Q&A transcript from SAP Screen Personas webinar 5

[PeterSpielvogel]

Thank you to everyone that attended the final webinar in our 5-part series, “Enhance Usability with SAP Screen Personas” on April 24, 2013. Jason Jester of Varian Medical Systems discussed how “Varian Medical Improves Sales and Distribution with SAP Screen Personas.” We have consolidated all the questions into the following Q&A guide, grouped into the following topics.

Questions for Jason at Varian

Product questions

Questions for Jason at Varian

Question	Answer
How long did it take to install Personas?	About a day.
How big is your team for Personas? Any professional designers?	Me and another person. We are both IT professionals without formal design training.
What training did you receive?	We had a half-day training with the SAP Imagineering team (inventors of Personas) at SAP.
Who was involved (business, IT, super users, etc) to make sure you designed the best screen possible?	Right now, we are starting with the business need and designing the screens within IT. Users will review prior to broader roll-out.
What was your approach to plan the use of the product and which transactions were the highest priority?	Our products are very complex and it is critical to enter the sales order correctly to assure smooth production and delivery to our customers. This process currently takes longer than we would like, so we are using Personas to streamline order entry by simplifying the screens.
How long does it take you to design a typical screen?	It has taken us several hours per screen. With more practice, it should take an hour for a basic screen and more for ones that involve more complex controls or scripting.
The sales order screen does not look very different from a standard SAP screen. Any reason for not changing it more to make it look more like web app?	Our goal was to improve user productivity. We have not been focusing on the aesthetics at this point.
Did you maintain central control or roll it out to the super users or end users to create their own screens?	We are currently creating the screens within IT. Once we expand our roll-out, we expect to involve super users within departments.
Were there any security issues?	Personas runs on top of existing SAP access control. All traffic can be encrypted with SSL.
Has there been an impact to the band width on your network?  Did you have to size your network to support the Personas solution?	We have not had any issues with this.
How is your personas performance with such images being served from server?	Performance with Personas meets our needs. We size images appropriately to optimize performance.
Please clarify what "tablets" are desired - iPads, Android, all?	Varian uses iPads.
Has Varian developed any standards/guidelines in order to better manage maintenance/support issues?	We are not at this point in the project.
What other business processes do you plan to put on Personas?	We are discussing with our business users.
What percent of your users are using Personas?	We are just starting our roll-out, so the number of users is small at this point.

Product questions

Question	Answer
Minimum requirement for installing SAP screen Personas	You need to be on ECC 6. Kernel version 7.21 or later. (This was released in September 2012) Browser running Personas needs Silverlight (version 5) plug-in installed. This is available for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. No other client software is required. You do not need the SAP GUI installed.
What enhancement package do we need to be on to install Personas?	Personas runs independently of the enhancement pack.
Does the F1 help work just as usual in SAP Screen Personas?	Yes.
Can we bring additional fields from different screens into a single screen in SAP GUI within then same transactions?	You would use the scripting functions to do this.
Also can we influence fields within a table control in a screen?	You would use the scripting functions to do this.
Are you leveraging GUIScripting for Screen Personas?	Personas has its own simple scripting functions.
When do you use JavaScript? Can I do validation of data entered on the screen? What about other business logic?	We recommend using JavaScript for simple client-side functions such as string manipulation or calendar functions. We recommend you do NOT put business logic into Personas scripts (although it is technically possible). You can use a Web RFC to do this instead.
What is your tablet strategy?	We designed Personas for desktop use. Yes, you can use Personas to make screens very simple to use on a smaller screen by removing all the fields you do not need and enlarging the buttons, text, etc. This will yield a simplified screen that still has a classic click and type interaction model. The tablet/phone paradigm includes zooming in/out with two fingers or swiping to get to the next screen. Also, rotating the screen changes the rendering. Personas does not exploit these features, so we recommend using Personas in a mobile scenario only if there is no way to get a dedicated mobile app for your specific use case. And, if you are assured of sufficient network connectivity to ensure that the session does not get interrupted. You can read a discussion about this topic on SCN. http://scn.sap.com/thread/3351976

If you want to ask more questions, I encourage you to attend the “Meet our Customers” session at SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando. Jason’s session will be on

Thursday May 16

2:00-3:30 PM (Eastern time)

“Meet our Customers” area on the show floor

You can reserve a spot through your SAP account executive.

In fact, we have many Personas sessions at SAPPHIRE NOW.

2013 H1 Personas Webinar Series

Original Broadcast Date	Recordings no longer available as of 2014	Q&A Transcript on SCN
February 27, 2013	Make SAP ERP Beautiful with SAP Screen Personas	http://scn.sap.com/community/gui/blog/2013/03/05/qa-transcript-from-sap-screen-personas-webinar-1
March 6, 2013	Streamline Quote to Cash Process with SAP Screen Personas	http://scn.sap.com/community/gui/blog/2013/03/09/qa-transcript-from-sap-screen-personas-webinar-2
March 13, 2013	Planning, deploying, and managing Personas in your SAP environment	http://scn.sap.com/community/gui/blog/2013/03/18/qa-transcript-from-sap-screen-personas-webinar-3
April 3, 2013	How to improve master data quality with SAP Screen Personas	http://scn.sap.com/community/gui/blog/2013/04/09/qa-transcript-from-sap-screen-personas-webinar-4
April 24, 2013	Varian Medical Improves Sales and Distribution with SAP Screen Personas	http://scn.sap.com/community/gui/blog/2013/05/02/qa-transcript-from-sap-screen-personas-webinar-5