What to expect when you’re expecting….a new SAP Support Portal
These are just some of the highlights you will experience with the first phase launch of the new SAP Support Portal:
- Simplified navigation
- Ease of access to applications that you use frequently
- Unique URL’s for every HTML page
- Login with an email address
- A new homepage
If you read my previous blog, A new SAP Support Portal – Focused on You, you will already be aware that customers are at the heart of this redesign of the Support Portal. We engaged with customers early and often to ensure that the SAP Support Portal was re-organized and focused on customer tasks, utilizing customer language and based on customer feedback and research.
The SAP Support Portal is a massive website, as I am sure many of you are aware. We focused this first phase of the new SAP Support Portal on delivering a simplified, clean, customer-centric, easy-to-use interface. Improvements to major applications such as the incident (message) wizard, software download center, and user management are dependent on major infrastructure changes, which are already underway. These and other application improvements will be part of future releases in 2014.
So what are we waiting for! Let’s show you some of the new improvements you will see in the first phase launch.
Simplified Navigation
Through customer feedback, surveys, and studies, we heard you loud and clear. The navigation of the current SAP Support Portal was not intuitive. We received an overwhelming response from customers to our navigation testing, and have created a new navigation structure based on your input, that makes it easy to find what you are looking for:
To create a unified digital experience for our customers, we have also added a ‘site switcher’ to provide easy navigation to other SAP portals such as the SAP Community Network and SAP.com so you can move from one SAP portal to another with ease:
Ease of Access to Applications You Use Frequently
What are some of the things that you utilize most in the SAP Support Portal? Downloading software, reporting incidents, opening connections? This was the feedback we heard, and as a result, the home page showcases these applications front and center:
Now on the homepage of the SAP Support Portal, you will be able to see and access these applications by clicking on the corresponding tile, simplifying the way you access these applications and significantly reducing the amount of time that it would previously have taken for you to find them
Unique URL’s for every HTML page
We recognize that a lot of people use the favorites functionality in their browsers, allowing them to save a page as a bookmark to go back and revisit at any time. In the current SAP Support Portal, this is not possible with the majority of pages because a unique URL doesn’t exist. Moving forward, every HTML page in the new SAP Support Portal will have a unique URL, making it much easier to save a page as a favorite, as well as providing clearer navigation paths.
Logon with an email address
The new Support Portal will, for the first time, allow you to logon with the email address associated with your S-User account. You will need to use the S-User password that you created along with this email address. We think that you will agree that your email address is easier to remember than your S-User number. 
A New Homepage
We have put a lot of time and effort into this next one. The new homepage on the SAP Support Portal is a breath of fresh air. Once again, we analyzed customer feedback, connected with customers about their needs, designed and mocked up models, then presented this new design to our Customer Advisory Forum. This homepage provides you with direct access to common tasks such as downloading software or reporting incidents, technical planning resources, product notifications, SAP Support related Twitter updates, Search, and Spotlight News all in one place. We believe the result is a simplified home page with you in mind:
Not long now before we begin to roll this out to our customers!
How does it look to you?
Hi Miles,
Great post. I for one am really looking forward to the simplified navigation. It looks like a HUGE improvement!
Thanks for sharing!
Kristen
Hi Miles,
looks great, looking forward to using it.
Something which would be a nice to have on my wishlist would be, when I use the Search or XSearch in SMP and search for a document, eg Master Guide for this, or Install Guide for that, in the search results it would be very very helpful to actually see the path to the location of the document on the SMP site, because for sure, when you find the document you need, you can expect that wherever that document is, there can be more that will be useful to you, but unfortunately the search results don't give the chance to either navigate to that location, or the path of the location.
The same is true when using the Search or XSearch to find patches.
Best regards,
Andy.
Hi Andy,
thanks for your feedback. We investigated trying to display the navigation path in the xSearch results at the beginning of the year. We had identified this as one of several important search results.
Unfortunately it seems not to be possible with our current search engine and content management system. Now that we are in the process of implementing a new content management system I will check to see if there is now a possibility of moving ahead with that idea.
Regards,
Miles
Looks like some great improvements!