August 3, 2016 3 minute read

Support site – easy to create, easy to consume, fun to use

Note that “SAP HANA Cloud Platform, Portal Service” is rebranded to SAP Cloud Platform Portal in March 2017.

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You all know this situation. You buy a new product or a service, you are really excited to use it and hmm… you need some support on this.

So, you look for the phone of the support, you dial in, and then you need to press 6 to go to the department and 2 if you want to hear about the opening hours and then 9 if you actually want to talk to a representative. By this time you probably already spend a few minutes just navigating the support system only to get some music and a nice voice telling you: “We are happy for your call, we are currently handling other customers, please hold for a representative to get your call”. So you wait, and you wait and you wait.

And finally someone answers, but guess what? Bill the representative is not really sure what the problem is, so he asks you to check this and check that and if there is a good ending to the story he manage to fix your issue, if not, he will call you back after he checks with some experts… by now you have wasted quite some time on getting the support you needed, not to mention the frustration.

But does it have to be this way?

What if instead you would navigate to the support site, where you can search for a known fix for your issue, consult with experts, or in case you can’t find the information on your own, open a ticket and receive the resolution on your own time without having to wait on the phone.

The service level and support we expect on products and services we consume today is much higher than in the past. We want effective, preferably self-service that will provide us with the support we need in a delightful experience.

Do you want to provide such experience for your customers to gain high customer satisfaction and retention?

On behalf of the HCP Portal Team, we are happy to bring you the new Support Site Accelerator to help you get started with building a support site rich with capabilities and with a delightful experience. The solution is integrated with the SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (C4C) to provide you with a kick-starter to implement your solution.

About three years ago we introduced the previous Support Site solution. The adoption was great and we listened to your feedback. Instead of a set of existing widgets which were challenging to customize, The new Support Site Accelerator brings you an open, customizable solution aligned with SAPUI5 and OData to enable you to create the best solution fitted for your needs. The support for mobile experience is improved, there is an improved support for Theming, the experience of the administrator has more capabilities and – The site templates can be edited in SAP Web IDE and then be reused to create the support site by the administrator.

We’ve also out-sourced the solution (Yes!) to allow you to modify it and tailor it to your own needs.

So what does it include?

Ticket handling – You can create new tickets, edit them, and interact with your customers on them, including the ability to add attachments.
Dashboard – the dashboard contains tiles that reflect your ticket status, this way you can see the status at every moment and make sure that high priority tickets are handled with higher attention.
Sample Jam integration (Jam Feed and Search) – you can embed your Jam content to provide more information for your customers with interactive support and forum with basic Jam content consumption
Freestyle pages with different widgets – you can enrich your site with additional pages and capabilities.

The support site accelerator allows you to easily create a new site and customize it for your own needs.

So how do I get started?

The Support Site is provided as an accelerator code enabling you a to create your own solution. You can download the code from GitHub, follow the instructions in the Readme file and you will be up and running in no time.

So why is it good?

End User

Your end user will receive a Self-service delightful experience that can run on desktop and mobile including a dashboard based on Fiori Launchpad to manage the tickets.

Administrator

Your administrator will be able to easily create and maintain the support site by using templates to create it. In addition it’s easy to create Theme integration.

Developer

Your developer can get easily started by downloading the code from GitHub, uploading it to SAP Web IDE SAP Web IDE and quickly customize the solution to your needs by using SAPUI5 and oData capabilities.

We will be happy to hear what you think,

Rachel

Useful links:

SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer: http://go.sap.com/solution/lob/service.html

GitHub: https://github.com/SAP/hcp-portal-service-for-support-site/

Cloud portal on SCN: http://scn.sap.com/community/hana-cloud-portal

SAP HANA Cloud Platform, Portal Service: https://help.hana.ondemand.com/cloud_portal/frameset.htm

We have now published a movie to help you with configuring your support site:

19 Comments

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Inbal Sabag

August 3, 2016 at 10:33 am

thanks for a great blog.

This should provide a huge value to our customers!

Former Member

August 3, 2016 at 12:36 pm

Excellent blog 🙂

Kiran Karadi

August 3, 2016 at 9:11 pm

Great enhancement to existing portal. Looking forward to customers migrating to new portal.

Florian Preuß

November 21, 2016 at 1:26 pm

This is a nice blog!

Can you tell me little more on how to make the proper user handling using the portal with C4C?

Rachel Kahana Samet

Blog Post Author

March 13, 2017 at 10:04 am

You gave us feedback and we listened.

I’m pleased to let you know that we released ~2 weeks ago a new version of the Support Site in Github, including many improvements around:

Ticketing application: removed hard-coded values, added support in navigation with parameters, UX improvements
Freestyle pages: replaced all HTML widgets with RTE for easier modifications, added multi-widget in section for easier layout changes.
Guidance: Improved documentation and README – also added FAQ section
Theming: Support Belize theme (including brand icon)

looking forward for more feedback,

Rachel.

