Recently, I’ve been asked to take part in a number of ‘reference calls’ for companies that are thinking about moving to SAP Enable Now. One of the questions I invariably get asked is: “Can we migrate our existing content from Product X?” – typically Oracle UPK or Ancile uPerform. My answer is always the same: “Short answer, yes. Long answer, yes, but…” Given that they usually aren’t looking for details of how at that stage I typically don’t go into the “but”, but for anyone looking for a bit more information, or an idea of the complexities involved, here’s some notes on my experiences of migrating simulations of SAP systems from Oracle UPK to SAP Enable Now. Details may vary for other target systems or for uPerform, but the comments below are likely broadly applicable.
First of all, there is no ‘conversion’ feature in SAP Enable Now that will let you import an .odarc file and have this magically turned into SAP Enable Now simulation projects. Personally, I think that if there was, SAP would find many more companies willing to make the jump. But I also know it is fairly complex and with enough variables to make the process significantly more complicated than a one-button conversion (which is likely the only thing most clients would consider acceptable).
What there is, are a few SAP partner companies that will do the conversion for you – obviously at a price, but one that is significantly less than the cost (in work-hours alone) of re-creating everything from scratch. I have used Abreon (now a subsidiary of Insight) and have been extremely pleased with their work. Eagle Consulting Partners offer a similar service, and there are likely others.
Preparing for conversion
Before you start sending off your .odarc files and Players, it is worth looking at what content you currently have, and deciding what you want to convert it to. Maybe you just have a library of UPK Topics and want all of these converted to UPK simulations, in which case things should be relatively simple. But it is worth considering whether the existing material is still being used – maybe it was developed for a new system roll-out and the system is now bedded down and formal training complete, or maybe the material is out-of-date, or not even being used. One client I worked with had WebTrends tracking running against their UPK Players, and made the decision that any content that hadn’t been looked at in the past 12 months would not be converted and just deleted (if you choose this path, take a usage snapshot before you announce it, otherwise users will start looking at content to see if they need it converted or not, which will then flag it as having been ‘used’, negating the point of the exercise…).
If you have the time, money, and resources, creating new content in SAP Enable Now is a much better option – SAP Enable Now has more functionality and better features, and you will get a more polished product. In light of this, consider whether you have any upgrade or ‘turnaround’ projects coming up that would necessitate re-recording your simulations anyway, and if so, you may want to not convert them now, and just create them new in SAP Enable Now, as part of the upgrade project.
You may also reason that you don’t really need SAP Enable Now simulations for all of your existing content. Maybe it will be sufficient to just retain the printable ‘work instruction’ (UPK Print It! mode). You can even load these into SAP Enable Now (as Media Objects) so they appear in the navigation outline.
You could also take a hybrid approach – re-create the ‘critical’ simulations – or ones that you absolutely want to use as a basis for Desktop Assistant Guided Tours, convert the remainder that have been used recently, and then just retain the PDF of the work instruction for the rest.
Converting simulations
Whichever approach you choose, ultimately you will have a list of simulations that you want to have converted. For UPK, you can just export the Outline Element that contains all of these simulations, and the conversion (at least as performed by Abreon) will create Groups for your Outline Elements, and organize everything correctly. But therein lies a problem if you only want to convert selected simulations – you need to strip out all of the simulations that you don’t want to convert, as the conversion will just convert everything. You also need to make sure that each Topic appears only once in the Outline (that you export) – especially if you export in batches – as each of these instances will be converted into a separate Enable Now simulation. This pre-work, of making sure you have identified and isolated all of the individual simulations that you want to convert, is probably the most effort in the entire process. But making sure you get it right at this stage will save you from the effort and expense of converting content you don’t need, or converting content you do need multiple times, creating duplicates (as I can attest from experience!).
For my conversions, I submitted an .odarc file and the corresponding published Player to Abreon, and they sent back a single .dkp file which could be loaded straight into SAP Enable Now. A simulation Project was created for each UPK Topic, and the contents of the attached ‘Concept Page’ was copied into the Description property. And as noted above, the outline structure was recreated using SAP Enable Now Group objects. The converted simulations generally worked straight out of the box (technically, Archive) and could really be used as-is, at that point. So far so good.
