How to structure your SAP Enable Now workarea

Dear SAP Enable Now community,

we all know that, when it comes to structuring data, everyone has a favorite way of doing it and there is no right or wrong. There are experts for data structuring who have written books on how to structure documents, files, etc.

However, at least for SAP Enable Now workareas, we do encourage you to follow our best practice guides for setting up and maintaining your workarea(s). The following approach may not fit to 100% of all use cases but it has proven its worth with many customer implementations.

First of all, think of the main criteria when creating sustainable content. The goal is to

• avoid redundancies,
• increase multi-modality (meaning making the most out of one recording) and
• ensure maintainability.

To help achieve these goals it has proven useful to create different sections in your workarea for storing templates and media (toolbox), content creation, content maintenance, and published content.

Sample of a best practice structure (1st Level)

• Toolbox

The toolbox should contain all media objects and templates. This is the place where all the authors work together to store the reusable media. It’s best practice to place all media here and link to it from within projects or book pages to keep network traffic low and increase maintainability.

You will find a sample toolbox available for download in the Infocenter.

• Creation

The creation section contains personal groups for content authors. The substructure depends on the number of authors, subject matter experts (SME) and locations. Some structure examples:

Sample structures for creation part of the workarea

• Maintenance

This section is meant for authors to have a place to store references. It is recommended to use this section if the recordings are used in different distribution channels (like a library, desktop assistant, etc.). This section provides fast access to the content via an application based structure.

• Publish

In this section the authors put the content that is ready to be consumed by learners and is published. Please note that the content is not automatically published just by being moved into this section. The published tree can be structured by language and/or roll out scenario. The first level should be language, then distribution channel and then a more detailed structure, for example by application.

Sample structures for publish part of the workarea

Of course these are standard examples and your structure might look different due to individual flavors to your setup. But I hope that these structural guidelines will help to define a workable and sustainable content structure.

If you want to learn more about workarea structure, this topic is part of the SEN200 Training for Master Authors available in the Learning Hub. Additionally, there are some great how-to guides in the Infocenter related to this topic.

Take care,

Kristina