OpenSAP Sps1 Week 1 Transcript

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WEEK 1, UNIT 1 00:00:12 Welcome to the openSAP course Introducing SAP Screen Personas. 00:00:16 My name is Peter Spielvogel and I'm part of the SAP Screen Personas Product team, responsible for Product Marketing. 00:00:24 This course is four weeks. In Week 1 we are going to cover the basics, give you an overview of the product: 00:00:32 What it can do, the architecture, how some customers are using it, and the process that you would go through from end to end to redesign screens. 00:00:41 In Week 2 we'll get into more depth, going through the different functions of how you would build screens. 00:00:47 Week 3, we get into the scripting and troubleshooting, the advanced properties that let you really drive productivity through personalization. 00:00:57 And in the final session we'll focus on system administration, how to roll these screens out to your user base 00:01:05 and also some performance optimization tips. 00:01:08 In Week 1 we've got five units. The first one, a quick introduction to the product. 00:01:14 In the next one we'll talk about the architecture: How the different pieces fit together and why things work the way they do. 00:01:22 Unit 3: We'll take you on a tour of all the different parts of the product, so you'll know how to use it. 00:01:27 And in 4 we'll exercise those functions and build a basic screen. 00:01:34 And finally, we'll go into the details of the process of how you simplify a screen, starting with the users. 00:01:44 Before we get too far along, I want to make sure that everyone understands what we are talking about when we talk about the product 00:01:51 and so I am going to show you a quick demo. This is SAP Screen Personas. 00:01:58 The first thing you'll notice is it's running in a browser, and you may notice it looks a little bit like the WebGUI. 00:02:05 And that's because this is built into the SAP GUI for HTML, also known as the WebGUI. 00:02:12 When you install Personas onto your system, which is a very simple process, it's just an addon to the NetWeaver ABAP stack, 00:02:19 should take less than an hour to install. There is no separate server required, so it fits into your existing landscape very neatly. 00:02:28 After you do that installation, you'll see this little P at the top of the screen. 00:02:32 And what that lets you do is give your users access to different variations of the screen. We call those flavors. 00:02:41 So here I've got my original screen, a flavor I'd built for the

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transcrição sap personas aula #1

Transcript of OpenSAP Sps1 Week 1 Transcript

WEEK 1, UNIT 1 00:00:12 Welcome to the openSAP course Introducing SAP Screen Personas.

00:00:16 My name is Peter Spielvogel and I'm part of the SAP Screen Personas Product team, responsible for Product Marketing.

00:00:24 This course is four weeks. In Week 1 we are going to cover the basics, give you an overview of the product:

00:00:32 What it can do, the architecture, how some customers are using it, and the process that you would go through from end to end to redesign screens.

00:00:41 In Week 2 we'll get into more depth, going through the different functions of how you would build screens.

00:00:47 Week 3, we get into the scripting and troubleshooting, the advanced properties that let you really drive productivity through personalization.

00:00:57 And in the final session we'll focus on system administration, how to roll these screens out to your user base

00:01:05 and also some performance optimization tips.

00:01:08 In Week 1 we've got five units. The first one, a quick introduction to the product.

00:01:14 In the next one we'll talk about the architecture: How the different pieces fit together and why things work the way they do.

00:01:22 Unit 3: We'll take you on a tour of all the different parts of the product, so you'll know how to use it.

00:01:27 And in 4 we'll exercise those functions and build a basic screen.

00:01:34 And finally, we'll go into the details of the process of how you simplify a screen, starting with the users.

00:01:44 Before we get too far along, I want to make sure that everyone understands what we are talking about when we talk about the product

00:01:51 and so I am going to show you a quick demo. This is SAP Screen Personas.

00:01:58 The first thing you'll notice is it's running in a browser, and you may notice it looks a little bit like the WebGUI.

00:02:05 And that's because this is built into the SAP GUI for HTML, also known as the WebGUI.

00:02:12 When you install Personas onto your system, which is a very simple process, it's just an addon to the NetWeaver ABAP stack,

00:02:19 should take less than an hour to install. There is no separate server required, so it fits into your existing landscape very neatly.

00:02:28 After you do that installation, you'll see this little P at the top of the screen.

00:02:32 And what that lets you do is give your users access to different variations of the screen. We call those flavors.

00:02:41 So here I've got my original screen, a flavor I'd built for the course, and the ability to create a new flavor.

00:02:49 The original screen is going to look just like your WebGUI. This is a test transaction where IӶe built my screens today.

00:02:57 The openSAP transaction: You'll notice a couple of things. One, I've got a nice background image. You can put on any image you want.

00:03:06 Once you load it into the system, everything resides on the server and any user can access this from any browser.

00:03:15 The next that you'll notice is I have a number of buttons. These big tiles are all buttons.

00:03:21 Some of these launch very familiar transactions: Time Entry and Leave Request.

00:03:25 I've got a launch button that will open a transaction to manage users. I've got one that will open a web page to SAP.com.

00:03:35 These are the two interesting ones. This is really where you get the power and the productivity through the product.

00:03:42 So let me show you a quick example: If I type my name and click on the button here,

00:03:47 it's going from this transaction to a separate transaction pulling some information back and now displaying it on the screen.

00:03:56 So I've gone out to transaction SU01, got my name from that tab and then brought it back and displayed it on the screen.

00:04:04 You can imagine the utility of that. If you're on a certain transaction and you need information from somewhere else,

00:04:11 you can write a script button that goes and gets that information and brings it back, keeping you in the exact same context on the screen.

00:04:19 And we are going to show you how to do that during this course. Another productivity item you can do is jump over certain screens.

00:04:28 If you're familiar with SU01, you go to a screen where you type some information in, and then you jump to that screen.

00:04:38 That's familiar with your Sales Order transactions, too, where you type in a number and then jump to the transaction.

00:04:45 In this case I entered my name on the first screen, and now I've jumped over to SU01.

00:04:51 And you can see I've got a very cleaned-up version of the screen.

00:04:55 If you are not familiar with that, I can show you the original. And here it is with a whole bunch of tabs.

00:05:03 And I've captured my name from the Address tab and the SNC status from this tab.

