The future of SAP Screen Personas – ongoing alignment with SAP’s UX strategy (April 2017 update)
In the SAP Screen Personas Practitioner’s Forum this week (April 19, 2017), we received the following question in the chat:
“My boss heard a rumor that Fiori will replace Personas in the future – please help me answer his inquiry.”
The short answer is that SAP Screen Personas will remain a stand-alone solution. It is a key part of SAP S/4HANA, an easy way to simplify classic screens as well as any custom transactions you are running in your existing ERP system or in your brand-new S/4HANA system.
Current state
Let me share with you some interesting facts about the current state of SAP Screen Personas:
- We have customers in all 25 industries that SAP serves using SAP Screen Personas.
- We have customers in over 60 countries.
- The number of live customers has been growing steadily over the past few years.
- We are aligned with SAP’s Fiori user experience strategy.
- SAP Screen Personas, in our last service pack, SP4, introduced support for the Belize theme, which is theme for SAP S/4HANA 1610 and higher.
Future plans*
We plan to release SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP5 around SAPPHIRE 2017. SP5 will include some new tools to build adaptive designs. And lots more, which we will announce when the service pack is ready.
Looking forward, we are continuing to simplify deployment by adding content to our flavor gallery. We continue to work closely with our colleagues across the organization to align with Fiori 2.0 and Belize, along with adding SAP Screen Personas functionality to SAP GUI for Windows, SAP GUI for Java, and Web Dynpro ABAP.
We plan to show a prototype of SAP Screen Personas Mobile Access at SAPPHIRE 2017. As the name implies, this allows you to render SAP Screen Personas flavors on mobile devices. We are seeking co-innovation customers who want to share their specific mobile scenarios and use cases with us and validate functionality as we move forward. Find me at SAPPHIRE if you want to discuss this topic.
You can see some of our other plans in the public-facing roadmap document.
To recap: there are no plans to replace SAP Screen Personas now or in the future, and the product continues to evolve to meet the requirements of our customer base.
We are here for you and we are here to stay.
For the SAP Screen Personas product team, Peter Spielvogel.
* This blog and SAP‘s strategy and possible future developments are subject to change and may be changed by SAP at any time for any reason without notice.
Hi Peter
Greetings from an ex-workmate here. 🙂 I've been looking into implementing Screen Personas in our company and I have a doubt.
We are on S/4 HANA implementation and looking into Screen Personas to simplify some of the old dynpro transactions which are not migrated to Fiori yet. We also have an old ECC system and we'll live with both systems for some time.
My question is more related to other blog post, where you said "SAP Screen Personas 3.0 planned to be integrated into Web GUI". For the S/4 HANA, some users are experiencing poor performance with the Web GUI. We are looking into your tips for Web GUI performance improvement, but I guess it will always be slower than GUI for Windows, and this annoys users who are used to the GUI for Windows. So we are allowing this users to also use the GUI instead of just using the browser and Fiori Launchpad.
That said, my question is: will Screen Personas also work for the GUI for Windows or SAP Business Client? This is crucial for us to decide whether we'll user Personas or not, because we don't want to users to lose performance just to have a better looking screen.
Best Regards
Luis Becker
Hi Luis,
The SAP Screen Personas flavor editor is built into the Web GUI. This is where it will remain. Once you simplify the screens, you can render the flavors in the browser (which you don't want to do), Fiori Launchpad (ditto), or SAP GUI for Windows. Some controls looks slightly different in SAP GUI for Windows, you will want to test and optimize the flavors for that environment.
Regards,
Peter
Hi Luis,
I’ll talk from my experience after three successful Screen Personas scenarios built for the same company: I think you shouldn’t use Screen Personas only for the sake of “better looking screens” as you’ve said. Although you can dramatically improve your screens’ appearance, the real power of Screen Personas comes with the scripting and RFC consumption capabilities that you can use to automate steps and actions that your users perform manually today on standard or Z transactions.
With this in mind, I’ve reached the point where even minor performance differences between Windows GUI and Web GUI performances didn’t matter when the Screen Personas powers are fully used as I’ve mentioned, because it makes users have less work to do overall. In fact, users always prefer to use the Screen Personas versions of the same processes when compared with the original standard versions, given the right functionalities and automation had been built using Screen Personas.
Keep automation and performance in mind from the beginning when designing and building your solution with Screen Personas and you’ll have great results.
Regards,
Douglas