The latest SAP Screen Personas SP17 service pack follows our pattern of delivering new features in response to customer requests. In addition to delivering new functionality for scanning, editing toolbars, supporting the newest SAPUI5 versions, and simplifying viewport creation, we have also focused on ensuring consistency across rendering engines, both the default SAP GUI for HTML and mobile-focused Slipstream Engine. And, we have updated our documentation to make it easier and faster for you to find the information you need to simplify classic applications in your SAP ERP systems, whether SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP S/4HANA (on-prem), or ECC. Improvements in SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP17 include:
Beyond the features highlighted in this blog post, we also made performance improvements so flavors load and run faster and updated the documentation to make it easier to use.
Consistent Adapt UI access through the SAP Fiori launchpad
With more customers moving to the SAP Fiori launchpad, we wanted to provide a consistent way to access the Adapt UI functionality in SAP S/4HANA. Adapt UI in the user action menu has been the way to access SAPUI5 flexibility for SAP Fiori apps, so now it’s the same process to access SAP Screen Personas to adapt classic apps.
Scanning now includes barcodes and optical character recognition (OCR)
While SAP Screen Personas has supported barcode scanning for several releases, we have added some new capabilities to the scanner. Not only can you scan barcodes, but you can also scan text using your device’s camera. The flavor builder can define either barcode or text recognition as the default for any individual scanner button you add to a flavor.
For shop floor, warehouse, maintenance, or other workers who are using tablets or phones to enter numbers or text into SAP, this can save time on data entry and improve data quality by reducing keying errors. In addition, there could be a safety impact if people gain situational awareness by spending less time looking down at their device. If your existing packaging has text, you can scan it directly without having to add barcodes to your labels.
Editing different levels of toolbars is the same
The Horizon theme introduced the ability to configure the menu and application toolbars, depending on how much screen real estate you wanted to use. It offers a choice of compact or full menu bar.
SAP Screen Personas lets you edit the toolbar controls across the application toolbar and system toolbar, including the expanded mode, with SAP GUI for HTML
In addition, SAP GUI for HTML and Slipstream Engine use a common interface to create header area changes. This allows customers to create custom menu structures with a hierarchy to which individual toolbar items or custom items can be moved and assigned. You have more granular control of how your screen looks, giving people access to the controls they need and helping to distinguish between primary and secondary toolbar actions.
To avoid manual roll-back of individual changes, you can reset the toolbar to its original state to start from scratch.
Viewports can start with existing changes
Viewports make it easy to navigate complex screens by showing only a subset of the available information at a time. Now, it’s easier to create viewports since you can keep the changes you have already made to a flavor or viewport and use that as the starting point. This reduces rework during flavor development and ensures consistency across your different viewports.
Supporting the latest SAPUI5 versions to include all the Horizon themes
Slipstream Engine uses SAPUI5 version 1.108 as the default. This gives you access to all the variations of the Horizon theme: Morning and Evening Horizon with their high-contrast versions. Previously, you could render the Horizon themes in your flavors; now you can also use the Slipstream Engine with the new Horizon themes.
SAP Screen Personas is free for customers and partners
The fact that there is no additional charge for SAP Screen Personas is not new, but it bears repeating since we still receive questions from people about this issue. We have thousands of customers using SAP Screen Personas to simplify their screens in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP S/4HANA, and ECC. Although we have more SAP Fiori apps than ever before, there are still classic transactions that include many controls (tabs, buttons, search fields, etc.) that people don’t need. SAP Screen Personas remains a fast, easy, low-cost, and low-risk way to improve the usability of these screens while keeping the core clean. The changes you make with SAP Screen Personas are upgrade-safe, which makes the flavors you build fit with our recommended clean core philosophy.
Learn more about SAP Screen Personas
Going forward with SAP Screen Personas
On behalf of the SAP Screen Personas product team, peter.spielvogel.
- Standardizing SAP Fiori launchpad access to Adapt UI functionality
- Improving scanning, including adding text recognition in addition to reading barcodes
- Adding consistency across SAP GUI for HTML and Slipstream Engine when editing toolbars
- Streamlining viewport creation
- Supporting the latest SAPUI5 versions to include all the Horizon themes
Beyond the features highlighted in this blog post, we also made performance improvements so flavors load and run faster and updated the documentation to make it easier to use.
Consistent Adapt UI access through the SAP Fiori launchpad
With more customers moving to the SAP Fiori launchpad, we wanted to provide a consistent way to access the Adapt UI functionality in SAP S/4HANA. Adapt UI in the user action menu has been the way to access SAPUI5 flexibility for SAP Fiori apps, so now it’s the same process to access SAP Screen Personas to adapt classic apps.
