Announcing SAP Screen Personas 2.0 Service Pack 3 (SP3) – better performance, easier scripting, lots more

SAP Screen Personas 2.0 Service Pack 3 introduces innovations that improve performance, usability, and administration. These enhancements are based on your feedback, so thank you to our customers that provide suggestions on how to make the product even better. This blog will highlight a few of the new features. You can read the full list in the SAP Screen Personas knowledge base.

Performance Improvements

I have observed an interesting thing about web-based applications. No matter how fast the response time, people always want it to be faster. So, we have made several improvements in this area. The biggest innovation, which is immediately visible, especially on complex transactions, is “slim state”. This reduces the amount of data transferred between the server and browser by trimming the XML metadata. Since all your transaction data remains intact, there is no impact on the transaction itself. Here are some test results for some commonly used transactions from our labs.

Your results may vary.

In addition to slim state, we allow you improve performance by configuring:

• XML encoding
• Delta rendering
• Lazy loading of tree controls (no configuration required)

Complete details are in the SAP Screen Personas knowledge base.

Usability Improvements

Since SAP Screen Personas focuses on improving user productivity, we also try to improve IT productivity in building screens using this tool. We have added several cool new features. My favorite is “locate controls.”

Locate controls adds a new icon to the toolbar that helps locate controls used in a script. So, if you are debugging your script, you can select a control ID (unique identifier for any element on the screen), click on the new icon, and SAP Screen Personas will highlight the element on the screen. You can also access this functionality from the editor, highlighting the ID selected in the properties editor.

We have also added or improved capabilities for:

• Local history
• Copy and paste of controls
• Text wrapping
• Show and hide controls via scripts
• Switching flavors via flavor ID

Complete details are in the SAP Screen Personas knowledge base.

Administration Improvements

As more customers roll out SAP Screen Personas across their organizations, they requested tools to simplify how they manage large-scale deployments. SAP Screen Personas 2.0 requires you to maintain a separate set of user roles. Now, you can automatically synchronize SAP Screen Personas groups with PFCG roles. You can schedule this process to run periodically or you can synch on demand. This is a big time saver for the system administrator.

We also simplified a few other processes in the admin UI.

Kernel recommendation

As you know, Personas works with several other components, especially the kernel, to deliver productivity through personalization. So, it is very important to remain on a recent version. The minimum Kernel Patch required for using Slim State optimization is:

kernel 7.21 patch level 415

kernel 7.41 patch level 215

Read about the minimum system requirements to use SAP Screen Personas 2.0 SP3.

Migrating to SAP Screen Personas 3.0

If you are deciding whether to start now with a screen simplification project or wait for SAP Screen Personas 3.0 to become generally available, I recommend you get started now on SAP Screen Personas 2.0 SP3. SAP Screen Personas 2.0 is a very mature and stable product. Later, you can migrate to SAP Screen Personas 3.0 when you feel ready. Migration from SAP Screen Personas 2.0 to 3.0 is fast and easy, so all or most of your work will be preserved.

Attention SAP Screen Personas Customers

• Want to hear how other customers are using SAP Screen Personas to make their users more productive? We have a monthly (virtual) meeting in which companies share their best practices and take questions from the attendees. Usually, there is a customer demo and tutorial from an SAP product expert. Learn how to register for the Practitioner Forum.
• Want free passes to SAPPHIRE NOW or TechEd, or credits you can use for consulting or training, then join our Customer Reference program. Email me for more details.
• Are you going to SAPPHIRE? It would be great to meet in person. Customers drive our product development. The better we know you, the better we can address your needs with SAP Screen Personas. Please email me to let me know if you will be there.

For the SAP Screen Personas product team, Peter Spielvogel.