Maximizing the Power of SAP Community at Product Support

To meet your changing needs, SAP’s Product Support is exploring additional options for delivering support. We aim to provide you the best channel for your how-to questions by expanding our  support channel offerings to include the SAP Community.

The SAP Community is your ideal place for your how-to questions so you can receive answers fast through community exchange. Experience the benefits of this additional way to engage and get your how-to questions answered appropriately. Receiving answers through collaboration with SAP  Community members reduces your overall effort for support requests and to create a support case with Product Support.

Integrating the SAP Community into our unified support experience

By integrating the SAP Community into our unified support experience as an alternate support channel, you can benefit from quick access to expert advice. Access knowledge and get answers to how-to questions from the SAP Community.

As it is our goal to build a bridge between Product Support and the SAP Community and provide you with a seamless, effortless support experience, we have launched a new process within the case management.

What does the new process look like? 

1. If you have a how-to question, we recommend you to first search on SAP Community since there is a high chance that your question has been posted already by other SAP Community members.
2. You can also ask a question on SAP Community.
3. For how-to questions that get submitted as Product Support cases, the Support Engineer leverages the SAP Community for you and answers your question in an SAP Community thread using a generic user called “SAP Support”.
4. Once available, the SAP support engineer will provide you a response with a reference to the SAP Community thread directly in your open case. So, there is no effort for you to post in SAP Community – the SAP Engineer will do that for you.

The support ticket is then sent back to you with proposed solution containing a response with the link to the Community thread. See below:

The SAP Support user is excluded from gamification.

When the support case is a pure how-to question, but our engineer cannot provide an answer, we will still prepare the question submission form for you and do our best to tag the thread properly. This way, you only need to review the form and submit whenever you are ready. Tagging the thread helps to reach the relevant subject matter experts who can help. In this case, the ticket response contains no thread but a link to the prefilled question submission form. This is a big difference since instead of suggesting you to go to the community, and fill out the form from scratch, we do this for you.

What is a how-to question?

A how-to question is a low-effort question, where you seek understanding or explanation on the functionality of an SAP product, which is applicable knowledge to all customers. The information or solution to these questions can be converted to SAP Documents (i.e. KBAs/SAP Note, product documentation, SAP Community, WIKI, etc.,) or is already available. The how-to thread posted on SAP Community must be beneficial for all future readers of the thread.

Some examples:

• Customizations/ Configuration/ Setup Issues
  • Low effort questions that can be answered with available SAP knowledge content.
• How to follow instructions given in SAP documentation
  • The solution exists but the customer needs help following the steps.
  • Customer doesn’t know what features exists, or how to use the features in SAP tools/products.
• Coding related questions
  • General programming questions, but not cases where customer needs help implementing custom code.
• Best practices to upgrade, migrate, install
  • Customer asks for SAP documentation on upgrade, migration or installation, i.e. not extensive help on following the documentation and make decisions related to upgrade, migration, installation.
• Tuning/Sizing issues
  • Generic, low effort questions that can be suggested with SAP knowledge content or expert knowledge, but not thorough analysis of a specific customer system and to suggest the best fit related to sizing.

Start using the SAP Community today for your how-to questions. 

For more information on what qualifies as a support case with Product Support and what questions are best to post on SAP Community, visit 2973358 – SAP Community: Preferred Support Channel for How-To Questions .

Further information about SAP Community

SAP Community is an open, public platform for SAP Professionals to collaborate. Explore the Questions and Answers page to get answers quickly or the SAP Blogs page to read blogs from  experienced SAP professionals. Tagging your questions with the right tags increases searchability and findability, therefore increasing the chance for proper subject matter experts to see your question and provide an answer. See the tag browser for all available tags. Community is an open public platform please make sure you follow the Community Rules of Engagement.