SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP4 now available. Productivity tools, template editor, easier admin
Thank you to the many customers that provided feedback on SAP Screen Personas and for your suggestions on how to make it better. We have listened to your ideas and built over 250 of them into SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP4. The theme was to make life easier for the person creating flavors. In this blog, I will highlight a few new features that I found especially useful.
- Keyboard shortcuts (quick path navigation)
- Instant script creation (bind from flavor editor, so you don’t have to it later)
- Auto-save function in scripts (don’t worry about a system time-out)
- Cleaner admin console (including instant visibility to the health check tool)
Watch the 10-minute Productivity Power Play episode on SAP Screen Personas SP4.
SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP4 includes dozens of ease-of-use features.
Keyboard shortcuts
Some of our power users wanted a faster way to build flavors. So, we introduced the ability to use the keyboard rather than the mouse for certain tasks. Quick path navigation gives you access to many functions using the <Alt> key. For example, if you want to insert a script button, you can type <Alt> I B S. This opens the Script Button dialog box, and you can enter the label that should appear on the button.
Here is how it looks:
I click the <Alt> key, which brings up the options of which tab I want to navigate.
“I” brings me to the Insert Tab
“B” to the buttons
Then “S” opens the Insert Script Button dialog box
Instant script creation
In previous versions of SAP Screen Personas, you would create a script button in the flavor editor, exit the flavor editor, open the script editor to record and edit your script, then return to the flavor editor to bind your script to the button. With Service Pack 4, we have streamlined this process.
Now, after creating the script button, you can create a place-holder script that is already attached to the button. Then, simply open the script editor and write your script; there is no longer a need to bind your script button to your script.
Auto-save function in scripts
A few customers asked why the flavor editor automatically saved their edits and the script editor did not. SP4 now has auto-save functionality in the script editor. Now, you can write long scripts that do many amazing things, without having to worry about losing your work if the system times out during your editing session.
Cleaner admin console
As more customers roll out SAP Screen Personas to large enterprises, we learn new usage patterns and what tools the systems administrators and basis teams need to do their jobs more easily. For SAP Screen Personas Service Pack 4, we have simplified the admin transaction (/n/personas/admin) to display a high-level health assessment when you enter the transaction. If your status is not “green”, you can run the full health check and see the specific areas where you need to take corrective action.
Watch a video in which the product owner demos these features and more:
Updated support statement
With the release of SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP4, we will only support SP4 and SP3.
SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP2 and earlier are now out of support (time to upgrade!!!). Since the maintenance window for SAP Screen Personas 3.0 is calculated based on the year of a service pack release plus a 3-year support window the new calculated support window is scheduled to end on December 31, 2019. With the first service pack in 2017, this will extend to the end of 2020.
System compatibility
SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP4 works on a variety of systems from SAP S/4HANA to some much older versions. Specifically:
Basis | Minimum Service Pack | Additional Notes Required? | Supported Kernel |
700 | SP25 | Yes | 722 |
701 | SP10 | Yes | 722 |
702 | SP09 | Yes | 722 |
731 | SP07 | Yes | 722 |
740 | SP03 | Yes | 742, 745 |
750 | All | No | 745, 749 |
S/4HANA | all | No | 749 |
For details on system compatibility, please see our pre-installation checklist on our knowledge base.
Kernel recommendations for SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP4
- Kernel Release 722 –> Minimum Patch Level 200 –> Recommended Patch Level 210 or higher
- Kernel Release 742 –> Minimum Patch Level 401 –> Recommended Patch Level 420 or higher
- Kernel Release 745 –> Minimum Patch Level 300 –> Recommended Patch Level 310 or higher
- Kernel Release 749 –> All patch levels are OK
Read about the minimum system requirements to use SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP4.
Next Steps
- Upgrade to SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP4 (requires valid NetWeaver License)
- Take a free openSAP class.
- Learn more from our knowledge base
- Watch the Productivity Power Play video series.
- Read how SAP Screen Personas makes SAP S/4HANA even better.
Sharing Your Success
If you are already live on SAP Screen Personas, we encourage you to apply for the SAP Blue Diamond Award, which recognizes excellence in SAP Screen Personas usage. Winners will be recognized for business impact, visual design, and technical innovation.
Tell Your Story
The Call for Presentations is now open for 2017 ASUG Annual Conference, taking place May 16–18, 2017, in Orlando, FL. Submit your SAP Screen Personas success story. SAP Screen Personas content is part of the Technology track, User Experience sub-track. Your proposal should focus on one of the following areas:
- Best Practice Summary: Outline a successful standard process or model
- Customer Story: Explore the factors of success or failure from a real-life project
- Lessons Learned: Share knowledge acquired from challenges overcome
- Return on Investment (ROI): How to maximize the business benefits from a project
- Strategy: Determine the best approach to meet business needs
For the SAP Screen Personas product team, Peter Spielvogel.
This is great Peter. SP4 seems to have some good functionalities.
Very nice new/updated functionality Peter, Sebastian...
Are we still limited to the Blue Crystal theme in SP4 when using the SAP GUI for windows?
UPDATE: GUI for Windows Patch 12 allows Personas with all themes,
PeteA
Hello Peter,
the information that SAP GUI for Windows patchlevel 12 allows the usage of Personas with all themes is not correct. Just like before the Personas features are only available in SAP GUI for Windows when the Blue Crystal Theme is used (or in SAP GUI for Windows 7.50 when the Fiori visual theme is used against an S/4HANA 1610 system).
We do not have the intention to release SAP Screen Personas features in SAP GUI for Windows for SAP Signature Theme or Corbu Theme - we rather concentrate on getting it right for Blue Crystal and Fiori visual theme. Blue Crystal has become our default theme and with SAP GUI 7.50 we have closed an important gap that Blue Crystal had: The "Colors in System" feature allowing users to assign color schemes to systems for distinguishing for example dev systems from productive systems more easily. Therefore from our perspective Blue Crystal is the right choice.
Best regards,
Frank Krause
Product Owner SAP GUI for Windows
Hi Peter Spielvogel,
We have recently installed Screen Personas 3.0 (SP4).
Is there any limitation with patch level of SAP GUI (Release 740), we are on patch level 7 and notice performance issue and some times we see "You are not authorized to select flavors" error while loading a transaction.
Can you provide your inputs on this.
Thanks, Ansar
Hi,
As explained in SAP Note 2050838, SAP Screen Personas begins to be supported in SAPGUI for Windows in patch level 10. So in lower versions some issues may arise.
Thus to have Personas, we can deactivate it for only for SAP GUI for Windows and activate the SAP GUI for HTML as explained in below blog.
https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/Img/Deactivating+SAP+Screen+Personas
With this the personas can still be accessed through browser and there won't be any issues for the users logging into SAP GUI for Windows.
Thanks, Ansar