SAP Business One 8.8 - New Skin and UI Design

SAP Business One 8.8 - New User Interface

One of the touted features of the new SAP Business One 8.8 release is the new skin. This update to SAP Business One's look and feel brings a functional interface some much needed polish. Overall, I'm impressed by how nice the skin looks. There are soft tones, rounded edges, and gradients all over the place. Also, the new skin comes with the redesigned SAP Business One logo, and ditches the older stylistic elements like the "water droplet" animation and icon set.

Fundamentally, the application now looks really nice. It looks at home on our Windows Server 2008 system, and blends nicely with any modern application running on your screen. We've also tried it out briefly in Windows 7, and the stylistic qualities blend seamlessly from system to system. Here are some screen shots of what the new system looks like.  Click the images to view them in full size.

SAP Business One 8.8 - Updated Log-in Screen

Upon opening the application, the changes are immediately apparent.  The login screen now has a much more "Web 2.0" appearance that looks strikingly similar to Quickbooks. SAP's obsession with pictures of people in business casual attire looking busy in professional settings still shines through (just like my old job - everyone looks good but nobody's actually working).  The new graphics and design is professional and serves it's purpose despite the fact that I'll wonder who the person is smiling at me when I login for the next two years.  Take a look:

SAP Business One 8.8 Login Screen: Who's That Lady?

SAP Business One 8.8 - Updated UI

After you manage to get into the system, you'll notice a few things immediately. The first thing is the new pretty colors. The baby blue background is soothing to the eyes, and the new menu colors and icons have a nice updated look.  The second thing is the new system message area at the bottom of the screen.  This is a sweet way of queuing all of the messages you receive into a nice list that has some sorting and filtering options.

SAP Business One 8.8 Main Screen

I'm impressed by the pervasiveness of the design update. Things have literally changed almost everywhere. Almost every screen and field has at least a subtle change to it. One of the first things I did was open up an internal report (in the case below, sales analysis) to see how the report layout had changed. Everything that was previously pretty dated now looks crisp and sharp. The financial reports are much the same, but the colors have been updated to provide contrast that draws the eye toward critical pieces of data like control account names and dollar totals. Finally, the selection criteria windows themselves are much improved. Matrix elements are now in blue if they can't be edited and white if they can be. Selections are still highlighted in a nice yellow color, and much of the icons remain consistent in this version. Overall, it's a great mix of familiar design elements with a nice new look.

SAP Business One 8.8 - Screenshots of Reports

Here are the screen shots of me running a few reports:

SAP Business One 8.8 Report Selection

This selection results in this report:

SAP Business One 8.8 Financial Report

Finally, here is a sales analysis report.  Check out those new graphs!

SAP Business One 8.8 Sales Analysis

SAP Business One 8.8 - Marketing Document Layout

Everyone also has been interested to see the new marketing document layout.  In the sales order below, you'll see a similar set of changes to those mentioned above. The blue, white, and yellow contrast is more bold than the white and gray of the previous version. Overall, the readability is much improved on marketing documents while preserving elements of the old design that users will be familiar with.

SAP Business One 8.8 Sales Order

In case you don't like the updated look and feel of the site, you can always switch back to the classic view in the general settings. Oddly enough, SAP finally changed the color names for the themes to more closely resemble reality. "Red" is now "Pink" - this solves a long standing minor complaint from many clients. Silly as it seems, some of these minor fixes go a long way in helping the product image.

SAP Business One 8.8 General Settings: Pink is still really ugly...

I hope that SAP is going to allow us access to the skin or theme engine to be able to make user modifications. We'll see if they allow for that. For now, SAP has managed to exceed my expectations with the new look by adding some nice subtle design elements while preserving the original user experience. We'll see how users respond to these changes in the coming months.