Accessing and Using Standard SAP Content

[ShaneLipke]

Introduction

SAP has produced a substantial amount of standard content for some of its current suite applications, including S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Ariba, and Concur.  This content is available to SAP customers deploying one of the impacted applications, to help each customer's understanding and adoption of the standard functionality.

The standard SAP content consists of thousands of SAP Enable Now Simulations, which cover common SAP business processes and transactions, and an even larger number of SAP Companion Context Help Message bubbles.  A small number of SAP Companion Guided Tours are also available for some SAP applications, e.g. Ariba.  All content is created and managed, by SAP, using SAP Enable Now or SAP Companion; SAP Companion is the in-application component of SAP Enable Now that allows content to be distributed directly from within an application.

The remainder of this post provides further information about how to access and use the standard SAP content.

Determining the standard content available for your SAP application

Standard SAP content is available for many of SAP's current browser-based applications, but not all.  There are three ways to check if standard content is available for your SAP application(s).

Option 1 - SAP Community post

The SAP team responsible for creating and maintaining the standard SAP Enable Now content maintains a Community post that links to the major libraries of standard Simulations and Book Pages.  If there is a link on the post for your SAP application, standard SAP Simulations and Book Pages are available for that application.  Open the relevant link to access a published library of the standard Simulations and Book Pages for your SAP application.

Option 2 - The SAP Companion supported applications and content scenarios document

The SAP Companion Supported Applications and Content Scenarios document contains information about the SAP applications that support the use of SAP Companion.  For each application that supports SAP Companion, the document contains a table, like the table below.  The information in this table can be used to determine if standard content is available for your application(s), and if it is, what types of information are available.

 The columns in the table that provide information about standard SAP content are:

Column name	Description
Application	Name of the application that supports SAP Companion, e.g. Ariba Guided Sourcing or S/4HANA Cloud
Help	If the Help column contains a tick, standard SAP Companion Context Help Message bubbles are available for the corresponding application
Guided Tours	If the Guided Tours column contains a tick, standard SAP Companion Guided Tours are available for the corresponding application
Simulations	If the Simulations (Tutorials) column contains a tick, standard SAP Enable Now Simulations are available for the corresponding application.  If this is the case, click the Access Learning link to display a published version of the corresponding Simulations. Please note: There is no list of standard SAP Companion content objects, i.e. Context Help Message bubbles or Guided Tours, for any of the applications

Option 3 - Check SAP Companion in your SAP application

The third way to check for standard SAP content is to open SAP Companion in the relevant SAP application.  If SAP Companion has been configured to display standard content, the content will be visible within SAP Companion.  When accessing standard content through SAP Companion, it's important to remember that the content displayed in SAP Companion is context-sensitive to the current application screen.  It is therefore important to open the relevant application screen before checking for content.

SAP Companion can be used to distribute the standard SAP Companion content, e.g. Context Help Messages, and the standard SAP Enable Now content, e.g. Simulations.  End users access the standard SAP content through four different tabs of SAP Companion.  The following image defines the SAP Companion tabs that contain standard SAP content.

If SAP Companion is available for your SAP application – confirm using the SAP Companion Supported Applications and Content Scenarios document – but is not displayed in your SAP application, it is likely that it must be turned on by individual customers.  Refer to the Getting Started with SAP Companion Community post for specific information about configuring SAP Companion for your SAP application.

The easiest way to determine if SAP Companion should be available by default, for your SAP application, is to check the value in the SAP Companion Setup column of table discussed above.  If the SAP Companion Setup value for your SAP application is By default, SAP Companion should be configured to display standard SAP content without any customer-specific action.

Accessing and distributing standard SAP content

The standard SAP content is created and managed, by SAP, using SAP Enable Now or SAP Companion, depending on the type of content.  Standard Simulations and Book Pages are created and managed with SAP Enable Now and standard Context Help Messages and Guided Tours are created and managed with SAP Companion.

All unmodified standard content, created with SAP Enable Now or SAP Companion, can be accessed, free of charge, by SAP customers of the corresponding SAP applications.  Individual customers, with SAP Enable Now licenses can also modify and extend the standard content using SAP Enable Now or SAP Companion but customers without SAP Enable Now licenses can only distribute the unmodified standard content, available for their SAP applications.

Distributing unmodified standard content to end users

All customers, of SAP applications with standard content, including those customers that are not licensed to use SAP Enable Now, can distribute the standard content to their end users.  Customers of SAP applications, with standard content, can make the standard content available to their end users through SAP Companion.

SAP customers with SAP Enable Now licenses can also load the standard SAP Enable Now content, e.g. Simulations, into their Enable Now Manager environment and then distribute the content from their Manager environment.

Modifying and extending the standard SAP Enable Now content

SAP Enable Now customers can access the standard SAP Simulations and Book Pages, through Connected and Extended Workareas; defined in their SAP Enable Now Manager environment.  Connected Workareas, created in Enable Now Manager, point to a corresponding Workarea on a global content server and automatically synchronize the standard content from the global server to the customer’s Connected Workareas, in Enable Now Manager.  As content on the global server is updated or new content added, it automatically synchronizes to the customer’s Connected Workarea so that the customer’s version of the content is always up to date.

Although the standard content is automatically synchronized into Connected Workareas, in each customer’s version of Manager, the content cannot be modified in a Connected Workarea.  Customer’s must create an Extended Workarea, within Manager, that exposes the content in a Connected Workarea and enables the standard content to be modified and republished.  That is, for each Connected Workarea, defined in a customer’s version of Manager, there will be a corresponding Extended Workarea that exposes the standard content and allows that content to be updated and republished with changes.

Modifying and extending the standard SAP Companion content

Unlike the SAP Enable Now content, e.g. Simulations, the standard SAP Companion content cannot be loaded into Enable Now Manager using a Connected Workarea.  SAP customers, with Enable Now licenses, can still modify and extend the standard SAP Companion content, but they must do this directly in SAP Companion.

SAP Companion can be configured to show standard SAP content, e.g. Context Help Messages, and also allow customers to create their own content; this is referred to as the Extensibility mode of SAP Companion.  When SAP Companion is configured to show both standard SAP content and customer-specific content, it is possible for Enable Now content authors to modify a standard SAP Companion content object, e.g. Guided Tour, and republish the new version of that content object for end users.  When Enable Now authors modify a standard SAP Companion content object, the modified information is saved to the customer’s environment of SAP Enable Now Manager.

For a complete overview of the process to used access and modify standard SAP content, refer to this video.

Summary

Standard content is available for some of SAP’s modern, browser-based applications, including S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Ariba, and Concur.  This content includes standard Enable Now Simulations and standard SAP Companion content objects, e.g. Guided Tours.

SAP customers without SAP Enable Now licenses can distribute an unmodified version of the standard content through SAP Companion.  SAP customers with SAP Enable Now licenses can also modify and extend the standard content to enhance and supplement the standard content.

As more SAP customers adopt cloud-based solutions, that are updated continuously and typically contain fewer customizations, the use of standard content is becoming increasingly relevant and necessary.  If you haven’t investigated the use of standard SAP content already, it’s definitely worth considering, as a part of your overall end user training and support strategy.