I am happy to announce the publication of my first book on SAP Enable Now, SAP Enable Now Development, which is available now from amazon.com and all good booksellers.
This book has been written for training developers who are new to Enable Now, and existing developers who are looking to enhance their skills. Over 600 pages, the book covers the basics of working in Producer, through recording and editing simulations, creating Desktop Assistant content, Web Assistant Content, and documents.
There’s a full 80-page chapter dedicated to Books and Book Pages, including animation and triggering actions. There’s also a chapter on Quizzes, along with examples of every type of Question. I also cover adding audio to both Books and simulations, and explain how to localize content into multiple languages.
Finally, I walk through the publication process for the Trainer (either in the cloud or locally), and also cover creating context-sensitive help files, and generating video output. Oh, and there’s also a chapter on workflow.
If you want to learn a bit more about Enable Now’s functionality and how to use it, then this book might be a good place to start.
Hello Dirk, I want to buy your SAP Enable Now Development book, but I am wondering if there will be an updated version soon? So I would wait to buy the updated one instead of the one published in 2018. Thank you. Janine
Janine: Thanks! I’m not working on an updated version yet, so probably not “soon”. I do get asked fairly often, and I will probably write one at some stage, but honestly there’s not really been enough truly new information to justify it. Aside from Web Assistant – which I wrote a more recent, separate book on – (and Desktop Assistant in WA mode) most of the updates have been relatively minor tweaks and improvements, not new functionality. The basics of creating simulations, courseware, and in-app help are largely unchanged. HTH, Dirk
Hi Dirk, I don’t know if my previous comment was published. My doubt was,
We have just started working on SAP Enable Now to capture simulations. I was wondering if you would know how to turn on click sounds. Currently there is a silence when the sim shows something being clicked. Also is there anyway to add fade in fade out animation effects to the fallouts in a demo? Would really appreciate it if you could answer these.
Well, if you go to Tools | Settings | Playback Settings | trainer – Global | Audio there is a setting called Disable Effects. I would have thought that just deselecting this would do the trick, but apparently not. I don’t know if this is a bug or there just are no click sounds in Enable Now (which would be odd). I’ll check with SAP and see what they say.
As far as I can tell there is no way to fade in/out the bubbles during playback. Sorry.
Update 01-MAR-2018: Confirmed with SAP. There are no audio effects (click sounds) in simulations.
Hey, Amy. Good question. SAP probably won’t thank me for saying so, but putting a $ saving on Enable Now vs. UPK isn’t that simple. At their root they are very similar products, and for a lot of UPK clients, the switch is driven more by the fact that UPK is being discontinued than any direct cost savings. (Yes, it has been reprieved for a couple of years, but no new development is planned, so it is basically a dying product; you can probably keep running it as-is for as long as you can keep the servers and databases stood up, but UPK’s never going to get any better than it is, and sooner or later you’ll hit a version of SAPgui or something that just won’t work with it…).
That said, I think that Enable Now provides much better in-application help, and believe that if this is used effectively it will reduce helpdesk calls and/or mistakes by users (especially with things like in-app validation (in Desktop Assistant), and/or instant (possibly auto-pop-up, ‘in-your-face’) help for commonly-reported problems), but unless you’re running something like Knoa that can quantify this, it’s going to be difficult to put a dollar value on that (and it may not necessarily be possible to do so until Enable Now has been installed and running for a while, to allow a comparison).
In terms of development time/effort, creating simulations in Enable Now is comparable to UPK. Publication is much faster (in a cloud environment), and providing in-application help via Web Assistant is super-fast (you could have additional help tiles in place literally within minutes of the need for help being identified) so I think there is possibly some saving there. Clients moving to an Enable Now cloud implementation will also see savings in server/storage cost and all the overhead associated with managing their own servers.
One of the arguments SAP will make is that there is pre-built content available for several of their products (and growing by the day). If you have fairly ‘vanilla’ business processes you could possibly use these as-is or with minor edits, but it really depends on whether content is available for the specific content you use, and/or whether you can use it as-is.
So. overall, I wouldn’t like to say “if you move from UPK to Enable Now you’ll see savings of xx%” – honestly, it’s likely to be very similar. But it is a better product in a lot of ways, it integrates very well with S/4HANA and other SAP offerings, and it is being actively developed so is constantly evolving and improving. Probably not necessarily something you can use as a ‘justification’ (especially where money is involved) but that’s my two cents. Happy to hear others’ opinions – hit up the comments!
Hey Dirk! Like many potential customers, our team is looking for ways to quantify a change from UPK to SEN. Leadership loves $ savings. Do you have any advice on how we could use metrics to make the case? We know quality will be leaps and bounds beyond UPK, but it always comes down to numbers. Thank you!