Speaking with dear colleagues from the SAP Italy, I heard about an interesting award SAP received yesterday in Pisa, Italy.
As you can read in the newsletter, SAP AG was chosen as the 2011 recipient of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Documentation (ACM SIGDOC) Diana Award.
As an SAP Mentor it has been easy to get in touch with colleagues Anja Kellermann and Sven Leukert from SAP AG that kindly reported to me about the relevant event they were attending to receive the prize.
The Diana Award is given every other year, during odd-numbered years, to an organization which has collectively made an impact on the field.
You can have a look to the interesting agenda and check previous award-winners here http://www.sigdoc.org/awards/diana.html or here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGDOC.
As we know, SAP documentation is accessed online via the SAP Help Portal http://help.sap.com with millions of hits per month and Sven and Anja confirmed to me that the most popular pages are still related to flagship product SAP ECC 6.0.
Anja and Sven shared a couple of slides about SAP Product Documentation Road Map they presented at a Pod at TechEd'11 in Las Vegas.
The good news is that a brand new version of the SAP Help Portal was rollout at the TechEd in Las Vegas and will be life at the usual address in October; a Lab Preview follows:
As you can read at http://docupedia.sap.com/
after a period of testing it has been decided to skip the maintenance freedom of the wiki confirming at the same time the possibility to add links to external resources like SCN Articles and Blogs and SAP Notes, to attach files on each page in order to enrich the page and also to Rank and Post comments about the content.
And here it is the SAP Product Documentation roadmap:
SAP Documentation about onDemand products
Sven and Anja suggested to me to check the SAP Business ByDesign library and the SAP Sales OnDemand.
Documentation about OnDemand products appears very well structured, a bit easier than usual and it is probably going into the direction of the End-Users and the consumption is very fast.
Technology to create and update documentation
If, like me, you're wondering about the technology used to maintain the documentation, you'll find interesting that it is not based on any public wiki engine but indeed it is mainly based to the SAP Knowledge Warehouse (SAP KW).
An exception is the documentation related to SAP Business ByDesign that is maintained with a specific new tool deeply integrated with the product itself.