00:05:11 And when I go to my tab merge, you'll notice the tabs have gone away. I've got information from different tabs all appearing on the same screen.

00:05:20 I've also put a script button here, so when I click Home, I go back to my original screen without having to click the Back button.

00:05:29 A lot of customers have simplified the screen such that they've got rid of the navigation on top,

00:05:35 and everything that people do happens through this product.

00:05:41 Customers simplify their screens in many, many different ways, and you can see some examples here.

00:05:47 We have people doing HR transactions, plant maintenance, goods movement, IT transactions.

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00:05:56 Anything that you can see in the SAP GUI you can modify in Screen Personas.

00:06:03 So all of your classic ERP transactions you will be able to simplify and modify. And once you modified them using this product in the WebGUI,

00:06:12 you will be able to render those also in the SAP GUI for Windows, and also the SAP GUI for Java. Very, very powerful stuff.

00:06:21 What do all these applications have in common on the screen? They had a champion who steered through the process,

00:06:28 an executive sponsor and people who were very focused on trying to simplify the life of their users.

00:06:38 And one example here, freescale semiconductor: This is transaction PA30. They've taken information from 13 disparate screens across the transaction,

00:06:49 where you have to click on buttons, click on tabs, click on infotypes, and brought it all onto one simple screen.

00:06:57 What used to take about 3 minutes, to go and get a full picture of the employee, now takes 1 click and 5 seconds for it to render.

00:07:06 Another example over here, this is a cockpit for maintenance workers.

00:07:12 They are able to take 22 transactions, access everything from a simple screen and never have to worry about navigating the rest of SAP.

00:07:28 As I mentioned, this works across the ERP suite. All the components, whether it's the Financial, Human Resources,

00:07:37 Plant Maintenance, Material Management, anything you're doing today in the SAP GUI or in the WebGUI

00:07:45 you can greatly simplify and give your users a much cleaner and easier and more intuitive user experience.

00:07:55 There're several ways that people measure the success of their projects, and I'm going to walk you through some of those.

00:08:01 The most obvious is improving user productivity. How long are people spending in transactions today?

00:08:09 How much time are they spending on data entry? If you simplify the screens, you can really reduce that.

00:08:15 Let me give you one example of that: We have a customer who is using SAP Screen Personas in their call center, using transaction IW51.

00:08:26 People call in, complain that the system is down, and the call center workers used to spend about 10 minutes taking all that information in.

00:08:37 Now with the simpler screen, they've gotten it down to 3 minutes. So you can do the math:

00:08:43 Going from 6 transactions per hour to 20 transactions per hour, that's a 233% increase in productivity. And that is fairly typical.

00:08:54 You should, by simplifying screens, you should really be able to make people more productive and also happier in their work.

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00:09:02 There's... Another great benefit is improving adoption of SAP. We hear this a lot. Customers have rolled it out

00:09:10 but if people aren't using the system, then you're not getting the business value that you expect from the product.

00:09:17 And some symptoms of that might be: People are doing some things in SAP, a little bit here in Excel, they've got a SharePoint,

00:09:25 maybe another enterprise application they use that they like better. And all these different systems, if the information is in an SAP,

00:09:33 you're not going to be able to run your analytics, your reporting, your compliance; and just run your business.

00:09:41 By simplifying the screens, you can make it much easier to use. And I'll give you an example of that:

00:09:47 There's a company that, before they used this, the workers would do their jobs and come back with handwritten forms,

00:09:56 drop them off at their supervisor and say, things got busy in the field today, I didn't have time to enter my data. Can you please do it for me?

00:10:04 So, that's an example of people avoiding SAP completely. In other cases they are doing workarounds.

00:10:11 If you use Screen Personas, you can get people using the product and start retiring some of these other enterprise systems

00:10:18 that are costing you money to maintain by using them in parallel.

00:10:25 The next benefit that you might find is reducing the training costs. How much time, how much money you're spending on SAP training today.

00:10:34 How long does it take until someone gets really comfortable with the system? Compare that with the consumer side.

00:10:40 If you tell someone to buy a book on Amazon, they don't need instructions. It's very quick and easy.

00:10:46 And with Screen Personas, which you already have the license to because there is no additional charge, it's part of the NetWeaver license,

00:10:54 you can simplify the screens and empower your employees to do their jobs more quickly and more efficiently,

00:11:03 and not have to spend a lot of time on training. Let me give you a quick example of that.

00:11:08 One customer, for their people who had to do some light transactions in SAP, had a 2-hour training class that they gave.

00:11:17 And typically after the class, the people would leave and they were a little bit dazed and confused about what they had seen

00:11:26 and not really comfortable or confident going forward. After deploying Screen Personas the class is down to 45 minutes.

00:11:35 After about 20 minutes people are experts in the system. They are using it, feeling comfortable about it.

00:11:41 And the new people say, I don't understand what the problem was. SAP is simple to use. Why

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are so many people complaining about it. 00:11:51 The last way you may see some great business value by deploying Screen Personas in your

environment is through improved data quality.

00:12:00 And this is quite obvious. If you have a lot of fields on the screen, there are a lot of opportunities to make errors:

00:12:07 Putting information in the wrong field, leaving something blank, a lot of errors.

00:12:12 If you simplify the screen, you can create a pull-down menu instead of a free-text field, radio buttons, really simplify the screen.

00:12:22 And I'll give you two simple examples here: One was a mining company, and they simplified a Create Notification screen

00:12:30 to the point that someone was able to use SAP wearing a work glove: Just dragging the mouse around, clicking on a few buttons,

00:12:39 they were able to create the notification and not have to do any typing.

00:12:44 Another example: This was a highly regulated industry.

00:12:48 We heard from them that one mistake in the master data affected something like 70 downstream systems.

00:12:54 So the cost of data quality for them was extreme. By simplifying the screens they were able to reduce the number of errors,

00:13:03 reduce the cost of rework and keep everything running smoothly.

00:13:09 So to summarize: You now know what SAP Screen Personas is, a simple rendering engine built into the browser. It works on all Dynpro screens.

00:13:20 What it does, it lets you simplify screens tremendously, merge tabs together, add custom fields, automate your actions.

