SAP User Experience in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208

This week marked the general availability of the new SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208 release—our fully-fledged cloud offering supporting your journey to the intelligent enterprise. As always, this release is packed with a large variety of enhancements and innovations which help you to run your business smoothly.

In this blog post, I am going to walk you through the highlights coming for SAP User Experience in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208. Take a look at my video to get a first impression of the exciting innovations waiting for you:

From a product and end-user experience perspective, SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208 comes with a significant step forward; it allows you to use the solution in an attractive and modern way from a visual standpoint and in a more efficient way looking at usability. On top of that, integrations with major productivity tools such as Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace are available to ease the daily activities at your work desk.

This post covers the following topics:

Modern Look and Feel Based on the New Horizon Visual Theme

After a phased roll-out starting with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111, the new Horizon visual theme is now generally available. With this innovation, we have implemented design elements that give SAP S/4HANA Cloud a fresh new look and help you to get your job done faster, more intuitively, and with better outcomes. A simplified header with the search field more prominently placed as well as an increased use of bold type makes it easier to see everything important at a glance. In addition to this improved information hierarchy, rounded corners and new icons make for a friendly look. We also ensure accessibility for the visually impaired through high-contrast white and black versions. With Horizon, it is now even easier to create your own custom theme with the UI Theme Designer on SAP Business Technology Platform, Cloud Foundry. Users can select the new Horizon theme via user settings and admins can make it the default for all users. Take advantage of this user-friendly experience for applications running in the browser as well as native mobile applications on both iOS and Android such as SAP Mobile Start—your native mobile entry point.

Figure 1: The new Horizon visual theme offers a fresh and organized look.

Do Your Job with Speed and Agility with the New My Home in SAP S/4HANA Cloud

The new My Home is an easy-to-use application that supports business users in their everyday tasks and optimizes their work environment significantly. Building on the functionality of SAP Fiori launchpad in SAP S/4HANA Cloud and leveraging ‘Spaces and Pages’, it orchestrates information, tasks, and applications so that you can thrive in today’s challenging work environment by accessing exactly what you need to do your job with speed and agility. Combining items from the ‘My Inbox’ and ‘My Situations’ SAP Fiori apps, it enables you to access and manage your to-dos, insights, and favorite pages and apps—and this, on any device. The best experience is offered with the Horizon theme, although it also supports other themes. In this release, we offer the new My Home as an Opt-In; when ‘Spaces and Pages’ is activated, the settings SPACES_CUSTOM_HOME and SPACES_MYHOME must be switched ON in the ‘Manage Launchpad Settings’ application.

Figure 2: The new My Home optimizes your daily work life significantly.

Take Collaboration to the Next Level Through Microsoft Teams

To simplify collaboration between SAP S/4HANA Cloud users, we introduce a new integration with Microsoft Teams. The ‘Share to Microsoft Teams’ option allows users to share content based on SAP Fiori elements apps directly to Microsoft Teams. By doing so, we improve efficiency in processes where SAP S/4HANA Cloud users need to collaborate based on the data in the system. Typical cases are approvals, exceptions, and validations. The receiver of the message can immediately launch the SAP S/4HANA Cloud app from Microsoft Teams and thus, react accordingly without any delay. Let me show you an example of how this works: A sales manager checks the orders of an important customer and realizes that one of them cannot be delivered on time. In order to quickly resolve this problem, they simply use this new feature to share SAP S/4HANA Cloud data with their co-workers and easily explain to them what needs to be done through a message in Microsoft Teams. Their co-workers can then navigate to the SAP S/4HANA Cloud system via the shared link and remove the issue. An easy and smart way of collaborating efficiently!

This functionality is currently in a phased roll-out and is being released as an experimental feature as part of the Early Adopter Care Program. If you’d like to be the first to test this feature and provide your feedback early on, sign up here for the program and be part of the journey!

Figure 3: The integration with Microsoft Teams makes it easy to collaborate with your co-workers.