Access SAP Screen Personas through the user action menu
Scanning now includes barcodes and optical character recognition (OCR)
While SAP Screen Personas has supported barcode scanning for several releases, we have added some new capabilities to the scanner. Not only can you scan barcodes, but you can also scan text using your device’s camera. The flavor builder can define either barcode or text recognition as the default for any individual scanner button you add to a flavor.
For shop floor, warehouse, maintenance, or other workers who are using tablets or phones to enter numbers or text into SAP, this can save time on data entry and improve data quality by reducing keying errors. In addition, there could be a safety impact if people gain situational awareness by spending less time looking down at their device. If your existing packaging has text, you can scan it directly without having to add barcodes to your labels.
Scanning now offers an optical character recognition (OCR) option in addition to barcodes
Editing different levels of toolbars is the same
The Horizon theme introduced the ability to configure the menu and application toolbars, depending on how much screen real estate you wanted to use. It offers a choice of compact or full menu bar.
The Horizon theme offers different ways to display toolbars on classic apps
SAP Screen Personas lets you edit the toolbar controls across the application toolbar and system toolbar, including the expanded mode, with SAP GUI for HTML
In addition, SAP GUI for HTML and Slipstream Engine use a common interface to create header area changes. This allows customers to create custom menu structures with a hierarchy to which individual toolbar items or custom items can be moved and assigned. You have more granular control of how your screen looks, giving people access to the controls they need and helping to distinguish between primary and secondary toolbar actions.
To avoid manual roll-back of individual changes, you can reset the toolbar to its original state to start from scratch.
Adapt the toolbar in your classic apps using SAP Screen Personas
Viewports can start with existing changes
Viewports make it easy to navigate complex screens by showing only a subset of the available information at a time. Now, it’s easier to create viewports since you can keep the changes you have already made to a flavor or viewport and use that as the starting point. This reduces rework during flavor development and ensures consistency across your different viewports.
A new toggle allows you to keep your flavor changes when creating new viewports
Supporting the latest SAPUI5 versions to include all the Horizon themes
Slipstream Engine uses SAPUI5 version 1.108 as the default. This gives you access to all the variations of the Horizon theme: Morning and Evening Horizon with their high-contrast versions. Previously, you could render the Horizon themes in your flavors; now you can also use the Slipstream Engine with the new Horizon themes.
SAP Screen Personas is free for customers and partners
The fact that there is no additional charge for SAP Screen Personas is not new, but it bears repeating since we still receive questions from people about this issue. We have thousands of customers using SAP Screen Personas to simplify their screens in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP S/4HANA, and ECC. Although we have more SAP Fiori apps than ever before, there are still classic transactions that include many controls (tabs, buttons, search fields, etc.) that people don’t need. SAP Screen Personas remains a fast, easy, low-cost, and low-risk way to improve the usability of these screens while keeping the core clean. The changes you make with SAP Screen Personas are upgrade-safe, which makes the flavors you build fit with our recommended clean core philosophy.
Learn more about SAP Screen Personas
- Online training. The best way to learn the basics about SAP Screen Personas (Adapt UI for classic applications) is to take our recent openSAP course: https://open.sap.com/courses/sps5
- Connect with your peers. With so many organizations using SAP Screen Personas today, it’s likely that at least one has already solved the screen simplification challenge you are facing. We have a group of customers that gather online every month to share their best practices, demo what they have done, and answer each other’s questions. We also have experts from the product team to show how to use the latest functionality. If you are interested in joining, you can sign up online to join the SAP Screen Personas practitioner forum. This will add you to the mailing list for the monthly meeting summaries. Please contact me directly if you want to join the monthly calls.
- Product documentation. The SAP Screen Personas documentation contains the most comprehensive information about how to use the product. We have made many updates to make it easier to understand how to use all the rich functionality.
Going forward with SAP Screen Personas
- If you are on SP14 or earlier, we recommend you upgrade now. We only support the current version (SP17) and two previous releases (SP16 and SP15)
- If you are not currently using SAP Screen Personas, why not?
Worried that we won’t support it into the future? Don’t be. We are supporting SAP Screen Personas functionality through at least 2040.
Worried that it’s not a strategic topic for us? Since we added it to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition as a standard feature, that should be solid evidence that the ability to adapt the UI of classic apps is something important to us.
Have other concerns about the roadmap for SAP Screen Personas? See if we answer them in our latest roadmap blog post.
On behalf of the SAP Screen Personas product team, peter.spielvogel.
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