SAP Inside Track 2016 Developer - #SITSP - Fiori and Screen Personas

[DouglasCezar]

This month I've had the opportunity to join some of the Brazilian SAP Mentors for a full day of learning, networking and  making new friends. I also had a glimpse on some of the best uses our community are making of new SAP technologies. It has been a terrific opportunity to learn more about Fiori, SAPUI5, HANA and IoT, among other interesting things.

I want to say a big thank you to the SAP Mentors raquel.pereiradacunha, 197f0f77709544a3bdebe98a55f527bb and jose.nunes who made this event possible and kindly invited me to present a session about the intersection between Fiori and Screen Personas.

Now, I want to talk here a little about this intersection and what it means in my opinion to SAP customers, developers and consultants.

If you are a SAP customer do you know how much effort, and maybe money, your company is unnecessarily spending today by not leveraging the opportunities brought by these two new technologies?

If you are an SAP consultant, specially a software developer, do you know how much of a opportunity you are losing by not making a serious plan to put these two technologies among your skill set?

The message from SAP is clear: Fiori is the present and Fiori is the future: SAPUI5 and SAP Screen Personas are the two preferred tools used to build the Fiori Experience.

I can say that both Fiori (powered by SAPUI5) and Screen Personas bring, when used together, a whole new world of possibilities for customers and developers. For SAP developers and functional consultants they bring absolutely new and bigger powers to deliver better software and experiences to our usres. If you add design thinking to this approach, then you're going to have real big improvements on the way you deliver business value!

If you have attended any recent SAP event on the last months you've noted that the word ABAP has been almost never mentioned. For sure ABAP is alive and, in my opinion, will still be alive for a long time when we talk about back-end logic. But when we think about front-end, it's definitely a whole new world!

When we talk about anything, and I really mean anything, related to the software that is "seen and used" by the end-users, Fiori and Screen Personas are, without any doubt, the most powerful, the fastest and the easiest ways to build the experience of using SAP software today and tomorrow.

For SAP's customers, as long as I know, both the technologies are free to be used, since the customer already have a SAP Netweaver license. So there is no need to spend more money here. When we think about the money spent on development hours I can say, from my personal experience, that in the majority of the cases, developing or enhancing screens is way faster when we use Fiori/SAPUI5 or Screen Personas when compared to the same work being done with ABAP.

It's important to note that the most powerful scenarios I've built both using Fiori/SAPUI5 and Screen Personas have leveraged the ABAP back-end, where I also wrote some code to deal with business logic. So the sweet spot, the most powerful approach for new developments, really is on the intersection between SAPUI5, Screen Personas and ABAP!

I want to finish by saying: If you are a customer, please give it a try! It's extremely fast for a good basis consultant to setup your environment to use both Fiori and Screen Personas, given that your system is relatively up-to-date with SAP support packages. And then, in a week or less it's possible to build a relatively simple prototype using each technology so you can have a glimpse of what powers you already do have in your SAP software but you haven't realized yet.

And, last but not least, if you are a developer, put your full attention to these two technologies! I've done this on the last years and it's paying really big rewards on my capability to build new and impressive solutions to the SAP customers with whom I work.

Let me know if you need some help or guidance and I'll be more than happy to share my lessons learned.

Happy Holidays!