Every end is a new beginning: SAP EA Explorer to be discontinued in July 2018

Dear SAP EA Explorer users,

Almost 5 years ago, two colleagues and I had the idea of providing an information platform for customers, using a semantic network to relate technical concepts with SAP products.

When we launched this project, semantic approaches of this kind were relatively new, so it made a lot of sense to start with a specific, individual tool that we later called SAP Enterprise Architecture Explorer.

Now, five years later, the SAP world has moved on (in a positive sense), with much stronger focus on simplification, and new initiatives to relate valuable content for our customers.

I really like this development, although it also spells the end of the Explorer.

SAP Enterprise Architecture Explorer to be discontinued by end of July.

It’s been a great journey but– unfortunately – it has to end here. After many years of successful collaboration with the German SAP User Group (DSAG) and with individual customers throughout the world, this is a sad moment. The fact is however that there are simply too many SAP information platforms at present, meaning that some inevitably have to disappear for the greater good.

Why so sudden?

Why do we need to shut down so suddenly and quickly though? The plan was to carry on until the end of September. Unfortunately, with some global changes in the SAP environment, we now have a pretty serious bug in the Explorer that limits our capabilities to make changes to its content.

Considering that the Explorer is going to be shut down anyway, it makes no business sense for us to invest in further bug fixing.

We have therefore decided to bring forward the discontinuation to the end of July.

Will the content be distributed to other places?

A lot of content has already been transferred to other places. If you have been following the history of sap.com, you might recognize that these pages contain a lot more detailed information than back in 2013, when we started with the Explorer. Also, the SAP Help Portal has evolved over time to more of a knowledge portal. Finally, there are tools like the SAP Transformation Navigator.

While most of the various content types can be found at these places, some types might be lost for now. We are obviously trying to avoid this, especially for particularly popular content. In the case of the “Enterprise UX Strategy” and “Enterprise IoT Strategy” topics for example, I plan to create two blogs containing all the information previously stored in the Explorer.

Every end is a new beginning

As the blog’s title points out: “Every end is a new beginning”. And so, this story too will turn into something new, something bigger and something with even more value for all of us.

Some of you might wonder what will happen to me, as most of the external communication for SAP EA Explorer went through me. Besides being the guy on Twitter, LinkedIn, SAP Community and TechEd, I was also the project lead, major architect, and the content owner for numerous topics.

Since April 2018, I’ve been working in Christian Klein’s new board area. Katja Mehl leads a team here that focusses on customer experience at SAP across all digital interactions between customer and SAP. Working as a solution architect for this team, I’m going to steer individual customer requirements into something that we currently call “MyHome”, a central location that connects customers with the various locations and content types within SAP.

You can therefore still count on me to bring together the different strands within SAP that are of most value to your daily business. For me this is an even greater chance to support our customers. I’ll tell you more about this project once it gets well and truly off the ground.

Thank you to all our users and contributors

By way of closing this blog, I would like to say a big thank you to all of you who supported this project, either with content or with feedback. And I also want to thank all of our users for their amazing support and interest throughout the course of the project. I would be delighted if you would continue to follow me as I embark on my new adventure with “MyHome”.

All the best,
JJ