Further step of SAP Fiori 3 available: Spaces and Pages
With the availability of the spaces concept we take a further step on the SAP Fiori 3 journey, evolving the award-winning SAP Fiori design for all SAP products to fully support the Intelligent Suite, running on any device. This first version of the concept gives users and administrators more flexibility in how they structure the layout of the SAP Fiori launchpad, and is available with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005 and SAPUI5 1.75.
In August 2019 we took our first step on our SAP Fiori 3 journey, with the introduction of the Quartz Light theme and the new shell header bar. In January 2020 we took another step with the availability of the Quartz Dark theme, and now the next step becomes available to users of SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005: the first version of the spaces concept.
Before having a look at how spaces and pages give you more flexibility in how to structure the layout of the SAP Fiori launchpad, let’s first have a look at the main elements of the previous home page concept, so that you can better understand how the spaces concept improves upon it.
Up until now: The Home Page concept
So far, the SAP Fiori launchpad has offered one single page of tiles, which could be further structured using groups of tiles. Users could navigate to each group by scrolling up or down the page, or by using the anchor bar navigation to jump directly to a group. This means that users had only one level with which to structure their home page content: the group.
Since we advise users to only put frequently used or particularly important tiles directly on their home page, the home page itself also provides a means of structuring the content: you have the set of all apps available to a user, then the subset available on the home page, which in turn can be portioned into groups, as depicted in this diagram:
If a user needs to access an app which they don’t have on the home page, they have three ways to do this with the SAP Fiori launchpad: search, the SAP Fiori 3 navigation menu or using the App Finder — as shown here:
Note that you can use all three to also find apps which are on the home page.
The spaces concept
The spaces concept gives users more than one page to access their SAP Fiori launchpad content. In fact, the concept envisages that users can access multiple spaces, and each space itself can have one or more pages. This first version of the concept available now supports exactly one page per space.
Each page can have its content portioned into sections, similar to the groups used before.
As a result, with this first version users have two levels with which to structure their content instead of just one: multiple spaces (each with one page), and multiple sections per page — i.e. spaces and sections. The following diagram shows this with an example for the space “Accounts Receivable”.
At the top of the screen you can see that the user can navigate to several spaces; the space “Accounts Receivable” has been selected here. This space contains one page, which contains four sections, “To-Do List”, “Customer Accounts”, “Payments and Clearing” and “Correspondence and Periodic Activities”. Each section contains the most relevant apps for the named activities.
With the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2005 release, we are providing page templates for many business roles, which contain the most relevant apps grouped into appropriate sections. Administrators can use the templates to quickly create custom spaces and pages; alternatively, they can also create pages from scratch without using the templates.
We continue to advise users to only put frequently used or particularly important tiles directly on their SAP Fiori launchpad pages. As before, users can find all their apps using search, the SAP Fiori 3 navigation menu or the App Finder.
A WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor is available for administrators and end users to adjust the layout. For the moment only administrators can create new spaces; end users can personalize a page’s sections and the tiles therein. The following figure shows what the editor looks like (on the left), when editing the page shown on the right. As you can see, by providing a split screen editor to administrators, they can see the home page structure on the left while searching for or browsing through the available content on the right. The app for administrators is called Manage Launchpad Pages.
With this release we have also slightly enhanced the design for end-user personalization to provide an even better user experience.
The transition from home page to spaces
Since users are used to their current home pages, and have quite likely personalized them to their needs, we are introducing the spaces and pages approach as an additional option to start with. The goal is to make spaces the only option in a future SAP S/4HANA Cloud release. This transition period, where both approaches are available, is expected to end in Q1/2021; thereafter, only the new spaces approach is planned to be available. If system administrators switch it on with the Manage Launchpad Settings app, then users can select for themselves whether they want to continue working with their home page, or whether they want to use spaces, via Settings in the User Actions Menu as shown here:
This transition period gives administrators time to build up optimal spaces and pages for their users. It also gives users the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the new approach and gradually apply their personalization to the new spaces and pages, while having the previous home page available to them as a fall-back.
Customers who want to transition more quickly can do so: there is also a setting in the Manage Launchpad Settings app which allows administrators to switch off the home pages for all users and give them only the new spaces and pages.
Outlook
In a future release, currently planned for later this year, we plan to give users all three envisaged levels with which to structure their content: spaces, pages and sections. Beyond that, we plan to give end-users more options for personalization, for example adding their own pages with sections and tiles of their choice.
The spaces approach with all three levels is also planned to become available for the next SAP S/4HANA any-premise release later this year.
Further information
These two blogs give you some more details on spaces:
· Get to know the new spaces concept for SAP Fiori launchpad
· Manage spaces and pages for SAP Fiori launchpad
Here is the relevant documentation:
· For admins: Enabling Spaces and Manage Launchpad Spaces and Pages.
· For end users: Spaces and Pages.
Soon we plan to provide these two openSAP microlearnings for you:
· Introduction to Structuring SAP Fiori Launchpad with Spaces
· Tools for Structuring SAP Fiori Launchpad with Spaces
If you want more information on SAP Fiori 3, a great way to get an overview is via the SAP Fiori Road Map webinar from March 2020. You can always find out more about our plans in the SAP Fiori Road Map — both can also be found on www.sap.com/roadmaps by searching for “Fiori”. You can get a more comprehensive overview via the openSAP course Intelligent Enterprise User Experience with SAP Fiori 3 (one week with five units of 15 minutes each).
If you are interested in a new and comprehensive overview of Fiori, then register for the upcoming openSAP course SAP Fiori Overview: design, develop and deploy which starts on June 9th. Until then, if you want to see some examples of how SAP Fiori helps users get their work done more easily, have a look at the demo videos in the playlist SAP Fiori 3 User Experience for SAP S4/HANA.
Finally, if you are planning to implement SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA: starting this week, you can join SAP Services to learn about how to do this best in the openSAP course How to Deliver a Great User Experience with SAP S/4HANA.
This blog originally appeared on SAP Community.
