Combining SAP CRM and SAP Screen Personas

Introduction

Since the first time I saw a demo of SAP Screen Personas on SCN I really liked the idea of being able to change the look and feel of existing ERP transactions. Therefore, I immediately installed the add on on one of our internal development system and tried it out. However, as earlier versions of SAP Screen Personas required the installation of Silverlight at the client computer I never started to roll it out for our customers.

In version 3 SAP Screen Personas was redesigned to no longer require Silverlight at the client computer. Therefore, I started to look at possible usage scenarios for SAP Screen Personas again. One scenario that immediately came to my mind was the simplification of ERP transaction integrated into SAP CRM using the transaction launcher technology.

Note that in this blog I won't give any introduction to the SAP Screen Personas functionality. A comprehensive collection of demo's and learning content for SAP Screen Personas is available here: SAP Screen Personas – Getting Started

SAP CRM Transaction Launcher

In short, the SAP CRM transaction launcher is a technology to integrate ERP transactions into SAP CRM. This is require if, for example, if no suitable SAP CRM functionality is available but a process needs to be executed from with SAP CRM. The integration of the ERP transaction into the SAP CRM Web UI is achieved using SAP GUI for HTML. If you are interested in further details regarding the transaction launcher technology as well as other usage scenarios I reccomand reading the two excellent document Almost Everything About Transaction Launcher - Part I and Almost Everything About Transaction Launcher - Part II by hasan.zubairi

One of the processes where we use the the integration of ERP transactions into SAP CRM is changing the contract account in the future via transaction CAA2. The layout of the transaction when displayed in the transaction launcher is shown in the screen shot below. As usually for ERP transaction it contains quite a number of fields that are not required in all processes variants.

Using SAP Screen Personas we could simplify the transactions to the required set of fields. An example of such a simplified transaction is shown in the following screen shot. From the screen shot it is immediate obvious, that it is possible to combine SAP Screen Personas and SAP CRM.

Configuring Transaction Launcher with SAP Screen Personas

So the question now is what is required to integrate SAP CRM transaction launcher and SAP Screen Personas. After executing the necessary post installation steps for screen personas (cf. Pre- and post-installation Checklist) the configuration is quite straight forward. Using transaction CRMS_IC_CROSS_SYS it is only necessary to change the URL for ERP_ISU from http://<server>:<port>/sap/bc/gui/sap/its/webgui/!?~transaction=IC_LTXE&~okcode=ICEXECUTE&sap-client... to http://<server>:<port>/sap/bc/personas/!?~transaction=IC_LTXE&~okcode=ICEXECUTE&sap-client=100 (cf. the following screenshot).

After this, all ERP transaction integrated into SAP CRM via the transaction launcher technology are rendered using Screen Personas. Furthermore, it is even possible to adjust the transaction using Screen Personas directly from within the SAP CRM session.

Christian