Being a (relatively recent) convert from Oracle UPK to SAP Enable Now, I’m often asked which product I prefer, or (more commonly) whether Enable Now is “as good as” UPK. I used UPK for over 10 years, and I’ve only been using Enable Now for one year (albeit very intensively) so it may be a little premature to make a definitive statement, but for training developers who may be considering a similar switch (or having one foisted upon them), here’s my high-level take-aways.
Firstly, the products are functionally similar in what they deliver, and conceptually similar in how they do this, so switching from one to the other shouldn’t be a problem for most training developers. However, there are enough differences to require a little cross-training to get up to speed.
The centerpiece of Enable Now (as with UPK) is the simulation. Simulations can be played back in Demo mode (= UPK See it! mode), Practice mode (= UPK Try It! mode), or Test mode (= UPK Know It? mode). You can also generate a printed version, similar to UPK’s Print It! mode, but in Enable Now you can provide multiple documents for a single simulation, and/or different document types for different simulations. For both UPK and Enable Now you can link directly to a simulation or play mode (for example, for embedding into a presentation), and provide access to a library of simulations via a website (the Player in UPK, the Trainer in Enable Now). For end users (consumers), the experience is almost identical.
Test mode deserves a specific mention here, as I feel that Enable Now loses to UPK in this area. With Test mode in Enable Now, there are no bubbles displayed for the steps; instead, there is a single panel of instructions that is displayed throughout the mode – which means that you need to put all of the required information into this. In some circumstances this could be a better method but in practice – and especially with SAP, which has multiple ways of doing the same thing – you end up putting more effort into fleshing this out to give the trainee a fighting chance than you would if you could just tag applicable text for Test mode (as you can for Know It! mode in UPK) at the step/bubble level.
In terms of tagging text for different modes, Enable Now only maintains two bubble texts – Demo mode (See It!) and Practice mode (Try it!) – versus three texts in UPK (See It!/Try It!, Know It? and Do It!), which takes an adjustment. These two texts are maintained separately (although you can tell Enable Now to use the same text for both – at the bubble level), so tagging text for the different modes in a single bubble is less complex. The downside is that the in-application help (the Do It! mode equivalent) has to use either the Demo mode texts or the Practice mode texts (you can configure which of these are used- at the library level), so you will likely have to adjust your text approach for one of these.
Editing simulations is relatively straightforward in Enable Now, and if you are familiar with UPK you will transition quite easily. Enable Now is different in that you don’t necessarily have to have a screenshot for every action and explanation – you can combine multiple actions/explanations into a single step (each step has a screenshot) and Enable Now does a few clever things to update the screenshot after each action so that the screenshot always looks correct. This can make simulations more compact (on the editing side – they play the same way), but again, takes some getting used to.
One area where Enable Now pulls ahead of UPK is in the richness of the formatting you can apply to the contents of a bubble. In addition to entering text and applying basic font formatting and typographical emphases (bold, italics, underline) you can also define and apply character, paragraph, and block styles, along with numbered and bulleted lists, indentation, and so on. (It’s not quite full CSS, but it’s not far off. Oh, and you can also display the HTML code for a bubble and edit this directly if you need to.) You can also insert tables, images (in many cases Enable Now automatically inserts the button image for action areas), placeholder texts, and so on. It’s truly phenomenal, and makes UPK look like Notepad in comparison.
Sometimes it’s just the small things that count. In Enable Now if you want to add a keyboard shortcut as an ‘alternative action’ you can do so via a property for the existing mouse action, whereas in UPK you need to ‘record’ it, necessitating getting into the application, at the correct screen resolution, just to capture something that isn’t even tied to the application screen (technically it is, via the Context Info, but it needn’t be), which really makes no sense. That said, Enable Now doesn’t really allow you to trigger an ‘alternative path’ for a keyboard shortcut, which is a little infuriating if (for example) the keyboard shortcut replaces two or three mouse-clicks (think cascading menus).
