It has been around a year since the last SAP Screen Personas roadmap update blog. Since then, the team has been busy talking to customers and partners about how they use SAP Screen Personas, the business benefits they are seeing, and what will make the screen simplification process even easier, especially for large-scale UX transformation projects or Fiori initiatives. Of course, we are always working on developing new features for upcoming versions and thinking about the next big thing.
Where we are
In the last release,
SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP08, we focused on usability improvements, making it faster and easier for you to build flavors, especially for multi-channel applications.
By now, you have probably heard about the major restructuring taking place at SAP. We remain part of the UX Engineering organization, along with Fiori elements, which is part of the Intelligent Enterprise Group. This is great news for you and for us, as we can focus on making your migration to SAP S/4HANA as smooth as possible, especially on the user experience side.
As you know, the Slipstream Engine provides a Fiori-inspired theme (looks like Belize) out of the box, giving you a modernized UX, even before you start building any flavors. If you are not yet on SAP S/4HANA, your flavors are forward compatible, assuming the transaction code exists in your new system. So, you can improve your UX today, as you plan your business justification for moving to SAP S/4HANA.
Our support commitment remains the same, a rolling five years from the date of the last service pack. So, our next service pack this year (SP09) will push the end of support to December 31, 2024. This structure is similar to the support of other SAP solutions.
What we are thinking about
We are likely focusing on the same things you are thinking about, along with aligning with the broader SAP strategy. For us, this means:
- Helping customers migrate to S/4HANA. We are working closely with the Fiori 3 designers so you can easily build flavors that have the most modern user experience design that SAP provides.
- Adding intelligence to everything we do. As SAP seeks to help all its customers become intelligent enterprises, we are incorporating intelligent technologies into all our solutions. We are examining how this would work on the user experience side. I hope to be able to provide more details in the next roadmap update. If exploring the connection between machine learning and user experience sounds interesting to you, please send me an email.
- Simplifying Fiori app development. From the time we released our first Fiori-inspired theme, we have been working to bridge the gap between Fiori and SAP Screen Personas. Most customers want to run Fiori apps and they don’t care which technology they use to create them. Most users want a personalized, simple, intuitive screen, and don’t care what technology is behind the buttons. We are looking at how to optimize low-code development for Fiori apps. Delivery might be on-premise or in the cloud. It might incorporate elements of existing tools or it could be something all-new. We are examining all our options.Ideally, we can simplify this:
On a more tactical level, we are finalizing our SP09 release and planning the functionality for SP10.
How you can influence the product direction
- Join the monthly SAP Screen Personas practitioner forum to see how your peers are using SAP Screen Personas. There is generally a customer demo each month, SAP tutorial, and discussion about technical topics.
- Let us know what you want to see in future versions. It can be feature requests or just an explanation of what you want to do with the product and cannot do today. You can leave it as a comment below or email us.
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 recently updated customer support page, which combines our knowledge base articles and videos into a single, searchable page.
- Browse the Fiori-inspired flavors in the SAP Screen Personas Flavor Gallery to see if there is something you can use to jump-start your project.
- 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 March 2019 update, there is a clickable link on page 4 that takes you to the content on page 47.
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.