As an Author, most of your work will be using the Producer component of SAP Enable Now. This is where you’ll record and edit your simulation projects, and develop your Books and Book Pages. Producer uses Java to provide its functionality, and its no secret that SAP would like to migrate off this, and to a pure web-based editor – at least for the cloud version. (Maybe Java being an Oracle product hasn’t exactly endeared SAP to it). This would be a welcome change, as we would finally get away from the “Do you want to open/save this file” malarkey every time you start Producer (although to be fair, throwing every related site you can think of into the Trusted Sites list alleviates this to some degree). However, this would also mean losing the current editors provided with Producer. Instead, I think it’s safe to assume, we’ll be passed to using the Web Editor for all of our editing (again, at least for cloud implementations – which is also something SAP are pushing heavily).
The Web Editor is already available, and is what you’ll use if you edit a project from within Manager, or if you edit Web Assistant content via the misleadingly-named Edit in Manager option. However, although most of the functionality available in the Producer’s Topic Editor is also available in the Web Editor, there are a few differences. All the ones I have found to date are listed below, although there may be more I haven’t found yet.
- There is no ability to adjust the documentation crop for a Screen macro. There is a Screenshot Position/Size property, but no Manual Crop / Auto Crop / Uncrop buttons at the top of the Macro Editor panel, so if you want to adjust it you need to take a guess at the absolute pixel values, which obviously isn’t ideal.
- Related to this, there is no Documentation View available, so you can’t easily see the effects of cropping the screens for documentation without generating the whole document.
- All ‘relative’ Position properties (where you can select whether the bubble/object is relative to the Document or Element) are available directly in the Macro Editor – you don’t need to click on an Edit button to open a dialog box. This is an improvement if you are in the habit of changing them, but unfortunately you lose the Copy/Paste position buttons in the process.
- Input Text macros include a mystery category of properties called Settings for the confirmation button. I can’t find any impact of these. It sounds like something you’d use with a Form Structure, but it isn’t. If you know, leave a comment, below.
- The Cut/Copy/Paste/Delete options are inexplicably on the drop-down for the Undo/Redo button, which also includes a new Duplicate button which allows you to duplicate the currently-selected object (Step or Macro) – and is different from the Duplicate option on the Producer menu, which will only duplicate an entire project.
- You lose everything on the Tools menu, which means that the Merge Screens functionality is not available. This is a major omission. You can still drag-and-drop macros between Steps, but this is hardly as convenient, and won’t actually check that the screenshots are similar enough to merge.
- You also lose the Replace Bubble Styles functionality for the same reason.
- There doesn’t seem to be any re-record functionality.
- There is no External Editor available for screenshots, which is annoying if you’re in the habit of performing a quick bit of photoshopping when necessary.
- Also, for ‘Documentation Screenshots’ on Input Text macros there are no ‘recapture’ options, and again no external editor capability.
- The toolbars have also been re-jiggled, with some commands moving from one place to another. This mostly makes sense, although for drop-down options, the ToolTip is the first option on the drop-down and not the actual button name, which is a bit confusing.
Now, it may be that these are just temporary gaps as SAP builds out this functionality. They could all be things that are technically impossible to achieve with pure JavaScript, as they require interactions with other Windows programs or functionality. Either way, as it stands, I’m not particularly happy about potentially having to give up the Project Editor.