For in-application, context-sensitive help, Enable Now is, frankly, streets ahead of UPK. It effectively provides three options; the Desktop Assistant for Windows-based applications, Web Assistant for SAP’s Fiori-based browser applications (such as SuccessFactors and S/4HANA), and the Context Help File which can be used as a Do It! mode equivalent if you don’t want to use either of the first two options (the Context Help File works very well with SAPgui although it needs to be refreshed separately). Regardless of which one(s) you use, the in-application help in Enable Now works very, very well, with the help bubble pointing to the exact object on the application screen, instead of just having a floating window that doesn’t point to anything, as is the case with Do It! mode in UPK. This is largely because Enable Now performs true object-level context capture, not just recognizing the name of the input field or button (which UPK also does), but identifying the technical identifier of this object in the application. The significance of this is that if the object on the screen moves (for example, because the application user interface changed, or the user is using a screen with a different resolution or display ratio) Enable Now will still find the object (based on the captured technical identifier) in the application and point the help bubble directly at it.
Books and Book Pages are a welcome feature in Enable Now. These allow you to effectively create full-function training presentations (in the style of PowerPoint presentations) within Enable Now. Pretty much anything you can do on a PowerPoint slide you can do on a Book Page. However, sometimes this just seems to take way more effort than it should do. For example, you can create a numbered list easily enough. If you want to animate this in one list item at a time in PowerPoint, you just apply a Fade In animation and set this to apply ‘per paragraph’. But in Enable Now you don’t have a ‘per paragraph’ option; the whole text block is animated at the same time. So you need to define each line as a separate text block so you can assign individual animation effects and triggers. But then you can’t use a numbered list because Enable Now will always start each block at “1” (there is no option for ‘start numbering at…’), so then you need to have the list numbers and list entries as separate text blocks, and…and… But now we’re really comparing Enable Now and PowerPoint (and for the record, I think Enable Now has better functionality – albeit at the cost of a much steeper learning curve).
That said, one of the things I like about Book Pages is the degree of reuse that Enable Now provides. A Book Page (slide) can be used in many Books (presentations) while maintaining a single, common version of the page (which is not possible in PowerPoint). You can also use a Book Page as a ‘concept page’ for a simulation or a Group (the Enable Now equivalent of an Outline Element) in the same way as you can use ‘Web Pages’ in UPK. You can also use a Book Page in the middle of a simulation project, if you really want to, which is a nice feature.
Enable Now also provides Quizzes and Questions, similar to UPK (although the user interface isn’t always as pretty unless you’re willing to put a lot of effort into building out templates). You can insert a Question into a Book, or even into the middle of a simulation, which again gives some great options for re-use. However, whereas you can insert a simulation into a Quiz in UPK, you cannot do this in Enable Now, which for me is a huge shortcoming. UPK also has much better options for checking Quiz coverage for a module (although UPK not providing a native ‘presentation’ format equivalent to Enable Now’s Book Pages does make this less useful than it could be).
Running through all of this is the usual check-in/check-out client/server library functionality. Enable Now provides the same functionality as UPK here, but somehow manages to make it seem much more complicated. This has improved slightly in the latest (1811) release (where mention of ‘write tokens’ has thankfully been removed), but it still feels more complicated than it really needs to be. But what Enable Now loses in this area, it makes up for in terms of workflow. UPK has two fields (Owner and Status) that it calls “Workflow”, but these actually offer zero control and are effectively just text labels. Enable Now, by contrast, has full workflow, where you can define the statuses that a content object must go through, and can control who can move the object from one state to the next. You can also define different workflow processes for different development types (for example, new development vs. updates vs. translations) to truly match your development processes.
Finally, publishing. Here, my experience may not be typical, because I am using the cloud edition of Enable Now, and the on-premise version is a little different, but for me publishing is incredibly fast. With everything sitting in the cloud, all it takes to publish a new simulation (or Book/Book Page/etc.) is to tag it as “Published” and it is instantly visible to your users. With UPK it would sometimes take me 24 hours to publish a Library (my largest was 3,500 simulations) – even with ‘incremental publishing’. So to go from that to being able to publish literally in seconds is mind-blowing.
There’s more functionality provided by both products, but that’s the key common touch-points. Overall, I feel that Enable Now takes a little longer to learn, but this is likely due to the sheer level of control that Enable Now affords you over just about everything – from colors, to shadows, to the acceleration and easing of animations, to pixel-specific positioning of just about everything, and so on. Enable Now just feels like a more comprehensive tool.
Do I miss Oracle UPK? Sure, because I knew it so well and could work very quickly within it. But do I regret switching over to Enable Now? Not for a minute.