Mode considerations
In practice, See It! mode is converted to Demo mode, and Try It! mode is converted to Practice mode. There isn’t really a direct equivalent for Do It! mode, but Concurrent mode is a close-enough substitute, and that works well, using the Demo mode texts. However, things are a bit trickier with UPK’s Know It? mode. The SAP Enable Now equivalent is Test mode, but how this is implemented is very different. With UPK you (can) have a bubble on every screen, containing action-specific Know It? mode text, but in SAP Enable Now’s Test mode you only get a single dialog box, displayed throughout the entire playback, that needs to contain all the instructions. The Abreon conversions did not build this out, so there were effectively no instructions in Test mode, which rendered Test mode effectively useless. It may be that the Know It? mode texts could be bundled into the Enable Now Task Description, but it is unlikely that this would be usable as-is (absent the context of the screen) so if you do use Know It? mode, be prepared to put some effort into building out the Task Description after the conversion. (Alternatively, just delete/disable Test mode – which is created/enabled by default – for all converted simulations.)
UPK’s Print It! mode could also present problems, but this largely depends upon which document format(s) you use, and how you have configured or customized these. The potential issue is that the SAP Enable Now document formats typically use the Step macro’s Name property, or the Screen macro’s Title property for headings within the document. UPK does not capture these in the recording, so these properties are blank in the converted simulations. This then results in an absence of headings in the generated document. To compensate for this, you may need to adjust the Action Table > Heading Level and/or Numbering > Indexing document settings to cater for this. None of the UPK Print It! documents were converted/carried over to SAP Enable Now, but re-creating them is easy enough, and can be done en masse via the Documentation > Generate Single Documents menu option in the Workarea.
In-application help
Possibly the biggest problem with converting existing recordings into SAP Enable Now arises if you intend to use the recordings for in-application help (and really, why wouldn’t you?) – whether this is through a Context Help file or via Desktop Assistant. SAP Enable Now captures very comprehensive object-level context information during recording (see the Page Key property) whereas Oracle UPK does not, only capturing application/transaction/screen-level context information. This means that you cannot use a converted simulation as the basis for a Desktop Assistant Guided Tour. What you can do is include the simulation itself (typically the Concurrent mode) within the Desktop Assistant content – but this relies on at least the application/screen context being present in the converted simulation. Initially, this was not part of the default Abreon conversion (no context was carried over) but Abreon were happy to work with me to copy what context information was available in UPK over to the Enable Now simulation, once I had figured out exactly what information was needed in (and it was not just the Page Key; information about the recording profile needed to be captured in the entity.xml file, among other things). So providing some degree of context sensitivity is possible, but you will likely need to do some detailed technical investigations up front, and then work with your conversion partner to make sure the required information is present in the converted content (this is likely another reason why SAP does not provide a canned conversion feature – because there is not a ‘one size fits all’ solution). The good news is once you get this set up in the conversion scripts (and I have found Abreon to be very accommodating of client-specific requirements), all of the converted content will work without further intervention on your part.
One last comment on context-sensitivity; if you find it is not possible to get the context carried over into your converted Enable Now simulations, you can capture this after-the-fact directly in Enable Now. It’s a bit tricky, and certainly extra effort, but if you are only after transaction-level sensitivity (so a simulation is proffered as available help for a given task), you only need to do it for one screen in the transaction, and not for every one. Contact me for details if you’re in this situation.
Converting Concept Pages
The next area you may need to do some tidy up is in the ‘metadata’ for the simulations – and particularly the Description property. Handily, Abreon’s conversion process takes the contents of any UPK Web Page object attached to the Topic as a Concept Page (the Concept Page is technically a separate content object in UPK), and inserts this into the Description property of the converted simulation in SAP Enable Now. If you make use of this feature in UPK, this is a godsend, as copying/pasting, or creating a separate Text Unit and setting this as the Library Autostart for the simulation, would be prohibitively cumbersome.