00:13:30 You've seen a little bit how it can help you through four areas of business value and a few examples of how customers are using it.

00:13:39 In the next unit, we'll go into the architecture and talk about the different components on both, the client side.

00:13:47 Hint: There is nothing to install over there, the add-ons on the server, and how all the different pieces work together.

00:13:53 We'll see you next time. Thank you. WEEK 1, UNIT 2 00:00:09 Hello and welcome back to Week 1 of your openSAP course on SAP Screen Personas. My

name is Sebastian Steinhauer and I'm the product owner.

00:00:19 Today we are going to talk about the architecture of SAP Screen Personas.

00:00:23 You have already seen an introduction into SAP Screen Personas by Peter, giving you a general overview of what the product is for.

00:00:29 Now, we want to talk about how this all works together.

00:00:33 So when we started out the SAP Screen Personas project, we were looking for a very low-risk way to allow people

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00:00:44 to change the way they're using their SAP system and to personalize it and gain productivity through this personalization.

00:00:51 So if you're looking at the overall system, you have your business application running in the backend.

00:00:58 And the idea of Personas was that we remain on the vanilla SAP screens, to not change them specifically and leave this system as much untouched as possible.

00:01:09 So while you can still create your own Z transaction and will be able to use those in SAP Screen Personas as well,

00:01:18 we wanted to eliminate the need for you to create Z transactions to do minor modifications on the screen,

00:01:25 which in our research we found a lot of customers did, and generally as a fairly costly approach.

00:01:33 So, SAP Screen Personas is installed into the backend, and you see that on the slide as the Personas add-on that that installs,

00:01:40 and you can use a transaction SAINT or the maintenance optimizer to install that into your environment.

00:01:47 And from there we have a component that's called the DYNP.

00:01:53 and that's the component that generates all the different screens that you get to see in your system.

00:02:00 So whatever GUI you use to connect to the system, the data is always generated by the DYNP and then sent to the respective GUIs.

00:02:07 And if you have SAP Screen Personas installed, what happens is, whenever you accessing a screen,

00:02:13 the DYNP receives that call and finds out that your specific system has SAP Screen Personas installed.

00:02:19 And if it does that, then it goes into the SAP Screen Personas database and looks up whether there are screen changes available

00:02:27 that you have done using the Screen Personas editor to alter this screen augmented with additional information or whether you've decided to hide certain elements.

00:02:38 So, all this information is then merged together with this screen and as one package sent out to the respective GUI clients.

00:02:44 And then each one of the GUI clients can decide how to handle that information.

00:02:50 If you talk about the different GUI clients, you have basically three options.

00:02:54 One is you can use, of course, the SAP GUI for Windows, the most used client at this point.

00:03:00 It talks to the backend in a protocol called DIAG, which is a highly performance optimized protocol that's proprietary to SAP.

00:03:09 And the main focus of this is really how can you get the most data to the client and have the rendering be as fast as possible.

00:03:17 So whenever you're talking about pure screen-by-screen throughput, then the SAP GUI for Windows is usually the best performance you can get.

00:03:27 Besides that, for those of you who don't have Windows, those of you that are using a Mac or

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Linux, 00:03:33 you can actual use the SAP GUI for Java as pretty much a drop-in replacement of the SAP

GUI for Windows. They're largely the same and also extremely fast.

00:03:44 Now of course the problem with the native clients is that they need to be installed on each one of the machines. So, you need roll them out across your entire landscape.

00:03:51 If you want to go with a lower footprint, in fact with a pretty much zero footprint installation,

00:03:58 that's available for you through accessing the SAP system through the browser which is if you use the SAP GUI for HTML or Web GUI for short.

00:04:06 And if you do that, you connect to a component that's called the Internet Transaction Server, which internally talks directly to the DYNP and gets the screen definition from there.

00:04:16 Now, the Internet Transaction Server is a component that some of you might be familiar with from the past. It used to be two separate boxes: One being the A gate, the other one being the W gate.

00:04:26 And they talked to each other, and the A gate was connected to your SAP system.

00:04:31 Now, over time this has actually changed drastically, and the Internet Transaction Server is now embedded in the kernel, which, instead of having to go with the wire to your backend server,

00:04:40 just allows it to actually use direct memory access to get access to the information much faster.

00:04:46 And performance of the Internet Transaction Server is thus quite impressive at this point.

00:04:53 So, the Internet Transaction Server also is the interface that was used for SAP Screen Personas 2.0,

00:05:00 the Silverlight client that you might be familiar with to access the backend.

00:05:05 So for that project already, changes had been made to allow SAP Screen Personas content to impact how the Internet Transaction Server would be working.

00:05:15 For Personas 3.0 the Internet Transaction Server is our main entry point, and we are using the SAP GUI for HTML as the rendering engine of reference.

00:05:27 So, the changes that we're implying are always implemented first in the SAP GUI for HTML.

00:05:34 And if they work there, work out fine, seen to be adopted by our customer base,

00:05:40 then it's up to the other GUIs to start looking at the same features and start seeing, well, they want to interpret them as well and render the respective features.

00:05:49 Also editing of flavors is only possible using the SAP GUI for HTML or Web GUI at this point.

00:05:59 Now, we talked about how all the data goes through the system and how all the changes are sent through the DYNP to the respective clients.

00:06:06 Now let me be a little more specific on that. If you do a lot of changes, then your flavor can grow in size quiet drastically.

00:06:13 But in order to keep runtime performance optimized, what we do is we apply a compression algorithm.

00:06:19 So if we do changes that are later on obsolete because you moved something five times, we only care about the last position of that element.

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00:06:27 And so all the unnecessary changes will be dropped before this most compressed data package is sent out to the respective clients.

00:06:35 We do that, of course, optimized for runtime performance since most users will actually see runtime performance as the most critical part.

00:06:43 Now, of course, if you want to install SAP Screen Personas, there are a couple of prerequisites that you have to meet.

00:06:49 Our current kernel that we are supporting is kernel 742. We will be expanding that in the future but currently kernel 742 is required.

00:06:57 And you will be required to have a NetWeaver service pack 3 or above plus the corresponding basis enablement notes depending on which service pack you are on, which is the component.

