SAP Enable Now Web Assistant – Working with extended content

Dear community,

the Web Assistant provides in-app help where learners need it and when they need it. SAP has made lots of standard content available for solutions like S/4 HANA, SuccessFactors, and SAP Marketing – to name just a few.

This contextualized help content can also be extended with custom content and this is what I would like to explain in more detail in this blog article.

Introduction

The Web Assistant displays content from a workarea defined in the parameters. If you set it up to show content from the SAP Education workarea, it will show the standard content. If, however, you want it to show only custom content, you enter your custom workarea.

In most cases, customers want to show a mix of standard content and their own custom content – this is what we call the extended content scenario. You can find videos showing how to set this up in the Infocenter (topic Enhancement of the Learning App).

Once you have set up a connected workarea for the standard content references and an extended workarea to enhance this standard content, your workarea overview will look something like this:

Connected and Extended Workareas

Now you are ready to work in the extended workarea and add your own content as well as change the extended standard content.

Preparing the workarea

Your extended workarea has its own root group, like any other workarea. What I would recommend is to create two groups underneath named “Extended Content” and “Custom Content”. Your own content tree can then be located in the Custom Content group. The Extended Content group will be where you see the content coming from SAP.

The extended content is marked by an orange dot. You can find this content in the Unsorted group. Start editing the Extended Content group and drag the extended root group up into it.

Sample Structure

Please be aware that you don’t need to (and probably shouldn’t) do this in the Producer. Set this up in the Manager instead, that way you don’t have to download all of the extended content into your Producer.

You can then start to build your own library, which can include objects of the standard content like projects or book pages.

Library Sample

This doesn’t have to be a library, this is just a sample.

Fetching Data

If you want to use some of the standard content and add you own explanation bubbles or more steps, you can fetch the data. I’d recommend to create an “extended content” user which is used to manage this so that your personalized Producer is not too cluttered and takes long to synchronize.

To do this, select the object in the Manager and click on “Fetch Data”. Or you can go into the Producer and start to edit the object. You will be asked if you want to fetch it or not. 

Fetch Data

You can also fetch data for more than one object in Producer by starting to edit whole groups.

If, later on, you decide to go back to the original version of the data – the extended content – then you can roll back your changes. To reset the changes, you need to delete your locally edited object from the Manager interface. Once you delete it, the original object is restored and you see an orange dot in front of the object name again.

This is covered in the section 12.5.2 Reusing Content from Other Workareas in Producer Manual.

And if there is standard content that you don’t want to use you can hide it. For this you need to start to edit it and then hide it.

Tips and Tricks

Besides the use case of using the standard content provided by SAP, there are other use cases for the extended workarea.

You could, for example, set up a base workarea which hosts all of the templates – and also resources – for the extended workareas. Different projects could use their own extended workareas which pull the templates and resources from the base workarea.

If you have more use cases to share, please use the comment function below.

Also be aware that the product version, which is part of the Web Assistant context, is important to maintain. If the target application rolls out a new version, the product version of the help objects needs to match this. It is maintained by SAP for the standard content. In your own content and the objects which you have fetched, you need to maintain this yourself. You can do this in the producer, also for more than one object, by going to Tools > Web Assistant > Context Maintenance… You can add additional product versions or replace existing ones.

Context Maintenance

The PDF SAP Enable Now Web Assistant Supported Applications in the Info Center gives you a great overview about supported applications and the kind of standard content we provide.

I hope this overview helped you learn about the extended functionality for workareas. Leave a like if you liked it!

Take Care,

Kristina