tracking flavor usage

[PeterSpielvogel]

Jay Pandit started a discussion about flavor metrics. http://scn.sap.com/thread/3769149

Our response was that this feature is in our backlog.

The product team is interested in hearing your requirements for tracking flavor usage.

Also, if you have implemented this in some way in your environment.

Please add your requirements or how you track usage to this discussion or email us your wish list. Also, let us know if you would like to test pre-release functionality when we have something (planned for later this year).

Thanks and regards,

Peter

[daniel_ruiz2]

hi Peter,

Considering this is a web-based solution for Personas 3, you should aim to provide at least what Google Analytics does. Case it's less, it's my opinion you should not even waste time trying.

Or, just use GA - create a wrapper around it to make it easier to be embedded into the Personas Flavor. Make sure Personas is compatible with GA and everything works as expected in order to visualize page hits, etc.

Cheers,

Dan.

[Former Member]

Some thoughts about tracking, based on my attempts to monitor Personas 2 usage a while ago...

• Monitoring usage by transaction/flavor is obviously important. I'm pretty sure you could do this by embedding Google Analytics into the pages
• I also want to be able to monitor by user, to see who is using the flavours and who needs more encouragement. I'm not sure Google Analytics could do this, but maybe I haven't thought about it hard enough.
• I'd like to be able to add my own instrumentation. I build Personas launchpads with "quick lookups" that don't render a page, but I'd like to monitor usage of those lookups. Either a tracking option on a button, or better a way to add tracking in a script - session.utils.track(...) - would be really useful.
• I'd like to be able to include extra information into the data. For example, I want to be able to analyse usage by department, using the data on the user master. The easiest way to provide for this, and the other things I haven't thought of yet, is to provide the tracking data in a way that can be imported into Lumira Desktop. You might want to provide some analysis directly, plus a data export facility.
• Tracking mouse clicks, at least on buttons & menus, might be informative, especially if you could do a before/after analysis.
• This is a bit more blue sky, but most people I suspect would be looking at moving from SAPgui to Personas flavours, not from webgui to Personas flavours. That makes a before/after analysis harder. Would it be possible to include ST03 performance data, or SM20 audit log data, into the analysis? That could be a job for Lumira I guess?

Steve.

[ssteinhauer]

Hi Steve,

I agree with you that google analytics is clearly the gold standard for tracking (easy to use, very powerful), and we have seen that is can be embedded into SAP Screen Personas (it is probably easiest to do this through the html viewer).

Of course having a call go from your client to the wild internet on every screen change might raise some concerns for some.

I am fully with you on the tracking API - we are currently working on a proposal in that direction which will also cover your 4th point. As for the per-user-performance tracking - SAP Screen Personas will not provide such a feature out of the box. I also thing that a well designed API together with the onBeforeRefresh/onAfterRefresh script will allow you to easily tack specific user actions (clicks, enter, ...).

On your last point, I agree that any tracking API has to work for both SAPGUI for Windows as well as SAPGUI for HTML. However, what questions would you be answering by combining SM20 and ST03 data? Are you looking for end-to-end time in process? To identify if the SAPGUI for HTML overhead is compensated by your SAP Screen Personas flavors when comparing with SAPGUI for Windows?

Cheers,

--

Sebastian Steinhauer

SAP Screen Personas

Product Owner

[Former Member]

If the tracking API works in SAPgui for Windows, then in theory I wouldn't need to use ST03/SM20 data. But, to get "before" data that would mean building flavours for all the tracked transactions before you can get anything. If the reason for tracking is to see on which transactions you should focusing, that's less practical. You can't instrument them all!

The existing ST03/SM20 data doesn't provide as good analysis as you'd get via your proposed API, but it does provide transactions counts by user & time, and from which I can derive department. That's my "real" before analysis. I can do that already, obviously. What I'm suggesting is that being able to combine it with the richer data from your new functionality will make before/after comparisons easier. It isn't necessary, but it would be nice to have it all in one place. Maybe the answer is just "Lumira" and so long as we can export your tracking data, we can merge as necessary with anything else we want.

And yes, as good as Google Analytics is, I really don't think you can use it because many organisations will either not like, or actively prevent, the traffic. Especially if it contains username information. You'll have to roll your own, I guess...

Steve.

[daniel_ruiz2]

hi Steve,

all points raised can be covered using Custom Events as far I'm aware.. you can embed custom data and parse it based on event and data if you want, creating a new report or goal conversion using events or sequence of hits.