00:07:06 There's a note that applies to the DYNP component specifically and ensures that the DYNP calls Personas

00:07:14 to ensure that all the information that is needed for your screen is actually embedded with the screen information it sent out.

00:07:21 We also highly recommend that you run SAP Screen Personas on a Unicode system.

00:07:26 If you are interested in our official support statement on Unicode and non-Unicode systems, you can find that in the Personas portal on SCN.

00:07:35 If you look at this picture in general, you realize that, in this case, the Personas add-on is installed in the SAP NetWeaver and not in a dedicated server.

00:07:45 That's very important. You don't need a dedicated server but you can install Personas in your existing NetWeaver stacks.

00:07:51 There is no problem with that whatsoever. For optimal performance though, I highly recommend you check our Performance Optimization Guide

00:07:59 and the Scaling Guide for ITS to ensure that you have the best possible experience for your end users.

00:08:04 Now, let me just summarize what we talked about. We talked about how the SAP Screen Personas add-on fits into the SAP stack in general.

00:08:15 We talked about the technical prerequisites you have to meet. We talked about deploying SAP Screen Personas as an add-on.

00:08:21 And, of course, we talked about the fact that you don't need anything specific in your landscape to launch SAP Screen Personas

00:08:28 but you can access SAP Screen Personas through the Internet Transaction Server.

00:08:32 In the next unit we are going to talk about SAP Screen Personas in more detail,

00:08:37 specifically the client-side of it, all the different modes, what the options that you have on the screen actually do

00:08:42 and how all these different components will work together. And Peter is going to talk about that in the next session.

00:08:49

With that, thank you and have a good day.

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WEEK 1, UNIT 3 00:00:12 Welcome back to Week 1 of the openSAP course SAP Screen Personas. My name is Peter

Spielvogel

00:00:19 and in this unit we'll go on a quick tour of the product to summarize the basics.

00:00:24 In the first section we did a quick overview of the product and how some customers are using it.

00:00:30 In Week 2 we gave an overview of the architecture: How the different components fit together.

00:00:35 In this one we'll go into the product and take a quick look around.

00:00:41 This is SAP Screen Personas, and the first thing you'll notice is it runs in a browser.

00:00:47 This red version renders inside of the WebGUI, and the only difference between this and the standard WebGUI,

00:00:54 also known as SAP GUI for HTML, is this P. This is what activates Personas once you have the product installed on your server.

00:01:03 When I click this, it opens what we call the flavor bar. A flavor is a variation of the screen.

00:01:10 Typically for each user or role you provide a couple of flavors based and dependent on what they want to do.

00:01:18 Over here you can see I've got an original screen, a modified screen that I created as well as the ability to create a new flavor.

00:01:26 For many users they will not have the ability to create a new flavor. They'll just have the ability to choose.

00:01:33 And they also won't have these items over here, which we'll talk about shortly.

00:01:38 So a couple of things to notice right here on the flavor bar: The Original Screen is highlighted. This is the default flavor.

00:01:47 I can choose the default. In some cases IT will choose the default flavor for me.

00:01:53 This symbol here indicates that the flavor is supported by IT. In some cases individuals may create their own flavors

00:02:02 or modify different screens, and IT may or may not support those. If you see this symbol, it's supported by IT.

00:02:10 And this symbol here indicates that the flavor is shared.

00:02:14 What I am going to do is now click on the OpenSAP flavor, and now that's going to change the screen into this particular flavor.

00:02:24 You'll notice we still have the tool bar, we still have the P but this is my flavor which will allow me to do certain things on the screen.

00:02:32 I've got a couple of script buttons here. I've got some transaction buttons and a button that launches a website.

00:02:39 And we'll talk about those when we build those then. Let's continue our tour of the product.

00:02:45 When I open the flavor bar, these are the ones that I can quickly switch to. There might be other flavors that I'm allowed to use.

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00:02:53 Those are contained in the Flavor Gallery. And the Flavor Gallery here includes a number of flavors.

00:03:00 We just had a class, so these are all the flavors that different people created during that class.

00:03:07 How is a flavor going to get into the Flavor Gallery? Well, it could be something I create and store there.

00:03:13 It could be something that one of my peers creates and shares with me and it will go into the Flavor Gallery by default.

00:03:20 Or it could be something that IT shares. They can put it in the Flavor Gallery or they can put it in the flavor bar.

00:03:27 If I want to move a flavor from the Flavor Gallery to the flavor bar, I just click on this and the flavor now goes to the top.

00:03:36 If I choose, I can click the x and then it goes back from the flavor bar into the Flavor Gallery.

00:03:42 I can search in the Flavor Gallery for flavors either by name or by the person who created it.

00:03:51 We're done with that so let's put that away. You'll see an arrow here. If I had many flavors in my flavor bar, which is not very typical,

00:04:00 I would be able to scroll through those to choose the one that suits what I need to do at this particular time.

00:04:09 Let's return to the flavor that we created, the OpenSAP flavor. And now I'll open up the editor.

00:04:18 The editor is available if you have rights to edit a flavor. In most cases end users will not have that capability.

00:04:25 It will be restricted to IT. In some cases users may be allowed.

00:04:30 Once you go into edit mode, then you have the ability to do things on the screen.

00:04:35 When I highlight something what I'm eligible to do lights up in the bar.

00:04:40 So now that I've done this button, I can change the font size, change the font treatment, change the font color.

00:04:48 We'll do all those things when we build the screen. I also have C-level controls to move items forward and backward.

00:04:55 If I have different graphics that I want layered. I can copy a control. This was one of the requests we had from the designers:

00:05:04 I've invested some time creating a specific control on the screen with a certain size, color and properties.

00:05:10 Can I just copy that and then make further edits? The answer now is: Yes.

00:05:16 This is how you hide various things. You can change the fill color, everything you would expect.

00:05:23 We have the ability to size the buttons easily, calculate their exact position on the screen,

00:05:31 as well as use the keyboard to nudge them around on the screen. There are some image functions here.

00:05:37 And that's pretty much what you would do on the Home tool bar.

00:05:42 When we go to the Insert tool bar, this is where you will add elements to the screen and also

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delete elements. 00:05:49 The difference between hiding and deleting: If it's a system generated control, you can only

hide it.

00:05:55 You can never delete it. This prevents you from getting yourself into trouble. If there was something mandatory and you've got rid of it,

00:06:02 you can always bring it back if it's hidden. Not the case if you delete it. So we don't allow you to delete anything.

00:06:08 If you add a control to the screen, which you'll do from this menu bar, then you're allowed to delete it.

00:06:14 And here you can add images and labels to the screen, group boxes so you can contain different common functions together,

00:06:22 you can add HTML windows to bring in web content. You can add individual buttons that launch transactions, open websites as we have here,

00:06:33 menu items so, if you have something that's usually contained in a menu, you can create a button

00:06:39 to avoid having someone click through to get to that, and, of course, scripts which execute a series of commands.

00:06:47 To simplify the screen, you can convert open text fields into drop-downs or radio buttons.

00:06:53 And you have the ability to add text fields either a single line, multi-line, or a text item with an associated F4 Help.

00:07:02 These items are associated with the scripting engine. And this lets you delete.

00:07:08 We also have a set of tools for dealing with tables. Those tend to be somewhat advanced features,

00:07:15 and that's going to be outside the scope of this course. Finally, the Release tab is primarily for IT.

00:07:23 This allows them to change the name of a flavor, change the description, compress it and maintain a version control of that flavor.

00:07:34 So now we've seen everything that's possible in the editing menu, so we can exit that. And next we'll go to Themes.

00:07:42 Once you spent the time editing a screen, you may find that you want to repeat it.

00:07:46 And instead of having to apply the same visual treatment to every single screen, you'll typically create a theme to do that.

00:07:53 Generally IT will create the theme. And for a typical company, you might have hundreds of flavors because each flavor is associated with a transaction

00:08:03 and those might be allocated by role, but the theme, you'll probably have a handful at best.

00:08:09 Only a few people in the company will create themes. Those will typically be the designers working in conjunction with IT.

00:08:17 You might have themes for different screen sizes, which you can launch as you execute the flavor.

00:08:25 And the purpose of a theme is to give a certain visual look and feel.

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00:08:29 And once you apply a theme, then all of the transactions in your system will inherit that theme

00:08:37 even if you make no further personalization to it. So that's a nice way to ensure a consistent visual treatment.

00:08:44 Some themes customers tend to roll out: A lot of times they'll embed SAP functions in their corporate portal,

00:08:52 so they'll theme it so it looks exactly like their corporate portal, and people might not even realize they're using SAP.

00:08:59 Another common theme would be to make the screens here look like the Fiori theme. And that would give again a consistent look and feel.

00:09:09 If you're using Fiori for your transactions, then all SAP would have a consistent look and feel.

00:09:16 We'll get into theming and show you how to build a theme in Week 2.

00:09:22 The last item that I want to cover here is Scripting. And Scripting opens a separate window.

00:09:29 The reason it does that is, when you're in edit mode, you're offline, you can move things around on the screen, add controls, push buttons

00:09:37 but you're disconnected from the backend. That is not the case in scripting mode because you're recording your key strokes typically,

00:09:44 and when you're recording your key strokes, you need to interact with the system.

00:09:50 The scripting engine uses Java script. You don't need to be a Java script expert. You barely need to know any Java script

00:09:58 because we have a recording function over here. And when you click that, you can just operate the system as you normally would,

00:10:05 click through a whole series of steps and the system will record it and automatically create the Java script for you.

00:10:12 It will also add comments, which is helpful later as you go through.

00:10:16 This particular script does not have the comments included but you'll see it's fairly simple.

00:10:23 And all this does is go to another transaction, copy some information and bring it back and paste it on the screen.

00:10:31 The script is associated with this button, and that's done through the editing menu.

00:10:36 Also in the Scripting screen we have an Inspector, and that is very helpful in building scripts.

00:10:44 It allows you to identify the field name of any property on the screen, whether it's something from the system or something that you created.

00:10:53 So when I click in the object picker, as I move over things, you can see here this is a GUI button. This is also a button.

00:11:03 This is a label. This is a text field. So anything on the screen you can look at

00:11:11 and, if you click on it, it will add that item to yours ... It will pull up the information here in the Scripting window

00:11:19 and then you can choose what property of that box you want to push into your script. Very straight-forward.

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00:11:25 Again, Java script knowledge is not required. We also have a logging window which helps you with error trapping and debugging your scripts.

00:11:36 Important if you're creating a long script perhaps one that spans multiple transactions

00:11:42 and either brings information back or you capture information on one screen and then push it out across.

00:11:49 Other important items in the Scripting menu: the Execute button.

00:11:54 As you're doing your script, instead of having to go back and forth and toggle, you can work on your script, execute it to see if it works.

00:12:03 You can validate. Any errors will show up here. And this is integrated. If you want to do debugging, you can pull up the debugger in the browser.

00:12:11 Again, we'll get into that when we talk more about scripting.

00:12:17 When you close the Scripting menu, you go back, and you have the ability to open edit mode.

00:12:23 And here I'm going to click on this to make it my default flavor. We'll be coming back to this screen and, in fact, building it in a future lesson.

00:12:35 And that is a quick tour of everything on the screen.

00:12:39 So in this unit we've talked about all the different elements of a Screen Personas screen,

00:12:48 the fact that it's built into the WebGUI, and everything that you do happens in the WebGUI.

00:12:54 Once you save your changes, you will be able to render those in the SAP GUI 7.40.

00:13:00 Very important if you doing integration with NetWeaver Business client, you can just point to the SAP GUI screen and have those come up.

00:13:08 So at this point you should have a good sense of the different components on the screen, what they do and when to use each component.

00:13:16 In the next unit we will build a flavor and you'll see how easy it is to use SAP Screen Personas to drive productivity through personalization.

00:13:26

Thanks and we'll see you next time.

WEEK 1, UNIT 4 00:00:12 Welcome back to Week 1 of the openSAP course SAP Screen Personas.

00:00:16 My name is Peter Spielvogel and in Unit 4 we will start building some flavors.

00:00:23 In the previous ones we gave a quick overview of the product and how customers used it. We talked about the architecture.

