SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP5 now available. Adaptive designs, performance tuning, longer support
Since our last service pack, we have received many great ideas from customers to make SAP Screen Personas even better. The top requests generally are around the topics of simplicity, performance, and mobility. So, the main enhancements in SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP5 address these issues.
Adaptive Designs
As customers deploy SAP Screen Personas in more business scenarios and more diverse environments (we currently have customers in all 25 industries that SAP serves and over 60 countries), we see more demand for flavors that work across different screen sizes.
With Service Pack 5, we introduce new functionality to create adaptive designs. Adaptive designs automatically change flavors based on the screen or browser size. In SAP Screen Personas, we have implemented this by allowing you to create a parent flavor and then additional adaptive versions of the same flavor. You associate each adaptive flavor with a specific screen width. There is no more scripting required to change flavors when the screen size changes. SAP Screen Personas will select the right flavor based on your specifications.
Watch the 3-minute Productivity Power Play episode on SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP5.
Adaptive flavors in SAP Screen Personas render properly on a variety of screen sizes.
Since SAP Screen Personas flavors render in the SAP GUI for HTML, which is not officially supported on iPad or Android tablets, this feature does not suddenly make SAP Screen Personas a mobile solution. But, it is a clear step towards that target and strong signal of our future direction.
The flavor tile indicates if it is an adaptive flavor and each version associated with the parent flavor.
Editor
The SAP Screen Personas editor allows you to simplify flavors quickly and easily, usually without any development resources. Consistently making intuitive screens relies on planning the alignment of your various screen elements. The pixel by pixel digital positioning in the editor gives very precise control of where the controls render. With SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP5, we have added automatic helper guides and an option to snap a selected control to align with other screen elements. This makes positioning controls on the screen much faster and helps you create professional-looking flavors every time
Helper guides simplify aligning controls on the screen.
In addition to the helper guides and snap mode, we made some enhancements to improve drag and drop performance in the editor.
Finally, we have integrated best practices into the product. If you create a new flavor, we will advise you that best practices exist. For example, the link will take you to a relevant flavor in the SAP Screen Personas Flavor Gallery.
A link to best practices appears if there is relevant content in the Flavor Gallery.
Back-end
In parallel to the improvements in the editor, we streamlined our ABAP backend code to improve runtime performance. These enhancements apply across SAP GUI for HTML (Web GUI) and SAP GUI for Windows (SAP GUI). When SAP Screen Personas is available in SAP GUI for Java (currently in beta), you will see the improvements here too.
Support Statement
Our product innovations sometimes outpace our customer’s ability to update their SAP systems to meet the SAP Screen Personas prerequisites.
SAP Screen Personas 3.0
To provide better support to customers on SAP Screen Personas 3.0, there are two important changes to our support strategy.
- SAP Screen Personas 3.0 will be supported until at least Dec. 31, 2020. As per SAP policy, this is a minimum of three years from the release of this service pack, rounded to end of the calendar year.
- We will also expand our support to the current as well as the two previous Service Packs. What does this mean to you?
- SP05 will receive continuous innovation
- SP04 will get important fixes and selected down ports
- SP03 will receive emergency fixes
- SP02 will no longer be supported
Earlier versions
Support for SAP Screen Personas 1.0 ends at the end of 2017.
Support for SAP Screen Personas 2.0 ends at the end of 2018.
We are not planning to extend these dates.
There are so many reasons to upgrade to SAP Screen Personas 3.0. Beyond the new features, building and maintaining flavors is much easier in version 3.0. If you are looking to migrate to SAP Screen Personas 3.0, we have a migration program to help you.
Showing at SAPPHIRE and ASUG annual conference
We will be demoing SAP Screen personas 3.0 SP5 at SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. Please come to one of our sessions or find us in the UX area. To learn more about the business benefits, I invite you to hear one of our customers speak about how they saved money, reduced training time, and delighted their users.
System compatibility
SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP5 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, 749 |
| 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 SP5
(as of May 9, 2017; check the SP05 master note or sign up for our support newsletter for updates to kernel requirements and recommendations)
Kernel Release 722 –> Minimum Patch Level 300 –> Recommended Patch Level 300 or higher
Kernel Release 742 –> Minimum Patch Level 500 –> Recommended Patch Level 500 or higher
Kernel Release 745 –> Minimum Patch Level 400 –> Recommended Patch Level 414 or higher
Kernel Release 749 –> Minimum Patch Level 200 –> Recommended Patch Level 210 or higher
Please note that kernel release 742 does not receive new patches anymore. Corrections are provided in downward-compatible kernel releases 745 and 749, without getting downported to 742. Therefore, we recommend that all customers currently using kernel release 742 upgrade their kernel for the best SAP Screen Personas experience.
Read about the minimum system requirements to use SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP5.
Next Steps
Upgrade to SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP5 (requires valid NetWeaver License).
Take a free openSAP class to get a foundation for starting your project.
Learn more from our knowledge base with articles on a variety of topics.
Watch the Productivity Power Play video series for tips and tricks from the development team.
Read how SAP Screen Personas makes SAP S/4HANA even better.
Read the latest blog about the future of SAP Screen Personas.
Sharing Your Success
If you are already live on SAP Screen Personas, we encourage you to apply for the SAP Blue Diamond Award, which rewards SAP Screen Personas excellence. Winners will be recognized for business impact, visual design, and technical innovation.
For the SAP Screen Personas product team, Peter Spielvogel.
Wow, great news, I’m really happy to see this Peter!
SAP Screen Personas really is a great product and these improvements are more than welcome, specially the those around adaptive design. Can't wait to put my hands on it!
Congratulations to you and your team!
This is great news.
We have been closing working with several personas implementations and we're completely flabbergasted by the features and bug-fixes of SPS04. Now, SPS05 has added charm to beauty especially with additional scope for performance tuning – we’ll have it as soon as possible in our landscape. Thanks again.
We recently upgraded to SAPGUI (for WIndows) 7.50 to take advantage of the Fiori visual theme for SAPGUI transactions. Sadly our Screen Personas flavors do not support that theme and only work if we go back to the Blue Crystal theme. What is the plan to support the Fiori Visual theme for Screen Personas?
Hello Ingo,
it is our long-term plan to support also SAP Screen Personas 3.0 functionality for the Fiori visual theme in SAP GUI for Windows. However we will not be able to provide this support within release 7.50 of SAP GUI for Windows, because we currently need to work on a number of topics that are prioritized higher and it is our policy to introduce new developments only in new SAP GUI releases anyway. I therefore cannot foresee when this functionality will be delivered, but I can certainly tell that this will not happen within 2017.
Best regards,
Frank Krause
SAP GUI Team
Thanks! I appreciate the direct answer.
So SAP Personas 3.0 SP05 works on basis 731 (barring that you're on SP07, kernel 722, and have applied all the required notes)?
Yes, that's correct.
Keep in mind that you need at least PL 300 for kernel release 722 to be in a supported environment.
Thank you Tamas - we going to test upgrading to a newer basis level/support pack/kernel first, thus hoping to need less notes before installing Personas 3.0.5
Now I haven't used Personas in a while, and back then it was version 2.0, but - do you just install Personas directly on the server the ECC system is on? Or is it better/best practice to setup a separate system to house Personas?
Back on 2.0, I believe we had it installed mainly on a separate system which had hooks/plugins to the other ECC systems. The main system had SAP ERP installed, but it was not a dev/QA/prod box - it was solely for housing Personas.
That option is not available anymore with Personas 3.0 – you have to install the add-on in each instance where it will be used.
Thank you Tamas!
Hi Peter,
thx for that blog. We did upgrade to Screen Personas 3.0 SP5 and we did upgrade to UI750.
Now we are able to use Screen Personas on WebDynpro Applications. With SP5 SAP introduces "Adaptive Flavors" which in my case is great functionality.
Is there (haven't seen so) or will there be the "Adaptive Flavor" function on WDA Flavors as well ?
Best regards,
Tom
Currently, adaptive flavors are not available for WDA. If you can please open an incident for this topic, we can add your feature request to our backlog.
Thanks,
Peter
Hi,
I’m using SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP5, and I have a script that works fine in Web GUI (starting from one tab, going to another tab, read some info, going back to the first tab and paste the info read). Actually it’s done on the ME22N item tabs. But, in SAP GUI, the script does not work for the IDs on the second tab, which are not visible on the beggining, but to which I skip by click. Seems like a tabs cache issue. I can not find any SAP Note or other information about it. Is it a known issue? Thanks in advance.
Best regards,
Marco
Hi Marco,
Please open an incident so we can examine your specific scenario.
Thanks and regards,
Peter
It's nice to see how Personas in growing, great job!
I do have a question. After importing a template in the admin transaction, I cannot select it when building flavors. 'No templates loaded'. Am I missing something?
Hello Peter -
Can you please provide some screenshots, so we understand this better.
When you are in the Personas flavor editor and you are trying to insert a template, Does the Insert Template popup throw the error you mention here?
Thanks
Vandana