Housekeeping in your SAP Enable Now Manager

[KristinaKunad]

*Updated Q3 2024*

Why Housekeeping?

I bet many of you remember some adult telling you to "Clean up your room!" or "I can't even see the floor!" or "How do you even find your stuff in here?". I guess the word "housekeeping" brings back those memories... However, this blog post is not going to be pointing fingers at anyone. I would like to provide some helpful tips and tricks for administrators working with the SAP Enable Now Manager.

Housekeeping for SAP Enable Now includes cleaning up content objects and making sure the active users in the Manager reflect your actual number of active users.

In this blog post you will find a list of different topics to check regularly to avoid chaos as well as a checklist with potential issues and solutions. The focus is on SAP Enable Now Cloud, but most of the points will hold true for the on-premise version, too.

Housekeeping Checklist

Let's start with a checklist with important points for administrators to go through regularly.

1. Unsorted

Unsorted Group

The Unsorted group contains all workarea objects that are not assigned to any parent group. don't have anywhere else to go. So these are, for example, projects that don't belong to a group or groups whose parent group was deleted (which is why we used to call these objects "orphans"). Please note that imported content will also by default appear in Unsorted. The Unsorted group in the Producer will disappear if it is empty.

This is one of the main pain points for administrators and master authors. It can happen that authors forget to move their content into the "real" structure or delete groups and continue to work with them in Unsorted.

A large number of objects in Unsorted can slow down your manager, because these objects are not indexed. To avoid this, authors should be trained to check their personal Unsorted group in Producer and move objects back into their main workarea structure.

If you already have lots of objects in Unsorted, it makes sense to put some effort into cleaning this up. A report for all unsorted objects was introduced with the version 2305 in May 2023. Watch this tutorial in the Info Center to find out more about this report. 

The easy way is to create a new group in your main structure and move the unsorted objects into this new group (in Manager or Producer). After that you can ask your authors to check this group and take care of their objects. Finally, everything that is not removed from Unsorted can be deleted.

My Unsorted Group

By the way, each author can also check their "own" unsorted objects in the Manager by checking "My unsorted objects".

2. Editing Report

Editing Report in Manager

To keep an eye on what is happening in your Manager, it makes sense to check the Editing Report and find out which authors are working on what content objects.

The Editing Report provides an overview of objects currently being edited by users. This enables you to easily identify how many objects each user has in editing mode as well as it provides the option to directly contact the according user, for example to remind that user to finish editing in time before next project phase.

3. Overdue Tasks

Status Report

You can keep track of tasks which are on track or overdue using the Status Report. Prerequisite for this is that you are using Statuses to track the progress of your authors.

This is a good way to keep track of open projects and their statuses. 

4. Server Statistics

Server Statistics

The Server Statistics area gives you an overview about the user registrations in your Manager instance. To have statistics on Learners' activity, you need to activate tracking on Producer. Go to Administration > Server Statistics to see this area.

Here you can check the number of active users in your Manager. Keep an eye on this number, because this is the number relevant as a licensing metric. Feel free to reach out to your Customer Success Partner or Account Executive in case you have questions about additional licenses.

If you realize that there are active users in your Manager who are actually not using the content anymore and have not been automatically deactivated by your IDP, you can deactivate them yourself. There are two options

• either use the automatic deactivation feature in your Manager to deactivate users who have not logged in since a certain time period (details in the Manager Manual). This feature was adjusted and now has a minimum amount of time that users need to stay active.
• or manually deactivate the users either one by one or by selecting several at once or via the excel export / import.

Whilst it is possible to deactivate and delete user records from the SAP Enable Now database, it is still important to ensure that your organization complies with the licensing requirements (SAP Enable Now Licensing Product Supplement Cloud, onPremise may differ per customers) at all times.

5. Workarea Management

As your SAP Enable Now usage grows, so might the number of workareas. Make sure to keep an eye on the workareas and their usage. There should be once central person administrating the creation of new workareas and no one should have the permission to delete workareas without prior alignment with the administrator.

Especially when working with connected and extended workareas, it's important to keep an overview. You don't want someone creating a connected workarea without your knowledge and then later wondering why you cannot create another connected workarea connected to the same SAP workarea. All new workareas should be set up to give permission to the Administrator to manage them.