For the most part, this conversion from UPK Concept Page to SAP Enable Now Description property is seamless – presumably because both of them use HTML as the underlying format – but there’s a few areas I typically had to fix:
- Soft returns (line breaks / Shift+Enter) didn’t seem to get carried over so split lines would just run together.
- Some quotation marks (single and double) weren’t converted correctly and showed as a ‘replacement’ character (�) . I suspect this is specific to ‘curly quotes’ and may be down to the SAP Enable Now editor’s Unicode handling. They are easy enough to spot and fix, but as a word of warning, check for these in simulation Names, and fix them before loading to the server.
- Nested lists didn’t come across correctly at all, with the list item following a nested list always starting a new list, instead of continuing the previous list at the same level. Again, easy enough to identify and fix, but extra effort (in some extreme cases – with tables embedded within lists) necessitating dropping into the Source view in the Text Editor and directly editing the HTML).
- Paragraph spacing was often ‘funky’ in the converted Description, with padding often being added. This may be due to direct-formatting applied to the text in UPK vs. the styles that Enable Now wants to use, and can usually be fixed by selecting the offending paragraphs and clicking the Remove Formatting button a couple of times (the first seems to strip character formatting, and the second strips the paragraph formatting).
Other than that, everything else was converted OK. All formatting, tables, (single-level) lists, hyperlinks, graphics (including floating graphics), and so on, all looked OK. I would stress that the success of this (Concept Page) conversion relies in no small part on consistency in the source material. This probably also holds true for bubble text, although UPK provided less formatting options for this, so less chance for authors to ‘flex their creativity’ in ways that may be problematic for the conversion. If your content is formatted consistently to begin with, conversion will be cleaner, and any clean-up easier.
Converting other metadata
For other metadata, such as Roles, this can probably be copied over OK, but I can’t vouch for it as I didn’t use it. In theory, any information where you can directly map a UPK property to a SAP Enable Now property should be ‘convertable’. You may need to work with your conversion company to get this set up initially, but once it’s there it should work fine.
There are many more properties available in SAP Enable Now than there are in Oracle UPK, but one feature that may help to get these properties populated (post-conversion) is the round-trip Workarea update possible through the Tools > Workarea Structure > Export Structure then Import Structure feature. Using this, you can export a list of all (converted) content objects (Groups and simulation Projects) – including all properties (and custom properties) – to Excel, populate them in Excel, and then upload the changes back into your Workarea. This feature is extremely useful in any case, but for completing conversions, it’s absolutely essential.
Converting courseware
All of the above only considers the conversion of UPK Topics (simulations) into equivalent SAP Enable Now simulation projects. SAP Enable Now also supports the creation and delivery of courseware – typically presentations for classroom use and/or CBTs. If you are using SAP Enable Now for simulations, you may want to just make it a one-step shop for training material and also create/store your courseware in Enable Now. This is certainly a realistic goal (even outside of legacy content conversion), but if you want to do that I would strongly suggest creating (or if necessary re-creating) your courseware (presentations) directly in SAP Enable Now, as Books and Book Pages. There is a very basic utility that will allow you to import a PowerPoint presentations, but each slide is captured as a non-editable, static image, which is far from ideal. There is a slightly better utility available to Enable Now consultants and implementers which will attempt to perform an object-level conversion (to create editable Book Pages in Enable Now) but the results are as variable as the content, and often requires significant amounts of clean-up.
I’m not aware of utilities to convert other formats (such as Adobe Captivate, or Storyline) to SAP Enable Now. There may be enterprising third-parties offering this service, but I’m not directly aware of any.
Summary
Yes, it is perfectly possible to convert existing UPK or uPerform simulations into SAP Enable Now simulations, but you will have to pay a third party such as Abreon to do this, and should expect some preparation work on the front end, and some clean-up on the back end. This will likely be less cost and effort than re-creating from scratch, but if time and money are no object, it would be much better to re-create the simulations directly in SAP Enable Now, in order to take full advantage of SAP Enable Now’s extensive features and capabilities, for the best possible deliverables.
