- SAP Managed Tags
Introduction
From Release 2408, all our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition customers have moved from Groups to Spaces and Pages. After eight months of practices, some customers asked me about the Best Practice of using Spaces and Pages. I think it is a good idea to give some of my advice on this topic.
My Three Best Practices
My best practices are three:
- Declogging My Home Page
- Personalize Pages to Your Needs
- Use As Many SAP Delivered Spaces and Pages as Possible
Best Practice 1 – Declogging My Home Page
My Home is the standard entry page with several sections. The below picture shows one of the systems I have access to. It is colorful and marvelous to showcase all the bells and whistles of My Home Page. However, as a system administrator, I don’t use all of them on a daily basis. I need to tailor the My Home Page to my needs by only listing those objects I need to do my job.
A Very Busy My Home Entry Page
Besides Spaces Menu, all the below work is conducted in the My Home Settings dialog under User Actions Menu (the menu listed under your name).
- Spaces Menu – Unpin not commonly used Spaces from the Shell Bar. Keep in mind that I can bring back these Spaces at any minute from the hamburger bar at the upper left.
- To-Dos Section – if you are critical to a workflow process, you need to leave the To-Dos section there. Because it hits your eyes right away every morning when you log on to the system.
- News Section – at this moment, the News section is prepared for you based on RASD information collected from your activated features and functions. Yes, its content is tailor made for you based on your information. Depending on your interest, you can reduce the content, or only display it right before and after a major upgrade. In other words, it does not need to be on everyday.
- Pages Section – although you are allowed to pin eight pages here, choose the most important one’s matter to you, not necessary all of eight. You have another section Apps to pin the right apps to be handy.
- Apps Section - Favorites – this is the place you need to pay attention to. Pin those mostly used apps in the Favorites tab. In addition, if you follow a workflow, you can put relevant apps in one Group. For example, when I create a set of new business users, I use four apps. Now I bundle them together to be a User Creation Group.
Group a User Creation Workflow related Apps into One App Group
- Apps-Most Used and Recently Used – these tabs contain all the apps you used. The list is extracted from Recent Activities under User Actions Menu (under your initials at the upper right corner). There are two sections: Recent Activities and Frequently Used. They correspond to Apps-Recently Used and Apps-Most Used, respectively. They are convenient tools to help you find the app you used.
- Insight Tiles – add no more than five system overview tiles here. In my case, the IAM Info System and Application Jobs are import to me. For other apps, I can go there directly from the App Finder on a needed basis. They don't need to be pined on the My Home page all the time.
- Insights Cards – Very similar as Insights Tiles, I only pin those needed reports here. Remember, when you pin many reports here, it takes resources to get the data when you open the My Home page. The more reports you want to see them by default, the longer it takes to prepare and display them.
Best Practice 2 – Personalize Pages to Your Needs
The below figure is the Identity and Access Management Page of Administration Space. It is an SAP delivered page and your system administrator assigned it to you based on your business user roles.
SAP Delivered Identity and Access Management Page
Many users thought they should not modify these SAP delivery pages. Any changes should be made by the Administrator for all users. Well, there is a misunderstanding here. You can use “Edit Current Page” under the User Actions Menu to modify the page. The modification only affects you, not others with the same page. This is a user specific modification on current tenant, not transferable to other tenants.
After editing, it becomes a very simplified page
The Identity and Access Management Page after Editing
If you change your mind, you can redo your modifications.
One note: if you want to preserve an app but not showing it, you can create a new hidden section and move the app tile to be there.
Working Session of the Edit Content Page
Best Practice 3 – Use As Many SAP Delivered Spaces and Pages As Possible
In the SAP Community, I had several discussions with community members on the pros and cons of using SAP delivered roles and their associated Spaces and Pages. One strong argument of against using SAP delivered business user role is from our SAP Activate:
“For the business roles in the Production System, it is strongly recommended to create custom business roles based on the identified workplaces.”
Let’s focus on Spaces and Pages here without too much discussion on the business user roles. Put in a simple way, Spaces and Pages are organizing apps according to a user’s job responsibilities. SAP UX designers put in a lot of effort to organize these apps in a most reasonable way with the end users in their mind. It is a waste if not using them. Even if you develop your own business user roles, it still makes sense to use a similar SAP delivered Space and its Pages. In case your business user role doesn’t have a certain authorization because of lack of certain business catalogs (see my blog on User Management), the app just won’t show up on the page (marked as “Out of role context”). It doesn’t cause any damage to the Page. The below figure from my blog Switching to Spaces and Pages Experience Sharing - Assigning Predefined S&P to Your Own Biz Roles just illustrate this concept.
Page with "Out of Role Context" App Tiles
Conclusions
In this short blog, I explained my three best practices for using Spaces and Pages with reasons and examples. I believe this can make your daily work more efficient and enjoyable with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.
References
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