This month, SAP quietly released a new feature in SAP Enable Now which is incredibly useful but also signifies just how committed to SAP Enable Now SAP is. This is a change to how screen objects in applications are identified when assigning Hotspots to them in Web Assistant.
Previously, when you hovered the cross-hair cursor over a screen object to assign a Hotspot, the object would be highlighted in either green, to indicate a ‘stable’ element (that is, one that can be consistently identified on the screen and is therefore suitable for assigning context-sensitive help to), or yellow, to indicate an unstable (and therefore unsuitable) element. Sometime around the 1908 release (but not formally announced in the release notes), SAP enhanced this to provide four levels of indicator, as shown in the graphic below.
This in and of itself is incredibly useful – particularly the differentiation between elements identified via an one of the element’s attributes and those identified using the element’s name (these are the two light-green variants). If you see that identification of a specific element is language-dependent (these are the ones with a flag in the recognition bubble), you can already plan on re-doing the Hotspot assignment when the help is localized.
If this visual indicator isn’t enough, you can now also display technical information about identified screen elements by pressing i on the keyboard during Hotspot allocation, to show the following panel at the bottom of the screen:
But what is most significant here is the types of elements that are (now) highlighted in dark green. These are objects that are identified by an attribute that was specifically implemented to support Web Assistant. Think about that. The SAP Enable Now team within SAP have approached the development teams for other SAP products and talked them into hard-coding Enable Now friendly identifiers for all of their screen elements. As anyone who has worked for a company that has multiple products – each with its own production team with its own priorities – will tell you, this is no small achievement. The Enable Now team must have had support from higher up the management chain (higher than the individual product owners), which is a strong indicator of SAP AG’s commitment to SAP Enable Now, and their expectation of its longevity. And that’s great news for companies looking to invest in an SAP Enable Now implementation – and for consultants thinking about getting certified in it.
We who work in training (or documentation, or information architecture, or whatever you want to call the development and delivery of user assistance) are used to being the lowest people on the development totem pole. So it’s heartening to see SAP Enable Now leading the way, and driving (or even dictating) product development. Kudos to the SAP Enable Now team (Mirko, Stefan, Anton, Mike, Frank, Jesse, and everyone else who’s keeping us in a job for years to come). Keep kicking ass and taking names – we appreciate it!