@Sebastian:

- I'm sort of fairly sure the ABAP system kinda have some firewall rules to access SAP.. I cannot see absolute no difference between accessing SAP or Google, just that Google is likely to be a lot more secure than SAP on every single technological point. Can you please elaborate what would be the concern of adding some more rules for outbound connections?

btw, I understand concerns about username - well, you don't need to send the perfect SAP username, you can just use some sort of alias.

[ssteinhauer]

Hi Daniel,

Thank you for you input. I am a great fan of GA myself. 

But we do have customers that run their operations so tightly controlled that that they do not even have an outbound internet connection - especially from their productive systems. We will need to provide a solution that does not require an outbound data connection to the public internet from either the client or the server. This is in fact more common than I would had thought.

Already today SAP Screen Personas 3.0 scripting allows you to build some very neat GA integration, but this puts the privacy and data protection burden on the flavor creator.

In case you are working on a Google Analytics and SAP Screen Personas 3.0 integration it would be great if you could share your findings in the form of an Knowledge Base article (Personas Knowledge Base - SAP Imagineering - SCN Wiki) for others in the user community to use.

Cheers,

--

Sebastian Steinhauer

SAP Screen Personas

Product Owner

[daniel_ruiz2]

hi Sebastian,

"We will need to provide a solution that does not require an outbound data connection to the public internet from either the client or the server." - worst sentence ever, you won't be able to create a "solution", above all if I decide to compare it to GA.. sorry, you won't - SAP is not capable of such.

it seems to me you're trying to justify wasting time to do something you should not do because the solution is already there and it's free.

also, "they" always have internet connection, every single company that can afford SAP software do have internet connection - now, are you telling me there is people out there that do work in a corporate environment with SAP software and they have no access to www.google.com ? - are they working in some sort of German bunker? (sarcasm) - even considering a tough-book in a warehouse system (which is usually WAN), you can setup rules to pipe the requests thru a corporate proxy.. so please, explain me exactly where the issue lies?

as soon you 'force' your product down any of a possible customer I could work in future, it means you have beaten the brains out of that customer - they won't accept GA because there is the 'SAP offering that does the same' (haha, yeah right!) which looks like an alien and offers 1000x less possibilities.. but I will suffer because I will have to use this eventually.. so please, pretty please, don't do it.

Cheers,

Dan.

PS: if a company is afraid of reaching the internet and especially a website of a company like Google, they have a hell lot more problems that you can solve..

[ssteinhauer]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your input - I believe I understand your position on the matter. I can ensure you if this solution was not asked for we wouldn't be having this conversation. As a simple example - the above mentioned scenario of tracking non-aggregated data about individual users is not possible using Google Analytics.      

I do however understand your concerns and we are at this point not planning to provide data exploration capabilities out of the box as part of SAP Screen Personas. On the contrary, I believe that enough extremely powerful or free tools exist ("R", MATLAB, Excel and Lumira come to mind). We are planning however to provide a data gathering mechanism which will not actively prevent your from collecting identifiable information and correlate the gathered data to other information your SAP instance is tracking by default (such as role, department, app-server, etc.).

Let me assure you that we will point out alternative solutions to customers, as we always do. The SAP Screen Personas remains focused on providing the best results to customers within their constraints.

Cheers,

--

Sebastian Steinhauer

SAP Screen Personas

Product Owner

[daniel_ruiz2]

hi Sebastian,

it is possible to track non-aggregated data, however one must be careful on 'what to track' to not break GA's T&C.. also, GA Premium is able to extend that power a bit more, not that most would need such anyways.. (would still be cheaper than patching SAP to do such) - to do the majority of decisions around usability you don't need such "tracking tool" you describe.

all I can think of is using such tool to measure 'adoption' - we're not talking about a fancy logging mechanism to query over, unless you are.. (and again, why the hell built such over Personas?) and to track adoption and usage (how people use, not how individual A or B uses it) - GA will do the work quite well as long one knows how to use it.

I thought people was asking for a way to have indicators if after Personas investment they had any return - in what I believe GA could potentially do such..

clearly we disagree, IMO your described "data gathering mechanism" should not be coupled with Personas but rather something else, something standalone maybe configurable for usage over any sort of UI technology in SAP landscape (wdp, ui5, personas, etc) - nonetheless, good luck with your efforts, my comments and thoughts are here and this is the only contribution I can actually make.

Cheers,

Dan.

[Former Member]

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