docupedia - SAP's Help Library meets social media (1)

Background:

The SAP NetWeaver Help Library or “doku” as we like to call it internally has been around as long as SAP software. It comes in many different flavors – from the SAP Library to Installation and Configuration Guides to Glossaries. Most of this documentation is produced by a diligent team of Information Developers around the world, and then goes through a thorough editing and production process before it reaches SAP customers and partners.

On the other hand we have SDN, that over time has accumulated an amazing pool of knowledge around SAP NetWeaver in form of blogs, forums, wikis, articles and more.

Currently our Help Library is not available to SDN, creating some interesting challenges for anyone looking for knowledge around SAP NetWeaver. We actually found some astonishing anecdotes from our users.

Often users have to go to two or three different places or even more to find answers to the questions they have. Some users keep “cheat sheets” of where all the answers are. Others find the documentation a good starting point but then need to find associated materials. Some users have assembled great materials that directly relate to our Library content.

On the other hand we have our Info Developers that have no indication how the materials they are producing are being received out there – what is good, what is missing, what should be changed. How is the product being used by our customers?

In my next installment I'll talk more about how docupediA will bring our product documentation to you - our community and what you can do with it.

Andrea Anderson is a Design Led Innovation coach for SAP NetWeaver PM.

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Coments and collaboration 2 thumbs up
2008-07-31 09:56:53 Nigel James Business Card [Reply]

This is great project. Documentation that I can comment on, request, tag, etc is an excellent start. The next time I see There is no documentation for function group ... I will be thinking of this project.


Bring it on...
Nigel

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Great stuff!
2008-07-25 23:31:39 Frank Koehntopp SAP Employee Business Card [Reply]

We have been talking about exactly this yesterday - what I'd love to have is help/notes with tags and RSS feeds, so I can create a feed (Yahoo Pipes for example) for a special product/version that has all the related information, in a river of news style.
That would be extremely helpful.

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SAP gets (more) social -- right where we need it!
2008-07-25 16:46:20 Moya Watson SAP Employee Business Card [Reply]

Andrea -
excellent! as an ex-dokudeveloper (read in english: tech writer) at SAP, i would have loved to see my documentation "socialized" via wiki. all of us who have written tech docs know that it is the end-user who holds the ultimate keys to real knowledge of a product. we have one-million-plus golden keys on the SDN; i can't wait to see how this project progresses!
thanks,
-m

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That's exactly what we need
2008-07-25 06:08:21 Michael Koegel SAP Employee Business Card [Reply]

Hi Andrea,
being heavily involved in projects on very early product versions and helping to round of the edges this is exactly what we need.
Being able to ammend the docu in the right places myself rather than having to find the right docu developer would speed up things alot.
On the other hand we'll still need the docu developers to make sure that the user created content is sound and well linked to background information and related topics.


Looking forward to the next installment.