TechEd 2014 was amazing. There was so much excitement around SAP Screen Personas, Fiori, and SAP’s new user experience (UX) in both Las Vegas and Berlin. For me, the highlight was meeting so many customers and partners with whom I had previously only spoken over email, phone, and in web conferences. Also it was great to meet several new customers that had gone live on SAP Screen Personas without the product team knowing about it.
Thanks to everyone that expressed interest in SAP Screen Personas
Thank you to the hundreds of people that attended one or more of our lecture, hands-on, and expert sessions.
I would like to thank the customers and partners that presented their successes with SAP Screen Personas:
- Patrick Conklin of Kiewit for his expert session in Las Vegas in which he showed some great, simplified screens
- Shane Kelly of RA Chisholm and Patrick for their video interview in the ASUG studio in Las Vegas in which they discussed how they are using SAP Screen Personas to improve productivity in their respective organizations
- Aditya Kothuri and James Shen of Deloitte for their expert session in Las Vegas about the process they follow with their clients for unlocking value through simpler SAP Screens
- Ira Feinberg of Return on Intelligence for his expert session on a simple process to determine how employees spend their time on various functions and where to find the best processes to simplify
- steve.rumsby of University of Warwick who demoed his “Personas Bubble” cockpit in a couple of expert sessions and also served as a teaching assistant in the Berlin hands-on sessions. Steve Rumsby was also interviewed by Denis Browne about how he has used SAP Screen Personas at the University. We all appreciate Steve’s willingness to share his knowledge and experience. He has certainly earned his SAP Mentor status.
Also thank you to the other members of the core and extended SAP Screen Personas product team (sebastian.steinhauer, tobias.queck, tamas.hoznek, clemens.gantert, sylviabarnard, Fernando, ralph.resech, dirk.becker2, and michael.kraeft) that worked tirelessly conducting lectures, hands-on sessions, demos, and interviews, performing usability testing, hosting 1:1 meetings with customers and partners, and setting the record straight about how SAP Screen Personas fits into the SAP UX strategy.
SAP Screen Personas 3.0
Several themes in SAP Screen Personas 3.0 seemed to resonate with the audiences at TechEd:
- The ability to create screens in Web GUI and render them in SAP GUI 7.40. We are still putting the final touches on this, but certain scenarios work today.
- The combination of SAP Screen Personas running in NetWeaver Business Client (NWBC). This has been possible for a while, but it is significantly easier in version 3. One area that is greatly simplified is single sign-on. Also, customers now have the choice to run Web GUI or SAP GUI inside the NWBC shell.
- The power of JavaScript in the new SAP Screen Personas 3.0 scripting engine. Some quick demos overcame apprehension from beginners. The experts immediately recognized the power of a full programming language and advanced debugging tools (integrated in the various browsers, as opposed to provided by SAP) for automating various keystroke combinations and trapping errors to present business users with a highly simplified way to consume SAP ERP screens.
- The leap in usability between the earlier versions of SAP Screen Personas and the all-new, HTML-based version 3. Sebastian and Tobias discussed this with SAP Mentor Phil Loewen.
SAP Screen Personas and Fiori
In the various user experience strategy sessions, presented in various forms by andreas.hauser, nisboy.naeve, wasserfall, and michael.falk, it was clear from the audience questions that we still have work to do in positioning SAP Screen Personas and Fiori as complementary solutions rather than competing approaches. If you did not participate in these discussions, I covered this in a short interview, but let me recap here:
- If a Fiori app exists, use it.
- If it does not do exactly what you want, but is close, then modify it using Web IDE.
- For the other 15,000 SAP GUI transactions or transactions that you have created or customized, then use SAP Screen Personas.
SAP Screen Personas 3.0 ramp-up status
There were also many questions about the ramp-up status of SAP Screen Personas 3.0 and when we would release to the general public. We are currently in the midst of a very active ramp-up program, working with a few dozen customers and partners to exercise the product through various scenarios to ensure you have a great experience when we make it available as a generally available product. Our current plan (not a commitment!) is to release SAP Screen Personas in 2015 Q1.
Quickest path to simplified screens
For those of you that are new to SAP Screen Personas and thinking about getting started, do not wait. Your users will thank you for making their life easier. Here is how to get started:
- Download SAP Screen Personas 2.0 from SAP Service Marketplace
- Go through the discover, design, develop process (detailed on slides 8-16)
- Transport your flavors from development to QA to production and go live
- Migrate to SAP Screen Personas 3.0 when the time is right for you
Slides from sessions
UXP203 2-hour lecture on SAP Screen Personas 3.0
UXP263 2-hour hands-on session for SAP Screen Personas 3.0 (no slides available as this was a hands-on session)
EXP17583 Expert session with Ira Feinberg of Return on Intelligence (Las Vegas)
Other Las Vegas expert sessions - slides not available as we did live demos.
EXP17612 Expert session on accelerating SAP Screen Personas adoption (Berlin)
EXP17880 Expert session on avoiding common deployment problems (Berlin)
What were your favorite parts of TechEd?
What questions remain on SAP Screen Personas or how it fits into the SAP UX strategy?
For the SAP Screen Personas product team, peter.spielvogel.
