Happy Birthday SAPterm.com!

Five years ago this month, SAP released a new solution for everyone interested in SAP’s terminology, www.sapterm.com

Up to that point we’d tried everything else to publish our terminology, believe me!

• The SAP Dictionary, two hefty books painstakingly formatted by my dear former colleague G.L. with term pairs in German-English (volume 1) and English-German (volume 2), which could only be distributed for sale via the SAP website at DM 50 apiece.
• SAPterm Junior, a standalone display-only reader for encrypted term files – which, unfortunately, meant breaking down SAPterm contents into a dozen files with different combinations of languages and subject fields in order not to exceed e-mail attachment limits.
• The SAPterm CD, versions 1 and 2 (not to mention the infamous beta version 0), which was not only fiendishly complicated to update, it had a maximum capacity of twenty languages and no double-byte language support.
• Term file downloads for customers and partners on request, with stringent non-disclosure agreements that were never watertight enough to keep files from reappearing in the Internet – and, in one instance, being resold as “official SAP terminology”!

None of these solutions provided what was really needed.

• Support automated weekly updates from the central SAPterm database.
• Provide 24/7 self-service terminology lookup worldwide.
• Share all publicly-available terms in all languages at no extra charge.
• Reduce administrative overhead to a bare minimum.
• Comply with company data and security standards.

Thanks to the developers in the Language Technology Group at SAP Language Services, SAPterm.com met our needs, and more besides. Within six months the number of SAPterm.com users exceeded the number of dictionaries and SAPterm CDs ever sold. Users logged in from countries which had never had access to SAP terminology in their languages. Many more logged in from countries in which SAP has no customers but in which people were looking for trustworthy terminology resources.

And it just kept on growing from there. Over the past five years, hundreds of thousands of users have visited SAPterm.com to support their work with SAP products and services or as a resource for quality technical terminology.

We’re still proud of “the term website that could” and hope it continues to help our users.

And please let me know how it’s helped you! Send along your SAPterm.com (or SAP terminology) stories and I’d be happy to publish a summary of them in a future blog posting.