00:00:32 In the last one, I gave you a tour of the product, what all the different components do. This time we are going to exercise those components and build a very simple screen.

00:00:43 As we saw, this is SAP Screen Personas built into the SAP GUI for HTML, also known as the WebGUI.

00:00:52 So I'm going to open my flavor bar and click Create New Flavor.

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00:00:57 I need to give it a name, so we'll call this unit 1/4.

00:01:06 And the comment will be: OpenSAP.

00:01:12 I click Create and now we switch from runtime mode into design mode.

00:01:19 Now I've got my tool bar on top and I can start building the flavor as I choose.

00:01:24 The first thing I want to do is clean up the things that I don't want to use on the screen.

00:01:30 So, the tree I'm going to hide. And you'll notice I make a distinction between hide and delete.

00:01:38 If it's a system control, you can never delete it. That's to prevent you from deleting something that you may need later on.

00:01:46 Once I hide it, you'll notice there's a little eye here and I can go back and unhide it later.

00:01:51 It turns out, this particular screen has a few hidden layers so I need to hide those in sequence until I get to the back.

00:02:00 How do I know I'm at the back layer? Because up here in the corner it says, User Area Selected. Now I know that's the bottom.

00:02:10 I can also hide this toolbar and for the Easy Access I can change the text on that as I choose.

00:02:21 I can change it to Welcome or anything else I want. In this particular case I think I'll hide that, too, in the efforts of simplicity.

00:02:30 Now I go to that background. I confirm that I'm in the user area and now I can assign an image to it.

00:02:38 Images are stored on the server. So any time you're accessing SAP Screen Personas whether it's through a browser or a SAP GUI, that image is going to be there.

00:02:49 Once the image is stored it's available for use by me or anyone that also has access to my flavors.

00:02:57 In addition, I can load an image from my laptop but once it's up it's available for use.

00:03:04 So, lets go back and use that runner. There's a preview and I click Insert and it shows up on the screen.

00:03:12 It seems a little low in my opinion. So we can go using the Alignment function. And I can select. And I think I'll just bring that up to the middle.

00:03:24 You've a choice of different alignments. In addition, if I wanted, I could stretch it out. Now it's filling the screen. I can fit it and so on.

00:03:33 I encourage you to play with those different options at your convenience.

00:03:37 Now that we've got the background in place, we can start adding some different elements to this screen.

00:03:45 There's a number of different types of buttons and controls we can add. So we're going to go through a bunch of those.

00:03:51 First, I'll add a transaction button and, since most employees need to enter their time, I'll call this Time Entry.

00:04:01 And the transaction code for that is Cat2.

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00:04:07 And once that's done, I never need to worry about what the transaction code. This is one of the ways you simplify the screens.

00:04:17 You don't have to force people to memorize transaction codes or navigate through a tree to get to what they want.

00:04:23 You can just put the code into a button and then they never need to see it again.

00:04:29 So, let me also add another button for a Leave Request.

00:04:37 And it might be a situation where you have a designer building the screen who's not necessarily familiar with all the transaction codes. And that's okay.

00:04:47 You can put a placeholder on the screen and come back later. So I'll just write later on the button.

00:04:55 And now I have two transaction buttons.

00:05:03 We can also create a button that opens a web page. So for this one I'll have it visit SAP.com.

00:05:14 You'll notice all of my new items, all the elements I put on the screen show up in this corner. So you always know where to look for them and then you can just drag them to wherever it makes sense.

00:05:25 So now I've got a couple of different types of buttons on the screen.

00:05:31 I will now add a script button. And this particular script is going to look up the user's name.

00:05:44 I'm not going to add any functionality to that. That will happen in a future exercise when we talk about scripting but you can still put the button in place now.

00:05:54 And I'll add another script button.

00:06:01 That is going to jump to user roles. And again, we're not going to put any functionality on that just yet, we're just putting the button in.

00:06:11 And let's add one more button and that will, again, be a transaction button. And we'll call this Manage Roles.

00:06:23 And that will go to PFCG.

00:06:31 So I've got everything in place. It doesn't really look that clean and personalized.

00:06:37 So what we can do now is add some consistency to the screen and make the buttons the proper shape.

00:06:45 So for that we return to the Home menu and we can enter the values right here.

00:06:53 And I happen to know for this screen resolution 200 by 45 is going to give a square.

00:07:03 And let me unselect. I'll select this one since this is a website. I will give that one a special color.

00:07:12 You'll notice here I've got two sets of colors: One is a set of basic colors and another is a set of corporate colors.

00:07:20 The difference here, we provide you the basic colors ready to go. And if you want you can take a set color palette.

00:07:29 Maybe you'll get that from your marketing team with all the RGB codes for the specific corporate colors.

00:07:36 That way you can be assured any screen you build will always be on brand and match

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whatever else you're doing.

00:07:45 You'll notice when I selected this color the font changed from black to white.

00:07:50 We know when there is a certain color of a button, if it gets too dark, it's not going to be readable so will automatically compensate and make the text white on that.

00:08:02 If you want to choose and overwrite that and give it a specific color, if you choose both, the system won't overwrite you. But if you choose one, it will maximize readability.

00:08:13 Now, let's take a look at these two buttons which are every-day actions.

00:08:19 And we can make those blue. The two script buttons we'll make our corporate orange. And this one, also IT-related, we'll make orange.

00:08:40 Now I can go and highlight all my buttons again.

00:08:47 Since everything moved because my hands slipped, not a problem: There's an undo button, everything goes back to exactly the way it was.

00:08:57 And now I can adjust my fonts all at once, make everything bold and really make this a nice readable and usable screen.

00:09:07 So I've got the core elements in place but, in order for my scripts to work, I'm going to need some additional information.

00:09:14 So I'll add a Text Field. There's a couple of different types of text fields available.

00:09:19 This is just going to be a simple one-line text field where I'm going to enter some information on the screen.

00:09:25 And then use the script button to look it up. So this seems like it will hold pretty much any login name, even a long one.

00:09:36 And since I've got what I want there, I can go back to Home, hit Clone and I get another control of exactly the same size.

00:09:45 So once you've invested in making a button or a control of a certain type, you can keep that and clone it as you would expect from any sort of design tool.