Exchange Your Data Easily with Google Workspace

We enable a seamless integration between Google Workspace and SAP S/4HANA Cloud to improve user experience by leveraging the collaborative capabilities of Google Workspace. SAP data from all UI tables can be exported to Google Workspace, allowing customers to connect core SAP software operations in the cloud with Google Sheets. A ‘File Browser’ dialogue offers the possibility to browse the Google repository and decide on the preferred location for the table export. Additionally, General Journal Entries can be uploaded from Google Sheets to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. In a first step, the user needs to download a template to Google Workspace opened in Google Sheets. Once all relevant information has been entered in the Google Sheets template, it can be uploaded and posted to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

The initial set of features is included in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208, leveraging an SAP Business Technology Platform service enabling tight integration and a consistent user experience (additional license. required: SAP Document Management Service, integration option).

Figure 4: The integration with Google Workspace facilitates data exchange.

Adapt UI with Screen Personas

The ability to transform classic applications into SAP Fiori-inspired designs, tailored for specific business roles and scenarios using Screen Personas is built right into SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Business analysts or key users can create simplified versions of screens—so-called flavors, which work on top of the underlying screens of classic applications using SAP GUI for HTML. Intuitive editors provide powerful features that allow flavor builders to simplify screens by hiding unneeded controls. They can also rearrange controls with the drag and drop editor as well as adjust the formatting and styles of UI elements. With the scripting engine, flavor builders can automate keystrokes, and data entry can be defaulted to eliminate manual user interactions. This not only increases end-user productivity and improves data quality, but also empowers end users to work more efficiently.

Figure 5: Transform classic applications into SAP Fiori-inspired designs using Screen Personas.

Further SAP UX Improvements

• Content Capturing for Classic SAP Fiori Applications to Easily Copy and Paste: End users can use this function to copy an area of an ALV grid or ABAP list to the clipboard, for example through a cell range selection by mouse. This allows end users to efficiently copy and paste data into any other application such as a text editor, a spreadsheet, or an e-mail application.
• Improved Menu / Toolbar in Classic SAP Fiori Applications: In order to ease access to the menu, it is no longer part of the overflow menu. Instead, it is the first element in the toolbar and is displayed as a drop-down list (also called collapsed view). It is possible to expand this view so that the menu is shown as a menu bar above the toolbar. It can be easily collapsed again via the settings dialogue.
• Easy Selection of Relative Dates: This allows the user to choose relative dates, such as ‘Today’ or ‘Yesterday’, which can be saved as views and reused without having to explicitly enter the new date for ‘Yesterday’. This applies to most of the SAP Fiori apps containing single date interval fields, single date fields, and single date time interval fields.

To get more details on the improvements mentioned in this blog post as well as further SAP UX improvements across SAP technologies and applications, have a look at Thomas Reiss’s blog post.

Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast

I would like to encourage you to subscribe to our podcast “Inside SAP S/4HANA”. This podcast leverages the unique knowledge and expertise of SAP S/4HANA product experts, partners, and customers to address your needs by sharing product insights and project best practice. There is no customer success without product success and project success—we help you to get to the next level and make your SAP S/4HANA projects a success. Subscribe now and benefit from the shared knowledge.

Your Voice Matters!

If you want to learn more and actively engage with SAP subject matter experts on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, follow our SAP S/4HANA Cloud topic page—now fully integrated with SAP Community. The community brings together SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers, partners and SAP experts and has a clear mission: deliver an interactive community to engage with one another about best practices and product solutions. We invite you to explore this new SAP S/4HANA Cloud ‘one-stop shop’ as the central place for all resources, tools, content questions, answers and connect with experts to guide you through your SAP S/4HANA Cloud journey.

Watch the Replays of Our SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208 Early Release Series!

We’ve hosted a series of compelling live sessions from the heart of the SAP S/4HANA Engineering organization. Missed the live sessions? Watch our replays on demand!

Among the replays, you can find a 48-minute recording, a presentation, and demos for SAP User Experience as part of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208 release as well as 20 other sessions on diverse topics like Manufacturing, Finance, Consumer Products, Sourcing and Procurement, Developer Extensibility, and many more. For more information on the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Early Release Series and how to sign up for it, see this link.

More Information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud:

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info here
  • Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud release blog posts here and previous release highlights here
• Product videos on our SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA YouTube playlist
• SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here
• Early Release Webinar Series here
• Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
• openSAP Microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA here
• Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud topic page: here
• Feature Scope Description here
• What’s New here
• Help Portal Product Page here

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