After experimenting with Personas for a while, I realized that I had a huge misconception about Personas. As I listened to companies talk about Personas and upcoming projects, I assumed they picked Personas because it didn’t require any development. Being an application developer, it scared me a bit. I was afraid that with a bit of work, Personas could replace all the effort I’ve put into my applications. After playing with it for a bit, I now understand that it absolutely is not the case.
So that led me to the question of why you would pick Personas over just doing your own custom development. I wanted to share some of the things that will require custom development, even if you pick Personas.
- If you can’t do something in the standard transaction,you won’t be able to do it with Personas. For example, I wanted to add a button on the notification screen that would allow me to create an equipment record and then return back to the notification screen. It’s not possible to this. The only way you could do it is if you create an RFC to create an equipment record.
- If you want additional data within a table or a grid, Personas can’t do it. Personas can only hide columns, never add a new one. You will need to create your own table/grid to accomplish this.
- If you want to pull data from multiple sources, your run time could be ugly. In this event, you don’t NEED to do custom code, but most likely you will want to in order to keep your end users happy.
I’m sure there are other things, but I just wanted to put this out there. Don’t expect that just using Personas will be a magic bullet. So if your goal is avoid programming, custom code, custom transactions, etc, don’t expect Personas to do it all for you. On the flip side, I personally recommend doing a combination. I think you can make any transaction look better with Personas. For the first time, you can make SAP screens look like a web screen, without doing a full UI5 or Web Dynpro application (translated to LOTS of TIME and MONEY). But remember, Personas can only fix what already exists. So expect to do both to really get to the ultimate user experience.
thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike