The 2311 (November 2023 edition of SAP Enable Now was released this weekend, bringing us to Version 10.7.12 build 5213. Here, I’ll summarize the major changes in this release:
Business Roles
This is the main new functionality, and allows you to control who can see what learning content based on an assigned Business Role (assigned to the content and to the users). This is interesting new functionality, but at first blush doesn’t seem to be as useful as it could be, because you can only have one Business Role per User Role (what was just ‘Role’), and you still need these to be assigned to users (in addition to the User role). However, I believe this is just a first step, and SAP have indicated that in the next release Business Roles will be assigned via a SCIM API, which will make this functionality (and potentially user maintenance as a whole) much more useful. But even now, as a first step, it does work (and is easier than the Consultant Script that provided some of the same functionality).
You can find a video showing the use and effect of Business Roles here, and for subscribers to my training, the new course SEN-MA05 Business Role-Specific Content Display will teach you all about it.
Connected Workareas
SAP has made a minor change to the way Connected Workareas are specified. Instead of a Connect Workarea button on the upper-right of the Workareas and Tags screen, there’s a new drop-down list on the left of where you specify a new Workarea, which you can use to select whether this new Workarea is a ‘local’ Workarea (as before) or is a Connected Workarea:
The functionality once you select Connected to Remote Manager Workarea is the same as before. I don’t think this is any clearer than before (and may actually confuse users who don’t understand that a ‘Local manager’ actually means “on the server” and not “on your PC”) but it’s maybe closer to on-premise terminology so may be designed to ease the transition for customers moving from on-prem to cloud.
Machine Translation in Manager
The last release introduced the ability to duplicate content objects – or entire structures – from within Manager (previously duplication was only possible in Producer). This release expands on this by allowing you to duplicate into a new language – effectively providing the ability to translate content (and structures) from within Manager. This is done simply by selecting the new language in the Translate To field of the Duplicate dialog box:
This uses SAP Translation Hub, which is a free service to SAP Enable Now customers.
Asynchronous execution of long-running jobs
Because duplication and/or translation can take a while to complete, processing of these and other long-running tasks (such as import and export) are now carried out asynchronously (‘at the same time as other things’) in the background, and won’t tie up your Manager session – so you can get on with other tasks while they complete.
To support this, a new ‘background jobs monitor’ has been provided, to let you know the status of these jobs (you’ll also get a notification message when the job completes). This is accessed via a new button on the right of the Manager Toolbar:
Web Recorder improvements
There have been a few improvements to the Web Recorder functionality, including auto-detection of a title and language, and a larger preview window. Most helpful is the ability to move the location of the camera (Webcam) window, and a couple of new camera window sizes – including a new Full-Screen option, which may initially seem odd when you are trying to record things on the screen, but makes sense when you think about providing introductions or including other instruction.
You can also change the location and size of the camera window ‘on the fly’ during recording, by pausing the recording, and then changing the recording settings, before re-starting.
*** These changes don’t appear to be available at the moment – I think the plugin needs to be updated. I’ll add to this blog post when the functionality is fixed.
SAP Companion for SAP Enable Now Manager
Although it was technically possible to create your own help content for Manager, it was a bit tricky to enable, and you could only show your custom content (there was no extended mode). With the 2311 release, integration of Manager with SAP Companion has been streamlined to use the same ‘snippet’ functionality provided for many other SAP applications (such as Concur and Ariba). You can now create a configuration script using the SAP Enable Now template snippet, and then paste the link to this script in the Server Settings under Features > SAP Companion for Manager > Path to Initialization Script.
For Manager, SAP Companion will always be in extended mode, so if you do not provide your own help for a screen, the standard help will be displayed instead.
Single Log-Out
It is common for applications that use the same IAS for Single Sign-On Authorization to allow users to be logged out from all applications when the user logs off from one of those applications. (Effectively, this is the reverse of Single Sign On.) now, SAP Enable Now 2311 can also support this convention, if enabled in the Server Settings.
SAP Companion Changes
As with most releases, the official bi-annual SAP Enable Now release notes include mention of all the SAP Companion changes that have been released in the prior six months (SAP Companion is on its own ‘whenever we feel like it’ release schedule). These have all been covered separately elsewhere, so I won’t repeat them here.
Summary
And that’s it. Still no sign of the ‘floating panel’ SAP Companion, but again, with SAP Companion being on its own schedule, we could still see this before year-end (and it is almost certain to arrive before the 2405 release of SAP Enable Now.
