Do you use videos to get information about a task or you prefer step-by-step instructions provided in the product guides? If you could change one thing about Replication Server documentation, what would you change?
The Replication Server documentation team has put together a short survey (5 questions) to help us understand better what type of product documentation our partners and customers are looking for and how we can improve it.
Please take a moment to complete this survey. Your feedback is essential to help us improve SAP Replication Server documentation and meet your requirements.
Please use the link to start the survey. You will be able to answer the survey by Thursday (end of business day) 28th of July 2016.
If you would like to have a more in-depth discussion about your experience with Replication Server documentation, feel free to e-mail me (utpal.bhatt@sap.com).
While the following rant applies to Replication Server and Data Assurance, it also applies to SAP in general (at least for the areas I follow).
---------------------
Sometimes (ok, quite often) I get the feeling that documentation is written by:
a - people with little/no knowledge of the product they're writing about (eg, giving command syntax as an 'example')
b - folks with quite a bit of knowledge of the product (eg, engineers?) but who leave out a lot of background details (ie, they forget that the end-user community doesn't have their intimate knowledge of the product)
SAP needs to find a better way to proof-read/validate their manuals.
Alternatively, SAP could provide an easy way for end-users to report documentation issues (something that doesn't require a S-user id and clunky tech support case notes!!!). [I know, heaven forbid SAP actually makes their websites more user-friendly and easier to use eh?!] 'course, then SAP would have to actually (wo)man the system and show that documentation issues are being addressed in a timely manner.
---------------------
SAP needs to improve the ability to search their own websites.
I no longer try to search for anything using SAP's 'search' links as I know I'll either:
a - get a thousand hits on stuff that has no relation to what I searched for, or
b - I'll get little/no hits, period
The only way I manage to find anything on (the publicly available SAP sites - more on this below) is to use Google.
Maybe SAP should contact Google for search engine help?
---------------------
What the h*ll is SAP afraid of?
Why hide so much useful data behind S-user login requirements and broken search engines (both public and S-user sites)?
Why does SAP insist on hiding SAP notes and KBAs behind S-user login requirements?
While not perfect, at least Sybase's 'solved cases' system allowed end-users to do a good bit of searching for themselves ... and without the need to jump through a bunch of S-user login requirements!
---------------------
I'll likely be back in 12-18 months to rant about the same thing all over again because ... because ... SAP will likely do squat in the next 12-18 months to improve the end-user experience @ *.sap.com.
Hi Mark,
Many thanks for your feedback on SAP Help portal and the searchability of our documentation.
Yes, we are taking a variety of steps to make things easier for our customers and partners. Some of the key initiatives are:
Of course, we cannot bring back Sybase InfoCenter, but hopefully these documentation enhancements will help our users.
- Utpal
Great initiative!