SAP Screen Personas Performance in the real world

[joao_sousa2]

I've read the blogs, Personas are amazing the user does much less clicking, etc, but in the real world is anyone using this in production, for a widescale deployment?

I've tried this in my system and although it's cute, and at first people have fun clearing all the fields they never used, I felt the performance was severely lacking, and worst of all is that it inherits all the problems of SAP GUI for HTML, specfically bad formating. I don't use SAP GUI for HTML because some transactions don't work well in it, namely FBCJ, CV01N, etc. Do you feel this problem is fixed by Personas?

It's the same as NWBC, awesome, great, but when I try to use it in production... the consistency just isn't there. I need a reliable GUI and both NWBC and Personas crash one too many times.

Am I seeing this wrong? Are you succesfully using this in production?

Best regards

[joao_sousa2]

SAP ECC 6.0 Eh7 (with 7.4 Netweaver). All SPs updated to latest available.

[Former Member]

Interesting. Same as me. In that case I don't understand your ITS behaviour. As I said, mine resizes as you'd expect, and is even slightly more compact than SAPgui.

Steve.

[joao_sousa2]

I'll have the basis guys check the Kernel.

[Former Member]

Be sure to check 's reply in . It has some valuable information.

[Former Member]

As for transactions that don't work well in HTMLgui, whether or not Personas helps depends on why they don't work well in the first place. The general rule is that if it doesn't work in HTMLgui it won't work in Personas, but there are ways of working around some of these issues. What doesn't work with the transactions you mention?

Steve.

[joao_sousa2]

Usually the general placement of the UI. Even for transactions that do work, compare ITS VA02 to GUI VA02, in ITS the tab becomes weird, takes over only half the screen, has like 1 or 2 lines available.

I will try to get a real use case like VL32N and see what I can do.

[Former Member]

Which version of ERP6 are you running? In my system both the ITS and Personas versions of VA02 expand the tab to show as many line items as the browser window will allow, and dynamically changes if you resize the window. I actually find the ITS layout slightly more compact - on my laptop, VA02 in SAPgui shows only two lines while in a browser window of the same size the ITS shows 3. Personas is less compact, I agree, but it does resize in larger windows. Again, though, Personas v3 should help with that as it is delivered via the ITS.

Steve.

[Former Member]

If you compare Personas to native SAPgui in unaltered transactions, then for sure Personas comes off worse. Its interface into the backend system is the HTMLgui, which isn't as responsive as a native SAPgui, and then it adds another layer on top. That layer is getting more efficient all the time, but still in most cases Personas is a little slower than HTMLgui.

But that's missing the point of Personas. Look at this blog - . Here I simplify a transaction that requires a user to do a lot of clicking around to find all the information they need. This can take 30-60 seconds to get to everything. My Personas flavour takes a little while to render - maybe 5-6 seconds. That feels a little sluggish at first sight, until you realise it has everything the user needs in one screen with not further clicking or scrolling. Slow to render? Yes. Slower that the equivalent in SAPgui? Absolutely not. Being conservative, this saves our users 20-25 seconds each time they run the transaction. Automation is the key.

Yes we are running this in production, and our users love it. Performance is not an issue for us or them. We have only 80-90 users using this live at the moment. There are customers with 10x that many Personas live in production.

Steve.

[joao_sousa2]

My main issue is reliability. I'm running a server with all the latest SPs and yet I got several freezes in a short while. The spinning windows ball adds a lot to the sluggish feeling.

Since you aren't customizing every screen, and the performance is worse for non customized screens, how do you handle this multi environment?

[Former Member]

For our users I have indeed customised everything, like this - . Cherry picking the transactions that need attention and leaving the rest doesn't work, in my opinion, not least for the reasons you mention. It also creates a very disjoint user experience - some nice transactions and some standard ones just doesn't feel right. This is more work, but necessary work I believe.

You could also use NWBC  to useWindows GUI for the standard transactions and Personas for the personalised ones. That gets rid of the performance issues while keeping a single interface for everything. But building a coherent set of personalised transaction completely in Personas feels like a better solution to me. That might change depending on the size of the set of transactions to need to work with. My solution above just included 23 transactions so doing the all wasn't a huge amount of work.

Freezes and spinning balls is not something I've experienced. I find Personas a pretty solid product so long as you keep up with patches to both Personas and the kernel.

[joao_sousa2]

I was looking at your videos, and although I see the benefit from simplifying that ugly SAP transaction (which must be one of the worse in SAP....), the UI lag is a big turnoff for me. You click, takes a while for the values to show up, then 1 or 2 seconds for the UI to become responsive, that's basically what I was talking about when I said sluggishness.

I can see in your use case the huge simplification, but the cost is high if the original UI is simpler.

[Former Member]

I agree. Personas is not a silver bullet for all your UI/UX issues. There are cases where it could conceivably make things worse. Going from a SAPgui screen to a Personas version with just a few fields hidden is one of those cases. Simpler but slower is probably a step backwards. I would hope version 3 will change that somewhat - the new architecture should make it considerably faster.

That said, don't second guess your users. I thought the 5 or so second render time for that IW33 screen would be too long. It certainly frustrates me as it does you. But my users don't care. Their overall job gets done more quickly, and it is easier for them - one button click instead of a dozen or so, and the screen is so much simpler and less confusing. If you have something considerably simpler, but a little sluggish in your opinion, ask them. They might like it anyway.

Steve.

[Former Member]

So I assume you are using the HTML version of Personas? SAP doesn't recommend using it. Recommendation is to use the Silverlight version until 3.0 is shipped to customers and even then the HTML version won't have all the features that the Silverlight version has in 2.0. Have you seen ?

[joao_sousa2]

No, Silverlight. But the problem is the same, I don't know how the rendering engine works, but I seems like I'm using SAP GUI for HTML even in Silverlight.

[Former Member]

Yes, that's true. Even with Silverlight ITS is used to retrieve the screens, there is a lot of caching happening though so that the Silverlight version feels "snappier" to the user. See also , some of the myths also deal with performance.

[joao_sousa2]

The fact is I login to Personas and immediatly get a feeling of sluggish performance that I don't get in SAP GUI for Windows. That document says I need to worry about tab caching and other stuff, but do I have to do that in order to get a performance that is equal (not better) then SAP GUI? For all transactions?

I get the sluggish, non-optimum performance from SAP GUI for HTML and that's why I don't use it. Personas feels the same. Cute, but not ready for prime time.

PS: And that is the main question, is there anyone here running this in production? In DEV I love NWBC (fat client), but it never replaced SAP GUI in production.

[Former Member]

I believe uses it heavily, in their ERP production system.

[Former Member]

Thanks for pinging me on this - I've been busy today and might have missed it:-)