SAP released SAP CRM 7.0 EHP1 on December 20th 2010. We are continuously receiving positive feedback about the benefits of EHP1 in either in fixing the issues and streamlining the business process.
The following
One CRM manager of our customer quoted “IPC Performance is 40% better with EHP1”
“Our users like the enhanced intuitive Web UI”
I decided to write a series of blogs on EHP1 with a focus on UI, Marketing, Sales, Serivce, Pricing Engine and IC Webclient for the greater benefit of SAP CRM community
The new productivity UI
SAP integrated the themes of CRM 2.0 and Web 2.0 and made the UI easy to use.
The search functionality delivered with EHP1 saves time by making the search easy and flexible. SAP delivered search templates for 94 commonly used CRM business objects. The model overview displays the list of marked attributes when a CRM business object is selected. SAP delivered the most requested functionality of multi value search (Ex: copy and paste multiple values from a spreadsheet into a search field in the advanced search function). The export to XLS tool could be governed by the user roles and authorization to apply the corporate security and governance policies.
BOBJ dashboards display got better with EHP1. The user can embed one or more frequently used dashboards on the homepage through personalization
Object tagging is a great feature that allows user to tag an instance of an object (Ex: an opportunity document) .User could share the tags with community. User can set access to tag cloud on the home page via personalization.
All familiar Go-to menu and Action Menu that most users are use with the smartphones is now available in EHP1. It looks like SAP is trying very hard to give an unified user experience.
Paste in tables is a great feature that allows users to copy the text in single or multiple cells to the existing table in Web UI. You should calculate the ROI of user time saved by not re-entering the data that is already available in some electronic format.
Central sharing tool is a great way to share the saved searches, tags, favorites etc., with your user community. Imagine the ROI in terms of time saved by using the existing saved search created by a colleague instead of creating a similar search with the same parameters.
Content personalization is a great Web 2.0 features that most users are familiar with Google etc... You can open and close a content block on page or you can remove the content from screen.
Enhanced table features such as selection of multiple lines with CTRL/SHIFT & mouse click /key board combinations within tables and trees. The table scrolling loads the data as you scroll than loading all the table data to improve the performance.
Fixed columns is an all familiar column freeze functionality of spreadsheet is available as a fixed column in horizontally scrollable tables. (Ex: fix the account name, phone#, email id an scroll through the rest of the columns)
Table filtering allows row filtering if rows are selected and the row selection is removed
Keyboard handling via arrow keys which is very familiar to PC users
Tab chain definition allows the users to define the sequence of tabs via personalization for any form based assignment block
Tile layout personalization allows users to drag and drop assignment blocks from one tile to another on the tiled layout page. The automatic overflow mechanism incase more assignment blocks than the tile can display are assigned.
Further personalization such as multiple views for a table and save them under specific names is available. The views could be reused via embedding.
Task based UI that is introduced in CRM 7.0 got better with EHP1. The visual guidance of sub steps in an animated scrolling structure for complex tasks similar to the 1 to 5 steps structure that most users use to place an order online with a credit card. The tasks could be reused via embedding.
Choice of death of wheel or gradient bar is available in EHP1.
Rapid applications and Mash-ups are available in the UI configuration tools of EHP1. Now you can change the SAP logo to your company logo using this tool.
Please check for Part –II on SAP CRM 7.0 EHP1 Marketing tomorrow.