00:09:58 Let's move this back to where it belongs and for my user lookup I want to put the information back on the screen.

00:10:07 So in order to do that, I'm going to add a label to the screen and this label will contain the name.

00:10:16 So, I'll just write name. And later on when we build the script it will go and retrieve the information and bring it back.

00:10:27 A lot of the time if you're creating a data-entry screen, you'll create a whole bunch of text boxes and a whole bunch of labels.

00:10:34 That'll be your layout. You'll capture the information from the user and then use a script to paste it downstream.

00:10:42 You can paste it into multiple transactions, giving the user the illusion that you have merged a few transactions together

00:10:49 but in reality each transaction is separate and Personas is just going through and automating the sequence of key strokes.

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00:10:59 So now I've got the fundamental building blocks here and it looks to me like these are not quite aligned.

00:11:06 So I can go ahead and go back to the Home screen and align these to the top. You have noticed one of those moved a little.

00:11:14 It looks like these are also not perfectly aligned so I'll align those to the top and finish,

00:11:24 make sure my bottom buttons are nicely aligned which they were already.

00:11:29 And we'll get the vertical alignment on these, aligned left on those.

00:11:42 These look good but we can verify and I don't even need to use the alignment I can look here and look at the position,

00:11:50 I've got 1078, this one is 1079, so I can just go here, give it a little nudge with my keyboard,

00:12:01 and now everything is lined up. So I've got the screen pretty much the way I want.

00:12:08 And I think I'll put a little label on the screen and call this My Dashboard.

00:12:28 And as labels go that's a little bit small so I can make the font bigger, expand the size of the box to fit that,

00:12:39 put it up in the middle and maybe we'll give it a little bit of color choosing one of our corporate colors.

00:12:48 And now we've got a new screen, looks good visually.

00:12:53 It will give people the ability to instantly click to a various transaction without having to know the transaction code.

00:13:01 Later we'll add some capabilities to the scripts so you'll be able to either take information from another screen and bring it back here,

00:13:09 one of the core building blocks for making users more productive,

00:13:14 or take information from this screen and then jump to a specific spot, several clicks down the road, again, eliminating key strokes and giving users productivity.

00:13:26 Since we're done, I will save and exit. And we've got our flavor, unit ܬ and we'll close that.

00:13:44 So summarizing, in this unit we learnt how to simplify a screen by removing elements that you don't want and adding things that you do.

00:13:55 We learnt how to add different functionality to the screen, we added a number of different types of buttons: We added transaction launch buttons,

00:14:03 a website launch button and script buttons. We added labels, we added text fields, and at this point you should have a pretty good sense of when to use which controls.

00:14:15 In the next one, we'll talk about how to design the screens in an overall user experience design process.

00:14:25 So, what you need to do first before you go in and start using the SAP Screen Personas tool.

00:14:32

Thank you very much and we'll see you in the next unit.

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WEEK 1, UNIT 5 00:00:12 Welcome back to Week 1 of the openSAP course SAP Screen Personas.

00:00:16 My name is Peter Spielvogel and in Unit 5 I'm going to talk about the process for simplifying screens.

00:00:25 Earlier this week we learned about the product, what it does, how it works and a little bit about the architecture,

00:00:35 and you saw how to build the screen. What we need to figure out is: Where does this fit in your overall process.

00:00:43 It turns out that using SAP Screen Personas is only a small part of the broader UX Improvement Process.

00:00:51 The user experience starts with the user. So the most important thing and what you need to do first is talk to your end users:

00:00:59 Understand what they are doing, understand what processes they are trying to do and where are they getting stuck.

00:01:05 And this is typically going to be the biggest and most time-consuming part of the process.

00:01:12 The first thing you need to do is identify the processes that you want to simplify.

00:01:16 And this can be through a conversation but more important is spending time with the users and observing them in action.

00:01:25 They may tell you what they are doing in SAP but not tell you about the other stuff that's surrounding the process.

00:01:32 If you're watching them you may see that every time while they complete a transaction they pull out a piece of paper and look something up.

00:01:42 Or they pop over to a spread sheet. They may not tell you that, but if you learn those things, you can integrate that into the screen

00:01:49 and really streamline what they are trying to do. Once you understand what they are trying to do, then you can set about to simplify.

00:01:58 What we see a lot is people spending a lot of time in a room with big whiteboards.

00:02:05 They might write the different process steps down, map out how they think it should be. They might do screen shots.

00:02:13 These are all the screens that I encounter from end to end and then go through with the different highlighters. Sometimes I'm going through this path, which is orange.

00:02:23 Sometimes I'm going through this path, which is red. Sometimes I go through the green.

00:02:27 And then by doing that you can notice patterns and that might say, well, we need one flavor for this, one flavor for this and one flavor for that.

00:02:36 Then you can go and simplify. You look at the fields that they are using. And look at the fields they are not using.

00:02:41 If it turns out they are entering the same information across several transactions, that might be a trigger that says:

00:02:48 Let me capture that information once and then use scripting to paste it downstream. And we'll talk about scripting in a couple of weeks.

00:02:59 The next area where you want to look at is what information are they not using and what

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information is no one ever using. Those are the ones that you want to hide.

00:03:08 In fact early on in the project, the first customer specification for using Screen Personas was:

00:03:15 I love SAP, it does everything I want but the screens are a little bit complex for my users. Can I just remove the items that I don't want.

00:03:26 And at that point we might have been done but of course we took it further with the visual enhancements and the scripting and so on.

00:03:34 But that was the most basic request and that is something you can do very quickly and very easily.

00:03:43 Once you have mapped out those simplified processes, then you can take a look at the data. What information are people using? Are things clustered?

00:03:51 And that points to the flavors. There might be opportunities where there are only a couple of valid answers. Create a pull-down menu.

00:03:59 Not only to make things easier for the user but you are going to improve the data quality by removing the opportunity to make mistakes.

00:04:07 Once you have done all of that upfront work, then you are ready to start building the screens. And typically that is going to be the shortest part of the overall process.

00:04:18 And then once that's done, you can look at enhancing doing further automation.

