My German friend Mark Becker, a programmer himself, commented that "all great programmers are inherently lazy". I think, and hope that he meant we try to use tools and logic to become more efficient. Indeed Mark was incredibly quick in getting things done.
Here is my earnest attempt at high laziness, by creating a single powerful search tool which leverages custom annotated Google coding.
We now have an enormous amount of content to review in researching a technical issue - for example "sap erp" generates over 2,000,000 hits. Fortunately google crawls sap.com, sdn.sap.com, wiki.sap.com as well as other sap-related commercial sites around the glove and has tools to help us quickly retrieve meaningful results.
The search engine http://sapintel.com/searchentry.html searches only with sites that are productive, and specifically for various strings and certain sites depending using tag annotations. Very simple to use... you will find what you are looking for so quickly you'll have time for that nap. There is a google url for this custom search as well.
As shown below, you search within SAP-related sites, then refine with a tag menu that includes common file types (pdf, ppt, xls, doc), by keyword (bi, esoa, etc) or by SAP area.
Each keyword is targeted toward particular sites or file types. For example, the tag for "help" tag restricts to http://help.sap.com and to html files, and the "Installation Guide" tag is restricted to pdf files with certain strings common to Installation Guides... such as "installation+guide OR installation+guides". The ESOA tags are tuned to search within the ES Wiki for specific process labels.
In the screen below, we searched for soa, then wanted to check for helpful podcasts by clicking on the tag. The search executed against media content within the results, and provides the following results.
Here are some of the sites used - more suggestions are welcome. Back to my nap!
4 Comments