Savita Arora

July 4, 2017 at 10:43 am

Hi Rachel,

Excellent Blog!!

As mentioned above, we are trying to customize the solution according to our needs by using SAPUI5 and OData means we are trying to change Label Name or trying to add new fields. But we are not able to perform the same. Is there possibility to do the same in this standard Application.

Thanks,

Savita

Iris Sasson

July 9, 2017 at 11:04 am

Hi Savita

I am not sure I follow the exact question. If I understand correctly, you would like to add fields when you open a ticket. To do that, you should check that the OData API to open a ticket contains the field you want to add, and you should be able to edit the application accordingly.

Does that answer you question? If not, please further explain

Iris.

Tobias Schneider

November 4, 2017 at 9:32 am

Hi Rachel,

can you help me with my problem I described here?

https://answers.sap.com/questions/341608/scp-portal-service-missing-website-template.html

I've done all the steps as described in the youtube video and the readme on github. But in the last step I'm missing the created website template.

Kind regards

Tobias

Former Member

November 24, 2017 at 4:10 pm

Hi,

Youtube link provided is not working:

We have now published a movie to help you with configuring your support site:

https://youtu.be/wikqPJQ_LKY

Please look into this and correct the link.

Thanks,

Hemant

Rachel Kahana Samet

Blog Post Author

December 11, 2017 at 2:17 pm

Hi,

The link is now updated again.

Best,

Rachel.

Former Member

November 29, 2017 at 1:27 pm

Hello, Rachel!
Please give correct link on Youtube video. Last link don't work...(
Best Regard!

Rachel Kahana Samet

Blog Post Author

December 11, 2017 at 2:18 pm

Hi,

The link is now updated again.

Best,

Rachel.

Bernd Wychnanek

November 30, 2018 at 1:40 pm

Hello,

thank you for the blog.

Creating a ticket with the SAP Cloud Platform Portal works fine. But for me its not possible to see existing service-requests. I only get this error message:

{

"message": "HTTP request failed",

"headers": [],

"statusCode": 404,

"statusText": "",

"responseText": "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?><error xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata\"><code/><message xml:lang=\"de\">Der Server hat keine Ressource gefunden, die mit dem Data-Services-Request-URI übereinstimmt</message></error>"

}

Can someone help me?

Best regards

Bernd

Krishnendu Laha

February 3, 2019 at 12:10 am

Hello Rachel, could you please let me know, if Customer needs to pay extra Licence fee for this Support site? Thanks, Krish

Michal Pospíšil

September 3, 2019 at 2:23 pm

Hello Rachel,

Thanks for the blog. I have a couple of questions about the out-of-the-box accelerator if you don't mind:

Does the accelerator support a customer self-registration process?
If so, is the customer replicated from the portal to C4C after registration?
Does it support SSO for login (Google, Facebook, etc.)?
Is it possible to create a ticket without a customer registration?

Thank you,

Michal P.

Iris Sasson

March 4, 2020 at 11:56 am

Hi Michal

Below are answers to your questions:\

The support site allows customers to open service calls using their identification. If you would like to get a self-registration process you can look on the partner portal accelarator. See this blog: https://blogs.sap.com/2016/08/09/partner-channel-management-the-way-to-engage-your-partners/
There is no out of the box SSO with google or FB, but one can develop it

You can gain access to a demo environment to learn more about this. You can contact me directly to better understand the need here

Thanks

Iris.

Julius Pereira

June 10, 2020 at 7:46 pm

Hi Iris,

Does the self registration process mentioned in the link above, work for C4C Service or is it only for C4C Sales?

Thank you

Julius

Julius Pereira

June 10, 2020 at 8:20 pm

Hi Rachel,

We wanted to implement a solution for all our customers with the below additional requirements and would like to understand if the following is possible using the SAP Support Site solution

Customers needs the ability to view their own C4C Service Tickets and should not be able to view tickets belonging to other customers. How can this be enforced using the support site solution? What I mean is if a customer called or emailed and created a service ticket, will they be able to see these tickets in the support site and not be able to see other customer tickets that exist in the C4C system.
The customers would like to manage their users access (creation of new users etc) to the site. Will the PCM Portal solution help with this? If yes, would this work for C4C Service Tickets or is this only for Sales transactions (leads, opportunities etc) and would we have to create each customer as a partner in the PCM portal? If PCM won’t work for this, is there any functionality in the Support site for this in C4C service?

Thank you

Julius

Andrew Smith

March 15, 2021 at 10:45 am

Hello Rachel,

I tried to access the YouTube video but none of the links appear to work.

Kind regards

Andrew

Support site – easy to create, easy to consume, fun to use

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