00:04:25 So now that we have talked about this whole process flow, the most important thing to know about working on Screen Personas is that it is very much a team sport.

00:04:38 And you need a minimum of three different types of expertise:

00:04:43 You need the person that understands the business processes, the transactions, the flow, why are things done the way they're done inside of SAP.

00:04:52 And that should be down to the transaction level and the data field.

00:04:57 The next skill that you'll need is someone who can design the screens. Someone who can move the pixel around, add the images, and then do the scripting.

00:05:05 That's your SAP Screen Personas Expert. That skill is relatively easy to learn. You'll pick up a lot of those skills in this openSAP class.

00:05:16 Or there's other training that you can take to build your skills in that area or just practice, learn, and read SAP Community Network.

00:05:25 Finally, you should also have someone who is a Design Expert as part of the team. This person is critical.

00:05:32 If you think about PowerPoint, it's possible to make very poor-looking screens or very goodlooking screens.

00:05:41 And the difference is design. You really want to have a designer on your team.

00:05:45 I remember an early conversation with an oil company where they said, all right, we certainly have the business process expertise.

00:05:54 We can learn SAP Screen Personas but design, it's just not in our corporate DNA. Can you help us?

00:06:00 And the answer is, of course, yes. We have a design center of excellence, called the Design and Co-Innovation Center.

And let me show you the process that they follow when they work with customers. And this

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00:06:08 might be something that you can use yourself.

00:06:18 They break it down into three steps: Discover, Design, and Develop. The Discover phase is where you're talking to the customers.

00:06:29 You're meeting with them, observing them, understanding the key roles. One, two pieces, two critical success factors for the team is in the Discover phase:

00:06:40 One is, you need to have an executive sponsor, someone who has a real stake in the outcome of the Screen Personas project.

00:06:48 Someone who is suffering today with screens that are complex and it's costing them money

00:06:54 and they're willing to make an investment in time to get those out on the other side.

00:07:00 Next is, you need some sort of champion internally. Someone who's going to take ownership of the project, build the screens, meet with the users, and iterate as needed.

00:07:12 And we'll talk more about why that's so important as we go through.

00:07:16 At the end of this, you'll have some sort of journey map: This is our current process and this is where we want to get.

00:07:24 And you'll have the flows and where to pinpoint the problems, and how you want to solve those.

00:07:31 Next, we move into the Design phase. That's going to be, well, here are the complex screens or a series of screens. How much can we collapse that?

00:07:41 We have one customer who is using SAP Screen Personas for sales quotations.

00:07:48 It used to take the sales reps nine different tabs to go through to complete one quotation. Needless to say they weren't too pleased about that.

00:07:58 And they used SAP Screen Personas to simplify. The CIO said it was transformational and how SAP Screen Personas changed the development process inside of SAP.

00:08:10 Well before, it used to be software developers coding at the keyboard, now the most important tool is the whiteboard.

00:08:18 The business users and the IT people sat in the same room, were on one team, they mapped it all out on the whiteboard and then figured it out.

00:08:28 Other times people would frequently use post-it notes, write things down, and that gives the ability to move things around.

00:08:36 Or just taking screen shots and printing it on paper. So the Design phase, you want to map out the flows: How can you simplify.

00:08:44 And someone who understands user experience design is absolutely critical at this point. And when you're done with this, you'll have some wireframe diagrams,

00:08:53 I'll show you that in a second, some sort of visual design of what the screens will look like and a journey map.

00:09:01 And from a design standpoint you can just purely simplify the screens and remove the extraneous elements. We have customers doing that.

00:09:11 You can make all of your screens look like the Fiori designs. We have some customers doing that.

00:09:17 Or you can use your own corporate colors, your own corporate templates and your own style.

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00:09:22 And then you can take your SAP transactions, put it into your corporate portal and it just looks like a part of the portal, and we have customers doing that.

00:09:31 The choice, of course, is yours.

00:09:33 These are some examples of what the design workshops look like.

00:09:38 You'll notice pieces of paper on the screen over here that you can move around, very modular, people working on whiteboards moving things around.

00:09:49 This is a wireframe diagram. It's not the final design, but you have a sense of how things are grouped, what are the main topic areas, what's the layout on the screen.

00:10:00 And changing things at this point is very quick, very easy, and very inexpensive.

00:10:06 From a wireframe standpoint, you can use a wireframing tool such as Balsamiq or you can just do it on paper or even in PowerPoint.

00:10:15 Whatever is easiest for you, whatever you are most familiar with, you don't need any additional tools in order to do this.

00:10:22 Finally, once all of that is done, then you can start the development process of the screens.

00:10:28 So you've done those first few blocks on that stair step diagram in the beginning and now building the screens.

00:10:36 This is typically going to be the fastest and easiest part of the process. For example, we had one company that rolled out Screen Personas to about a 1000 users in a month.

00:10:45 And of that month, the first week was talking to the users, understanding their requirements and mapping those out,

00:10:53 three days building the screens, and then the balance of the time was testing, validation, documentation, and training people on the new processes.

00:11:05 And that's not to say you're necessarily done at the end of that. You may make further requirements. You may get feedback from people and decide to further simplify.

00:11:14 Once you have done the development phase, then you've got your SAP Screen Personas system in place similar to the screens you saw earlier in this week's materials.

00:11:25 Once your development is done, you'll typically do this in your development landscape, then using the standard transport process.

00:11:33 You can move it into quality assurance, and once that further testing is done there, then you can move it into production.

00:11:42 So to summarize, the Screen Personas process is a journey. The user experience starts with the user.

00:11:51 So, talk to your users, understand their requirements and map everything upfront.

00:11:56 Then spend the time building the screens and test it, validate. This is always characterized by rapid iteration. We often use a Design Thinking methodology for this.

00:12:08 And what's unique about that is: There is a lot of interaction with the users. And the users provide feedback early and often, so you can iterate on the designs.

00:12:19 Then, get your team ready, involve the users, iterate rapidly as we discussed

00:12:25 and then you'll have some intuitive, simplified screens, that will help your users drive productivity through personalization.

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00:12:34 That covers it for Week 1, and next week we'll talk about how you can built simplified screens using Screen Personas. Thank you.

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