Workarea Permissions

Managing workareas might be a Master Author responsibility, but Administrators should always have an overview about the status. This is an ongoing topic.

Important Topics to look out for

To make your admin life a bit easier, here is a list of topics which might come up concerning the housekeeping of the SAP Enable Now Manager.

1. Single Sign On

Housekeeping also means being prepared for changes before they happen.

• For example, make your IT aware that they need to inform you about Identity Provider Changes.
• Also the SSO certificate needs to be replaced every once in a while which you as the admin needs to inform SAP Support about. Your IT contact should be notified by the SAP Enable Now support via an automated email if a replacement is coming up.
• Make sure you stay aware of the requirements - does your company need roles and organizational units to be part of the user data? Are there changes to those roles? In both cases a talk with the Active Directory or IDP responsible people is a good idea.

2. Application Updates

Especially in a Cloud environment, regular updates are the norm. So here are some things to consider concerning updates:

• SAP Enable Now has two main updates a year. Prepare for those by using the preview access (link to blog about the preview environment here) and testing new features before they go into production. 
• Be aware of the updates of the target applications like S/4 HANA or SuccessFactors. These might include changes to the UI or new features which in turn affect the content created with SAP Enable Now. 
• Keep an eye out for version changes when you are using standard content for SAP Companion. You might need to re-fetch parts of the content and hide it again.

3. System Landscape

SAP Enable Now is not an isolated solution - there are dependencies on other applications. So be aware of changes in your companies system landscape. The consequences of the changes might be more important for Master Authors, but someone needs to inform them.

• Keep track of your companies cloud strategy - are you taking advantage of RISE with SAP and moving to the cloud? Then maybe it's time to start looking into using SAP Companion.
• Are there new applications coming into the landscape? This might mean new projects wanting to join and use SAP Enable Now, so be proactive about including new user groups and setting up new workareas.
• Are applications or modules being deprecated? If so, are there replacements? Do existing trainings need to be changed?

4. Acquisitions / Mergers / Splits

In case your company is planning an acquisition or a merger, you can start to think about the implications this has on your admin work.

• If there are additional users to be integrated, it's good to find out how they will be accessing SAP Enable Now. Do you need to set up another SSO in your IAS or add the users to an existing IDP?
• In the case of a merger, does the other company have a training solution? Are there synergies or content to be aligned on?
• If a company is split into several parts, who keeps the SAP Enable Now licenses? What happens to the active users of the former company? Is there a plan about when to deactivate them?

5. Privacy Statement

SAP Enable Now provides an option for customers to add their own privacy statement. All new users need to agree to this statement if you have this option checked in the Server Settings. Chapter "Privacy Statement" in the Manager Security Guide tells you how to adjust this privacy statement.

Some companies have overarching privacy statements and don't use the statement option in the Manager. However, make sure to still use the "Enable Data Protection Feature" which is required in some countries. Before deactivating the data protection feature ensure the legal legitimation to do so by consulting your data responsibilities. Not matching the legal requirements of the General Data Protection Regulations can result in remarkably high fines.

There are other options around this topic, like purging personal data and invalidating the consent to make users agree to an updated privacy statement. All options are listed in the Manager Security Guide.

Wrap-up and more information

If you keep track of these topics, you should be able to proactively and effectively administrate the SAP Enable Now Manager.

The following resources can help you with finding out more about the work as an administrator.

Our Infocenter (s-user required) has information about Manager Basics, Roles and Permissions, Workareas, and Monitoring Success.

Several guides on the SAP Help Page contain important information (please note that these are the Cloud links, to to the Help Page to find on-premise versions):

• Manager Operations Guide - System Requirements, Server Settings, User Import via Excel, and Server Housekeeping
• Manager Security Guide - Data Protection, Separating Administrative and Authoring Tasks, Password Restrictions, Authentication Bruteforce Protection, Trusted Scripts, Logging Information, and Cookies
• Manager Manual - Basic Information & Knowledge, Interface Explanations, How To Guides like How to Begin to Producer Content

I hope this guide helps you to focus on the administrative tasks and keep surprises at bay.

If you have more ideas about what an administrator could check regularly or experience from your daily work, please feel free to share in the comments below!

Take care,
Kristina