SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP15 – cloud mindset drives innovation in usability

The addition of SAP Screen Personas capabilities to SAP S/4HANA Cloud has sparked a wave of both customer adoption and internal innovation. The “cloud mindset” of being more agile, thinking in smaller chunks, and soliciting feedback earlier, has shifted some of our internal processes. This will result in new, and potentially bolder, innovations in future versions of SAP Screen Personas. While we have always gathered customer feedback in our practitioner forum to improve usability, the addition of a new sounding board group is allowing us to get even closer to our customers and gather feedback on new ideas before we start development.

As with previous releases, we are focusing on improving usability for flavor builders and flavor consumers. In this summary blog post, we will focus on both design time and runtime improvements.

• Parking lot in detachable window
• Quick copy script and control IDs
• Auto-transport of global scripts
• Compact mobile menu in Slipstream Engine
• Horizon theme support

Since we have a single code line for both our on-prem and cloud versions, these innovations apply to both delivery channels, except anything related to Slipstream Engine, which is only supported in the on premise delivery of SAP Screen Personas. With the majority of SAP Screen Personas customers still running on-prem, we will continue to plan on regular service packs to bring improvements in usability, performance, and ease of use

Parking lot in detachable window speed flavor development

The parking lot in the SAP Screen Personas flavor editor provides options to focus better on simplifying very complex and overloaded screens. Instead of trying to find room to “park” controls somewhere on the transaction (application) screen, the parking lot is a container to collect relevant fields before putting them in their final location in the flavor. For example, you might use the parking lot to temporarily store controls from different tabs as you are simplifying the screen.

With this release, you can now detach the parking lot as a separate window. This gives you more flexibility as you can see your entire flavor without anything covering it. You can move it back inside the flavor editor at any time.

The parking lot in SAP Screen Personas lets you temporarily store controls, often in conjunction with tab merging.

By detaching the parking lot, you can move it a separate location that does not cover any part of your flavor. (In this screen shot, we are showing it detached and outside the flavor, but currently on top of the flavor editor.)

Quick copy script and control IDs simplifies script creation

In scripting we added the capability to copy the script ID or control ID to the clipboard with a single click. If the item is underlined, clicking on it once will add it to the clipboard. This makes it faster and easier to build scripts.

Copying the script ID or control ID to the clipboard with a single click makes it faster to create scripts.

Auto-transport of global scripts streamlines putting flavors into production

We now automatically detect and add global scripts to transport requests when they are referenced in local scripts of a flavor. Instead of adding items manually to your transport, SP15 will automatically include global scripts. This simplifies the deployment process.

Global scripts referenced in local scripts are automatically detected and added to the transport package.

Compact mobile menu in Slipstream Engine improves usability on phones

With this new service pack, we have greatly improved mobile rendering in Slipstream Engine. The focus is on maximizing the use of the very limited screen real estate. The menu tile is now movable; you can drag it to any location on the bottom of the screen, so it does not block your view of anything else. This compact mobile menu holds actions for applications, including all the mobile options for the application, access to the SAP Screen Personas switchboard, and the ability to view current and cleared messages. The switchboard allows you to change themes, including the new Horizon theme.

The compact menu includes application options, SAP Screen Personas switchboard, and access to messages, including those you have already cleared.

Horizon theme support aligns with SAP UX strategy

The Horizon theme, announced last year, is now generally available in some products. SAP Screen Personas introduces Horizon support with SP15, so you can deliver a consistent experience to your users, if you are using Horizon in your other SAP applications.

SAP Screen Personas uses SAPUI5 1.96, so you can now render the new Horizon theme.

SAP Screen Personas fully supports SAP S/4HANA

Since SAP Screen Personas is now a standard feature in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, through the Adapt UI menu option for classic applications, it should be clear that SAP Screen Personas is a key part of SAP’s UX strategy going forward. We are seeing more SAP S/4HANA on-prem customers using SAP Screen Personas to simplify classic applications. In SAP S/4HANA, we use the term classic applications to refer to what we previously called transactions in ECC.

SAP Screen Personas brings the SAP Fiori user experience to classic applications by making them more simple, focused on a specific role, and compatible with any device.

Support through 2040

Here is our current support strategy for SAP Screen Personas 3.0.

1. As a reminder, SAP Screen Personas 3.0 is aligned with SAP S/4HANA support. This is now through 2040. https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2900388
2. The SAP Screen Personas release strategy note contains details on installation and support. https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2013453
3. We support the current as well as the two previous Service Packs. What does this mean to you?
   • SP15 will receive continuous innovation
   • SP14 will get important fixes and selected down ports
   • SP13 will receive emergency fixes
   • SP12 and earlier will no longer be supported (time to upgrade!)

If you look in the product availability matrix, you will see the end of support date for a specific service pack. This is aligned with the “n-2” support outlined above.  Overall, though, we have committed to support SAP Screen Personas through at least 2040, as mentioned in a response to this specific question in one of our roadmap posts.

System requirements

SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP15 works on a wide variety of systems from the latest SAP S/4HANA release to some much older versions of ECC. Specifically:

For SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP15, the supported kernel releases and their corresponding minimum and recommended (as of June 2022) patch levels are listed below.

You do not need to update your kernel to move to the new version of SAP Screen Personas, if your system is on a supported kernel release.

Kernel release 785 –> No minimum patch level

Kernel release 781 –> No minimum patch level

Kernel release 777 –> No minimum patch level –> Recommended patch level 100 or higher

Kernel release 753 –> Minimum patch level 600 –> Recommended patch level 615 or higher

Kernel release 749 –> Minimum patch level 400 –> Recommended patch level 800 or higher

Kernel release 722 –> Minimum patch level 400 –> Recommended patch level 900 or higher

Kernel release 773 is out of maintenance, so it was removed from this list. The minimum patch level for kernel release 753 was raised to 600 due to a required correction delivered in this patch.

See the SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP15 Main Note 3201065 for more details and updated recommendations.

Continuous improvement

We already have some exciting things planned for extending SAP Screen Personas functionality in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. If you have additional improvement ideas, please send us your requests (via email or as a comment to this blog) for anything you would like to see in upcoming deliveries.

Next Steps

• Watch the Productivity Power Play video about SP15.
• Upgrade to SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP15 (requires valid NetWeaver License).
• Take the free Introduction to SAP Screen Personas openSAP class to get a foundation for starting your project.
• Extend your knowledge with the Using SAP Screen Personas for Advanced Scenarios openSAP class to go deeper into how to use the product.
• Extend your flavors from your desktop to all your devices with our Building Mobile Applications with SAP Screen Personas
• Learn more on the SAP Help Portal for SAP Screen Personas with articles and videos on a variety of topics.
• Join the monthly SAP Screen Personas practitioner forum to see other customers demo how they are using the product to improve the usability in their SAP systems.

For the SAP Screen Personas product team, Peter Spielvogel.