep it brief here. The quick answer is that if you design your screens properly, caching only the information you need and using images that have been sized correctly to minimize scaling, you can expect great performance from your Personas screens. In fact, with some smart scripting, you can dramatically reduce the time it takes for a person to complete transactions in SAP.

SAP Screen Personas and Fiori

One question that came up very often was how SAP Screen Personas and Fiori fit together. The quick answer is that they are complementary and your organization can ask several questions to determine how to choose between these solutions. The session we held on SAP Screen Personas and Fiori was packed with over 100 people standing around the small demo pod. You can view the TechEd presentation on SAP Fiori and SAP Screen Personas.

For SAP Imagineering, Peter Spielvogel.