SAP Screen Personas roadmap update January 2020 accelerating SAP Fiori adoption

With 2020 upon us, it’s time for an update to the SAP Screen Personas roadmap. Last year, we saw a nice uptick in SAP S/4HANA adoption. Using informal polling methods at SAPPHIRE and SAP TechEd, the attendees in our sessions had many more hands raised when we asked who is on SAP S/4HANA. But, the number of hands for who is running more than 10 SAP Fiori apps was much lower.

Based on our conversations with customers, it appears that many people are doing a technical upgrade with SAP S/4HANA rather than taking full advantage of the benefits of the SAP Fiori UX. For SAP Screen Personas, our focus this year will be accelerating SAP Fiori adoption. I hope we will be able to present on these topics at the 2020 ASUG Annual Conference. We’ll certainly have some webcasts on simplifying SAP Fiori adoption later in the year, through both ASUG and SAP channels.

There have been some organizational changes that have affected the SAP Screen Personas team (in a positive way), so I’ll mention those in this blog, along with the usual product information.

2019: innovation, disruption, but not disruptive innovation

In SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP10, we introduced the SAP Fiori 3 theme, so you can build simplified flavors (we call each variation of a screen, usually personalized by role, a “flavor”) that match the latest versions of SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA Cloud. This is in addition to the SAP Fiori templates and styles we have included in previous versions of SAP Screen Personas. We have also made it easier to integrate flavors into the SAP Fiori launchpad.

Mid-2019 saw the introduction of SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP09. We improved the Slipstream Engine, simplified managing scripts, and made several usability enhancements.

Organizationally, early in 2019, the SAP Screen Personas team joined the SAP UX Engineering group. This restructuring broke down internal silos. After this change, the UX development teams work more closely together, with a common focus on making SAP’s products easier for our customers to use. For the past few years, we have talked about how SAP Screen Personas is part of the SAP Fiori UX. This move reinforces that message as we sit alongside other UX development teams in a single global group.

This was a great move for us, as we now have the opportunity to work with new colleagues around the world on SAP Fiori elements and some new visual tools to make SAP Fiori application development easier. Our experience making simple, visual, screen editing software made us a natural choice to work on some new UX tools (sneak previewed at SAP TechEd 2019, official name coming soon, beta program starting in February 2020). The UX Engineering leadership team is very focused on customer success and appreciates the work we have done to bring SAP Screen Personas to nearly 1800 customers.

2020 will see more changes

Our focus for SP11 is to make it even easier to seamlessly integrate SAP Fiori-themed SAP Screen Personas flavors into your launchpads, alongside apps that SAP ships and those you build with SAP Fiori elements and SAPUI5. In our product planning meetings, we are reviewing all the feature requests that customers and partners have made throughout the year, along with backlog items we generated based on the results of our usability testing sessions at SAP TechEd. I expect we will continue to work on:

• Making global scripts easier to use and manage
• Improving rendering on mobile devices to deliver an experience that’s closer to a native app
• Simplifying administration in the /personas/admin transaction
• Tracking SAP Fiori 3 standards, as they evolve
• Streamlining integration with the SAP Fiori launchpad, whether you run it on-prem or in the cloud
• Enhancing accessibility

With our new CEOs in place, I expect we will see more restructuring in 2020, aimed at driving operational efficiencies and helping the development teams get closer to you, our customers. This will likely result in new solution offerings for you and new collaboration opportunities for us. It will probably also be disruptive for some teams. Having been through this several times in the past few years, we will continue to focus on creating innovation you need to make building SAP Fiori apps and using your SAP S/4HANA or ECC systems easier.

How you can influence the roadmap

• Tell us what you want to see in future versions. It can be ideas for new features or a story about what you want the product to do that it cannot today. Leave us a comment below or send us an email.
• Attend the monthly SAP Screen Personas practitioner forum to see how other customers use SAP Screen Personas to improve employee productivity. There is generally a customer demo each month, SAP tutorial, and discussion about technical topics.

Where to learn more

• Take one of our openSAP courses. By taking the introduction, advanced, and mobile courses, many customers have renovated their SAP user experience without any additional assistance from us.
• Visit our customer support page, which combines our knowledge base articles and videos into a single, searchable page.
• View the latest official SAP Screen Personas roadmap at sap.com/roadmaps. Search for the SAP Fiori roadmap and then inside that document, scroll to SAP Screen Personas. In the November 2019 update, our content starts on page 70.

For the SAP UX Engineering team, Peter Spielvogel.

Disclaimer:

* This blog contains forward-looking statements about SAP‘s strategy and possible future developments. This information is subject to change and may be changed by SAP at any time for any reason without notice.