SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP16 – improvements across runtime, design time, and administration

On behalf of our global development, testing, and documentation teams, I’m excited to announce that SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP16 is now available. As organizations face ongoing financial pressures, they are looking for ways to improve operational efficiency. SAP Screen Personas is a great way to improve usability, empowering employees to get more done in less time, often with less stress. In this release, we have made improvements across runtime, design time, and administration. Many of the product enhancement ideas were suggested by customers and partners, so please keep your suggestions coming.

Runtime improvements improve user productivity

Barcode scanner in SAP GUI for HTML add utility for warehouse and field service workers

Barcode scanning has been part of SAP Screen Personas since SP12, but it has been limited to the Slipstream Engine. Now, we have added this capability to the SAP GUI for HTML. It works with any modern browser that supports camera access through the MediaDevices interface.

SAP Screen Personas SP16 adds a new barcode scanner in SAP GUI for HTML to speed up data entry.

People running classic apps on tablets now have a faster and automated way to enter data. This will be especially useful for warehouse and field service roles. This new capability is available in SAP kernels: 7.53 SP1028, 7.54 SP012, 7.77 SP512, 7.81 SP310, 7.85 SP210, and 7.89 SP000.

Continue button in mobile menu

For mobile data entry, it’s all about speed and accuracy. While the barcode scanning covers this in one way, users still need to navigate screens to move through a business process. On a device with a physical keyboard, users can press the enter key to advance to the next screen, however, on a touch screen, people must navigate through the menus.

With this release, we have added a “continue” button that simulates the “enter” key functionality. On mobile devices, people can save steps and time on data input for classic apps. This was suggested by a customer using SAP Screen Personas to simplify warehouse screens.

The continue button simplifies navigation on mobile devices.

Design time improvements empower flavor builders

Code analyzer for custom scripts

As the number of SAP Screen Personas customers grows, so does the range of apps and processes they simplify. In parallel, as the product becomes more mature (SP16!), people are using it for larger projects. This often involves creating more complex scripts. Although we encourage developers to embed SAPUI5 applets into their flavors, some prefer to build their scripts in the SAP Screen Personas script editor.

To help improve the quality of your custom scripts while you are creating them, we have added the following rules into the code analyzer of the script editor:

• – Compliance checks for Content Security Policy (CPL)
• – Warnings for potential context issues that need attention
• – Indications for unclear constructions to avoid errors in script execution

The findings of the code analyzer appear in the code section along with details on options for how to fix the findings.

New code analyzer rules in the SAP Screen Personas SP16 scripting editor provide more help for clean custom scripts.

Toolbar editor in SAP GUI for HTML

The Horizon theme introduced more options for formatting the toolbar. Compact mode keeps everything on one line, adding more space for content in the app, but requiring additional clicks to open certain menu options. The full menu option optimizes access to menu items but allows less space for the application content. SAP Screen Personas enables customers to adapt the toolbar with enhanced options.

• Improved capabilities for toolbars and menus
  • Hide and rename existing entries of the toolbar and menu items
  • Reorder toolbar and menu items
  • Add custom toolbar items, i.e. script buttons
• Support the new Horizon theme options for collapsed and expanded toolbars, as well as toolbars of earlier themes
• Add custom drop-down menus
  • Move individual toolbar items to a custom menu to distinguish between primary and secondary toolbar actions
  • Add custom items to a custom menu and add scripts to execute features
  • Allow hierarchy within custom drop-down items to distinguish by process needs or importance
  • This is initially available for SAP GUI for HTML in SP16. We plan to add this capability to Slipstream Engine

You can now add a custom drop-down menu with SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP16.

Conditional formatting: time in different formats

We now offer conditional formatting rules for data in tables based on time only or in addition to date:

• Rule definition in date and time in the default format of the flavor builder
• Rule interpretation based on the date and time format of the end user consuming the flavor

You can now add a custom drop-down menu with SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP16.

Administration improvements streamline deployment

Default names for object export

When exporting objects from SAP Screen Personas, the system used to give a generic name. While this met the basic functional requirement, it was not as user-friendly as it could be. Now, we automatically create a meaningful name for the export file that includes the object type and object name. For example if we are exporting a flavor for a shipping specialist, the name defaults to: “[Flavor]ShippingSpecialist.zip”. You can override the system-generated name if you want to. If you export multiple objects of the same type, they will be auto-named “collection” and indicate the object type, for example, “[ThemeCollection].zip”. The default export name does not consider object dependencies. If the chosen object has dependent objects, that will not be reflected in the naming.

Slipstream Engine authorization

It used to be that if you tried to use a transaction on Slipstream Engine and you did not have P_RUNTIME 01 authorization for the specific transaction, you would see an error message. Now, Slipstream Engine can be used without the P_RUNTIME check, which is only relevant for the Personas client. All authenticated ABAP system users can launch Slipstream Engine, even without SAP Screen Personas. This makes the behavior more consistent between Slipstream Engine and SAP GUI for HTML. Thank you to the customers who enlightened us about the problem this caused them.

SAP Screen Personas fully supports SAP S/4HANA

Since SAP Screen Personas is now a standard feature in SAP S/4HANA Cloud public edition 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 Cloud private edition and SAP S/4HANA on-prem customers using SAP Screen Personas to simplify their 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 simpler, focused on a specific role, and compatible with any device. It is a great way to adapt the classic app screens to suit your specific business requirements.

Support aligned with SAP S/4HANA

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. The innovation commitment for SAP Screen Personas functionality, 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?
   • SP16 will receive continuous innovation
   • SP15 will get important fixes and selected down ports
   • SP14 will receive emergency fixes
   • SP13 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 the UI adaptation that SAP Screen Personas provides 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 SP16 works on a wide variety of systems from the latest SAP S/4HANA release to some much older versions of ECC. Specifically:

Basis	Minimum Service Pack	Additional Notes Required?	Supported SAP Kernels
S/4HANA	All	No	749+
750	All	No	749, 753
740	SP03	Yes	749, 753
731	SP07	Yes	722
702	SP09	Yes	722
701	SP10	Yes	722
700	SP25	Yes	722

For SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP16, the supported kernel releases and their corresponding minimum and recommended (as of December 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.

SAP Kernel release 789 –> No minimum patch level

SAP Kernel release 785 –> No minimum patch level

SAP Kernel release 781 –> No minimum patch level

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

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

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

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

See the SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP16 Main Note 3264444 for more details and updated recommendations.

How to influence the future of SAP Screen Personas

We already have some exciting things planned for extending SAP Screen Personas functionality. 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 to use SP16 or learn more

• Watch the Productivity Power Play video about SP16. (Coming soon)
• Upgrade to SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP16.
• Take the latest SAP Screen Personas openSAP class to get a foundation for starting your project.
• 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.