Increase User Productivity on Your SAP Fiori Launchpad by Enabling Embedded Help

Setting up your SAP Fiori launchpad, for instance by structuring your business roles, maintaining spaces and pages, or creating additional launchpad content in the on-premise world is one part. The other part is to provide anyone who works with the launchpad adequate help and training opportunities. What could be more convenient for them than getting help directly when using the launchpad?

Let me take you on a journey from the launchpad itself to its SAP Fiori administration apps. Have a look, what information is available for your users when they open the launchpad and what is available for you when you define the launchpad layout and settings. And the prerequisite to make use of that help? I will describe everything important in this blog post.

But let’s first start with what embedded help offers you in general.

What’s in it for Your Users?

SAP provides embedded help for various apps, and for the launchpad itself help is available as well! And these are the benefits:

Context-sensitive help: You only get information for elements which are currently visible on the screen.

Short explanations: Short explanations concerning an app, a UI element, a dialog or a view.

No need to search externally for help: The information is directly shown when working on the screen – including a direct link of the current selection to the complete, official documentation.

Use well-known shortcut F1: Press F1 and the embedded help opens.

New users, who are using the launchpad for the very first time, and more experienced users benefit from these capabilities, as with new apps, new app features and launchpad features constantly new information will be available in the embedded help.

This is how the help looks like:

The list on the right side contains the help entries for all currently shown UI elements for which help is available. The blue frames indicate the elements for that context-sensitive help is available. Users can click on either a text in the list or the element itself to open the help information.

Where is Embedded Help Information Available for the Launchpad?

The embedded help in the launchpad provides general information on the available apps and within those apps. Specifically, for the launchpad there is information on the shell and for the launchpad administration apps available:

• Manage Launchpad Spaces
• Manage Launchpad Pages
• Manage Launchpad Settings (cloud only)

Simply click on the ? icon in the tool bar or press F1 to open the embedded help.

On the Shell

When you work with the launchpad shell, you directly get help for visible elements like:

• Home
• Search
• Notifications
• User Actions Menu

On top of that, you can get further instructions for the launchpad. For instance, when you are in the spaces mode, you can read on the current screen which steps need to be done in order to personalize a page. An entry for the spaces in general is available from here as well.

In the App Manage Launchpad Spaces

Now let’s get from simply using the launchpad to administrating it. When defining the menu structure with spaces and pages for your users, there is information available in the Manage Launchpad Spaces app. This information should help you getting an overview of the most important features in that app, so that you can directly start working with it.

Starting with the overview of spaces on your system, you can quickly learn about the different possibilities to create spaces and which information on that page helps you to achieve this task.

Once you select a space in the list and enter the edit mode in order to make changes, you get additional information on how to structure that space by maintaining the pages inside it.

In the App Manage Launchpad Pages

We continue in the Manage Launchpad Pages app, that we can access from the Manage Launchpad Spaces app by directly selecting one page inside the space. In this app, you get direct help as well – and not just textual help, but also a guided tour, that lets you first try out this app (and also the app for managing spaces) before using it. If you are curious, you can try out the tutorial directly here: Managing Spaces and Pages Tutorial.

In the App Manage Launchpad Settings

This app is only available in cloud products like SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Here you see an example with a direct link to the documentation that describes the app.

How to Activate the Embedded Help?

The good news is, when you administrate a launchpad on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, the help is enabled by default.

In an SAP S/4HANA on-premise environment, you need to actively enable the help first. The SAP help documentation Setup of In-Application Help provides you all the information you need for this task.

If you would like to find information about embedded help on SAP Launchpad Service, then have a look at Activating Web Assistant Content.

Other Help

Of course, there is also other help for the launchpad available, like

• Texts on the user interface
• Help on the help portal (e.g. SAP Fiori Launchpad for SAP S/4HANA Cloud or SAP Fiori Launchpad for SAP S/4HANA On-Premise)
• Microlearnings on openSAP:
  • Introduction to Structuring SAP Fiori Launchpad with Spaces
  • Tools for Structuring SAP Fiori Launchpad with Spaces
• Guided tours: SAP Fiori launchpad for new users, Working with and Personalizing Spaces and Pages for users, Managing Launchpad Spaces and Pages for administrators. The current versions of guided tours are linked in the SAP Fiori launchpad user guide, e.g. SAP Fiori launchpad for SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
• And loads of blog posts.