New SAP Help Portal Goes Live: What it Means for Smart Data Streaming and ESP Users

SAP has a new Help Portal, hosted on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. Live now (go check it out!), it features a clean design that is fully responsive, and much improved navigation through better search functionality.  Here are the changes you can expect for smart data streaming and Event Stream Processor (ESP) content.

Getting to the Content

To find the smart data streaming or ESP documentation, just search for “smart data streaming” or “Event Stream Processor” from the homepage.

Clicking the search result will take you to the product page, which is home to all of the content for that product. The navigational menu of the old Help Portal is long gone and replaced by the search bar on the homepage: search functionality is dramatically better, and it is good enough to be the only way to navigate. Yes, searching actually works now. Once you’re on a product page, you can search for content across all of the guides.

Finding the Version You Want

Product pages will show the latest version of documentation when you first land on them. However, getting to older versions is now easier than ever: you can access all available versions from a dropdown menu on the product page. This menu includes versions that were part of the “Earlier Releases” page, as that page doesn’t exist anymore. This means no more downloading ZIP batches of PDF files if you are using smart data streaming SP 09, for example. Now, you can view previous release documentation directly in your browser.

For everyone using ESP SP04 or earlier, you will still be redirected to the Infocenter to find your documentation. All of this amounts to fewer links and downloads, and easier access to the version of the documentation that you’re interested in.

If you’re using smart data streaming on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, you’ll find your documentation here too. You don’t have separate links anymore; simply choose your version from the dropdown menu! With a few exceptions noted in the SAP HANA Cloud Platform Smart Data Streaming help section, the smart data streaming documentation is identical for the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

Navigating Within Documents

Documents now open by default in your browser. The new Portal design places a larger focus on the content with a larger viewing area and collapsible table of contents for each document. Looking for something specific within a document but can’t find it in the table of contents? Use the search to locate the content.

Those of you familiar with viewing smart data streaming documents in your browser may also have noticed green images on the first page of each guide. These images were static in the old Help Portal (as they are in this post), but now they are fully functional navigational tools! Click an image to go to the relevant content within the guide.

Where’s the PDF?

While you can’t download a ZIP file containing all PDF documents for a given product, you can still access PDF versions of each document through the sidebar widgets. Select the download icon to download a PDF version of the document you are viewing. This widget bar includes other options such as the ability to change the font size, and provide feedback on the document you are looking at.

Check out the new Help Portal at help.sap.com and leave us your thoughts about it in the comments!