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Author's profile photo Ervin Szolke

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.

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      11 Comments
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      Author's profile photo James Zhang
      James Zhang

      Nice, and easy to use.

      Author's profile photo Andrea Borgia
      Andrea Borgia

      I'm not sure this is such a great idea, case in point this question and the rather unhelpful answer.

       

      Author's profile photo Ervin Szolke
      Ervin Szolke
      Blog Post Author

      Hi,

      Thanks for reaching out.

      I will look into this, Andrea, might be a mistake or bug.

      Thanks,
      Ervin

      Author's profile photo Ervin Szolke
      Ervin Szolke
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Andrea,

      This was caused by a bug that is now being fixed, I deleted the thread, sorry for any inconvenience.

      Best Regards

      Ervin

      Author's profile photo Gregor Wolf
      Gregor Wolf

      Hi Ervin,

      I just would like to let you know that the video linked in the blog is private.

      Best Regards
      Gregor

      Author's profile photo Ervin Szolke
      Ervin Szolke
      Blog Post Author

      Thank you Gregor,

      letting me know, the video definitely was not private earlier, I will investigate what happened in the meantime. Thanks so much again letting me know, much appreciated.

      Update: I have now corrected the link. 

      Ervin

      Author's profile photo Matthew Billingham
      Matthew Billingham

      I've just seen my first question from SAP Support. https://answers.sap.com/questions/13767713/insertupdate-a-huge-characteristics-of-function-lo.html I can't say I'm massively impressed by the idea.

      The question is incomplete, and the answer is asking for more information (should be a comment). Furthermore, it's been accepted as the right answer. To someone who has not read this blog, it looks like someone is talking to themselves.

      What is wrong with someone asking the question themselves with their own account? Do the customers really need this level of hand-holding?

      Author's profile photo Ervin Szolke
      Ervin Szolke
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Matthew,

      I agree with you and the thread is now corrected. Even though we have clear guidelines, the process might be -- rarely -- misused. I will reach out to the engineer to find out which part of the process to reiterate.

      Thanks for letting me know, Matthew.

      Andrea Borgia I saw your mod alert too, let me find out more, and I will take action accordingly (if needed I remove the thread).

       

      UPDATE: I have removed the thread.

      Regards,
      Ervin

      Author's profile photo Matthew Billingham
      Matthew Billingham

      Thanks, Ervin Szolke I hope it is rarely.

      I do understand that SDN/SCN/answers.sap.com is an effort to reduce SAP's support costs by drawing on the goodwill of experts such as me.

       

      Author's profile photo Martin Kreitlein
      Martin Kreitlein

      Hello Ervin Szolke

      I found your blog via the link in this question... also this one seems not to win the first prize 🙁

      https://answers.sap.com/questions/13949600/delta-functionality-in-datasphere-system-post-s4ha.html

      Please don't delete it, since it contains helpful information... but the question is: Who posted this answer and accepted it? It does not match to the question .... but all what Nishant Kumar had posted would be a helpful answer.

      Thanks, Martin

      Author's profile photo Ervin Szolke
      Ervin Szolke
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Martin,

      Thank you for reaching out!
      I will look into it.

      UPDATE: In this scenario the answers are accepted automatically by the redirection process, i.e. not by an individual. I reached out to the engineer to review. If required I can unaccept the current answer, turn the comment of Nishant to answer and accept that one, but I would like to hear from the engineer first. By the way, in such cases you can also use moderation alert of the give forum thread.

      UPDATE #2: Nishant is a developer colleague of the engineer who created the post and he just wanted to build on the original answer (actually on the request of the support engineer, after seeing your first comment, so without him perhaps Nishant wouldn't have contibuted either.). Still, I have adjusted the thread in a way that I accepted Nishant's response.

      Best,
      Ervin