A New User Experience with SAP Solution Manager 7.2

It’s no secret that SAP has somewhat lagged behind other enterprise applications in terms of the general user experience. Users are typically presented with clunky looking screens, with many buttons, screen areas and information that is irrelevant and often confusing to users. We touched on how the general user experience can be improved in our insight on SAP Personas and Fiori applications and we’re very pleased to see that SAP have really considered the user experience in SAP Solution Manager 7.2.

In fact, they’ve not just considered it, it feels like something of a revolution!

The new approach consists of three key elements; the launchpad, inbuilt Fiori applications and a flexible dashboard framework:

Launchpad

The launchpad follows a similar concept to the workcenters that we have come to know in Solution Manager 7.1. It provides a centralised, role based access point to the Solution Manager functionality of interest to you. However, it looks a little different now, with a new tiled layout that conforms to SAP’s new ‘One Launchpad’ that you may have encountered on the SAP Marketplace (replacing the traditional marketplace applications from mid-July).

The launchpad can be configured to provide access into complete workcenters, or to individual functions within a workcenter, resulting in a very targeted entry point for the end user. No more confusion over complex navigation paths to the applications you need, it’s all there for you in one place and your applications are just one click away.

In addition, further customisation and personalisation options are available to the user, to tailor the interface to their specific needs.

Fiori Apps

Solution Manager 7.2 will be shipped with native Fiori applications for key applications, most notably ITSM and ChaRM. These apps typically replace the upfront user interaction into the processes, providing end users with a clean and concise entry point into the functionality. This will undoubtedly improve the end-user experience at their touch points with the process, reduce training needs and help to eliminate typical user errors that are common in the Solution Manager 7.1 equivalent functionality.

Below are a couple of screenshots of the new Fiori based applications for new incident creation and the capturing of a new business requirement. Click on the image for a closer look:

Dashboards

A new dashboard framework will be included in SAP Solution Manager 7.2. This will enable users to adopt standard dashboards as delivered with the new release, but also to craft a more personalised view of the data that is important to them. This is supported by a concept of ‘application specific’ and ‘cross-application’ dashboards.

Application specific dashboards provide detailed information for the various scenarios available within Solution Manager, such as Application Operations, Business Process Operations & Incident Management.
The cross-application dashboard builder allows for dashboards to be created that present information from multiple scenarios.

These new dashboards seek to provide greater coverage and more flexibility over the flash based dashboard framework in Solution Manager 7.1. We’re looking forward to making the wealth of information in Solution Manager even more accessible than it is today!

This UI approach for the 7.2 release fully aligns Solution Manager with other next generation SAP products in their portfolio, most notably the S/4 HANA suite, to provide a consistent experience across products.

From a technical perspective, the new UI is built on SAP UI5 technology – a HTML5 compliant platform, and moves entirely away from the Flash based applications in Solution Manager 7.1 so reducing the complexity of browser requirements to support the UI. SAP have also confirmed that all major browsers will be supported.

For more information on the user experience changes in Solution Manager 7.2, and for a sneek peek at the UI in action, see the short video below:

Project Description

Launchpad

Fiori Apps

Dashboards

Launchpad

Fiori Apps

Dashboards