SAP Screen Personas – Fit, Fiori, and Futures (roadmap update July 2016)
In the two months since SAPPHIRE NOW, we have had many conversations with customers, either individually or in user group meetings, or hands-on SAP Screen Personas training. Several topics seem to come up very often around SAP Screen Personas, SAP Fiori, and SAP S/4HANA, especially how these solutions fit together and the future of SAP Screen Personas in this context. Specifically, several customers we met with already had SAP S/4HANA and wanted to know where SAP Screen Personas fits. Others are planning for SAP S/4HANA and want to avoid starting any UX-related projects that will be throwaway within a few years.
In this blog, I will:
- Discuss how SAP Screen Personas fits with S/4HANA
- Explain how SAP Screen Personas makes it easy to deliver Fiori UX to your users, whether you are running ECC 6.0 on NetWeaver 7.00, SAP S/4HANA, or anything in between
- Share the latest SAP Screen Personas roadmap
How SAP Screen Personas fits with S/4HANA
I and several colleagues participated in a few meetings with customers that had purchased SAP S/4HANA with the expectation that all screens have the Fiori user experience. While the Fiori UX is ultimate goal for SAP S/4HANA, as our chief design officer explains, we are on a journey to get there and have not yet reached our destination. The good news is that SAP provides a powerful tool for customers that want to achieve the Fiori UX now. SAP Screen Personas allows you to transform classic screens in SAP S/4HANA into Fiori-inspired designs:
- In areas where Fiori coverage does not yet exist
- For custom transactions for which you want to keep your business logic and not redevelop a new UI5 application.
The outcome of these meetings was that customers realized that SAP Screen Personas will become an essential part of their S/4HANA landscape. The combination of SAP Fiori apps and SAP Screen Personas will deliver the desired simple and delightful user experience.
SAP Screen Personas makes it easy to deliver Fiori UX to your users
During ASUG meetings, SAP Screen Personas practitioner forum calls, and other customer-facing events, while we see strong interest in S/4HANA, the number of customers that are live or far along their path to S/4HANA is relatively small. So, what do these customers do if they want the Fiori experience now, with minimal disruption to their current IT environment?
SAP Screen Personas provides several ways to deliver the Fiori UX on existing ECC 6.0 or Business Suite on SAP HANA systems.
- To make it easier to build screens that follow the Fiori design, we have a Fiori style guide.
- The SAP Screen Personas Flavor Gallery provides a starting point to accelerate creation of Fiori-inspired flavors.
- In the recent SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP3 service pack, we introduced new tools such as templates that make it faster and easier to build screens that look like Fiori.
Latest SAP Screen Personas roadmap
With all our customer contact, we receive a steady stream of great ideas to enhance the product. Thank you to everyone that has provided us suggestions for updates.
Here is the latest roadmap slide (available as part of the UI technologies roadmap document on SCN) that shows what we are working on. What else you would like to see in future versions of SAP Screen Personas?
Now that you have this information, what should you do? Here are a few ideas:
- Download SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP3
- Sign up for push notifications related to support (new SAP Screen Personas Notes, kernel recommendations)
- Join the monthly Practitioner Forum call to hear how your peers are using SAP Screen Personas
- Train your team, starting with the openSAP course.
Disclaimer: In this blog, I have made forward looking statements and predictions of when SAP will bring certain products or services to market. This represents our current state of planning. These plans might change for a variety of reasons. So, none of the content in this blog reflects a commitment from SAP to provide specific functionality or deliverables on any set schedule.
For the SAP Screen Personas product team, Peter Spielvogel.
Hi Peter,
Looking into the updated roadmap i could see in the future directions-Adaptive design for different screen resolutions does that include mobiles and tablets, if not is there a plan to enable it for mobile and tablet devices.
Regards,
Vigneshkkar
Hi Vigneshkar,
We are exploring adaptive design to render on a wide variety of devices.
Regards,
Peter
Great Thank You Peter.
Regards,
Vigneshkkar
Hello Peter,
Thank you for posting latest information on SAP Screen Personas. I wanted to confirm if public sector entities can update SRM Webdynpro screens?, We are currently using SRM 7.13 & ERP 6.17, NW 7.4, SP12.
Regards,
Nisha Sharma
Travis County, Austin, Texas
Dear Nisha,
Yes, you can use SAP Screen Personas 3.0 on any Web Dynpro for ABAP applications, as long as you meet the minimum requirements. See also note https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2050838 which has a detailed list of restrictions.
Kind Regards,
Klaus
Hi Peter,
I understand the adaptive design is in the Future direction, but is there a estimated timeline of this feature? This is a feature which I am eagerly awaiting.
Thanks,
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
We too are excited about adaptive design. It is possible to use scripting to switch flavors today, but we are looking at making this more powerful. Unfortunately, we do not have a timeline for this feature yet.
Regards,
Peter
Hi Peter,
Any news on the adaptive design yet.
Great stuff Peter
What do you see as the future of SAP Fiori UX apps in conjunction with SAP Screen Personas - desktop users using Personas with mobile apps built with Fiori and SAPui5?
Is SAPui5 different than the SAP Fiori for iOS?
Missed this month's Personas meeting due to a scheduling conflict, but like the work you are the team are doing.
Hi Jordan,
Continuing what we see today, SAP Screen Personas flavors will co-exist with SAP Fiori apps. We expect desktop users to access SAP functionality through the Fiori Launchpad. The tiles they press might open a Fiori app, SAP Screen Personas flavor, Custom UI5 app, or other web-based application.
On the mobile side, customers will continue to have a choice: use a standard Fiori app or build their own mobile application using SAPUI5 (to run in any browser) or a native iOS app to run on iPad or iPhone (to the extend people want to run SAP from their phones). As you may have noticed in the latest SAP UI Technologies roadmap slides, we are exploring adaptive design for SAP Screen Personas to run on a wider range of devices.
Fiori now represents the SAP user experience. The image below clarifies this.
SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori for iOS are two ways to build applications that follow the Fiori design guidelines. The former is focused on multi-device environments, while the latter is aimed at the Apple ecocystem.
Hope this clarifies things.
Regards,
Peter
Most definitely a good help, as always sir =]
Yes, doing some more research I found a new world of exciting technologies that SAP is working on that I believe will be the future of SAP access for the user. With SAPUI5/OPENUI5 and the new SAP for iOS dev language coming out, I see a lot of cool opportunities for incorporating Screen Personas to fun adaptive web apps or iOS apps.
Thanks Peter, keep up the good work sir!
Hi Peter,
Thanks for the great post. Did I understand correctly that Screen Persona can also be used to create a brand new UI in S/4 HANA environment (e.g., S/4 HANA Finance, etc.) ? I mean SAP Screen Personas / WebDynpro and data access to S/4 HANA datasets will be / already made available in Personas. Otherwise anything we've developed using Screen Personas will go away after we've completely move to S/4 HANA from R/3. Please advise.
Thanks
Hi Nur,
SAP Screen Personas works with S/4HANA as well as ECC. If you create flavors in ECC, you can continue to use them after you migrate to S/4HANA. You can also start with S/4HANA and build flavors to simplify and personalize the user experience.
Regards,
Peter
Thanks
Hi Peter,
Thanks for the great insights but for simple people like us who depend on SAP application programming for our career it becomes very important which technology to choose.
Could you please tell us is it SAP accepting that redesigning 300K+ GUI screens is tough and SAP so unfinished dynpro screens will get the personas treatment or it is a stop gap measure for the years to come unless all s/4 solutions are ready?
SAP Screen Personas allows you to simplify and personalize any Dynpro screen to meet your specific needs.