I’d initially considered SAP Enable Now as primarily a vehicle for creating and delivering training simulations – for use either in the classroom as part of Instructor Led Training or integrated within a CBT for self-paced learning. The fact that you can use the same recording from your simulation to create in-application help was really an added bonus. If I could only have one or the other, I would have always chosen the simulation over help help. (Besides, you can always use Concurrent Mode to provide guidance as you work in the application anyway, and that’s a kind of help…)
But then SAP muddied the water with Web Assistant, where you can’t create Web Assistant help from a simulation project (at least not as of the time of writing, although rumor has it that may be coming in a future release). This meant that you had to consciously create purpose-built help directly in Web Assistant – and largely using functionality that looks nothing like any other part of Enable Now – as its own, independent deliverable. Suddenly, help was no longer just something that you only provided because you could create it from something you were creating anyway, with very little additional effort. It required its own focus. And you weren’t getting anything else (like a simulation) with it, either. You had to really want to create it.
And you will want Web Assistant content. SAP is giving it a lot of attention – to the point where it may well become the main purpose of Enable Now, with simulations (and Books and Book Pages) just being supporting information for this.
Web Assistant was built primarily to support SAP’s own applications that use a Fiori (web-based) interface. The hard push is with S/4HANA, which leans almost exclusively on Fiori, and may prove to be the gateway drug into Enable Now. But there are other SAP offerings that use Fiori that are not on S/4, which also provide a path to Web Assistant (and with it Enable Now). Of these, the most compelling case for adoption is provided by SuccessFactors. SAP is providing a significant amount of free content (both help content and training material) for SuccessFactors, via Web Assistant. This content is free to consume (assuming you have Enable Now Consumer licenses for all of your SuccessFactors users), but if you want to update, augment, or even replace it, you need an Enable Now Developer license. Focusing on SuccessFactors first is a smart move on SAP’s part, as SuccessFactors often has the largest user base in a corporation (because, typically, every employee touches it).
But SAP are not stopping with SuccessFactors. They are slowly expanding their free Web Assistant content to all of their other browser-based offerings, which will have the double-pronged assault of providing additional incentive to adopt Enable Now corporate-wide, and also promoting their cloud-based offerings. SAP are also working hard to provide Web Assistant integration for third-party applications. SalesForce may well be coming soon, and there will certainly be others. All of this will put Web Assistant, and with it Enable Now, front and center of SAP’s cloud offerings.
And it’s not going to stop just at ‘traditional’ in-application support of providing screen overlays and Guided Tours. (It’s a testament to the speed of technological change to think that this is already considered ‘old-school’.) Consider Copilot, SAP’s ‘digital assistant’. If you ask it “How do I create a Purchase Order?” where does it get the answer from? Web Assistant. And if you ask it to show you more, where will it get this information? Enable Now. Using Augmented Me in a Warehouse and call up help? That help is delivered from Enable Now, right to your glasses. If you use SAP’s SkillBuilder to develop new competencies, the training material it suggests will also be pulled from Enable Now – the same training material you see in the SuccessFactors LMS. Soon, everywhere you look, Enable Now will be there, providing you with in-application help and just-in-time training.
All of this will place the focus in Enable Now squarely on providing in-application help – and this to an increasing degree via Web Assistant – and allowing the user to jump from there to more detailed training material in the form of Books, Book Pages, and simulations if they need it. In a complete turnaround, the help will be built first, and the training material second. So if you’re currently not making full use of Web Assistant, you should probably start now. Because pretty soon, Web Assistant will be unavoidable.
