Editing In-App Help (Web Assistant content) in Post Go-live Scenario

[AngadJadhav]

I have a use case. Let's assume that, we authored and published Web-Assistant In-App help content on a Production Instance. Now, it successfully appears as content overlay on the live production system. Now, if I need to modify any In-app guided walkthrough in the Production instance, what is the ideal approach?

Should I first UNPUBLISH the guided walkthrough from the Workarea, make necessary modifications, and the publish it again? When I UNPUBLISH a guided walkthrough from the Workarea, will it still be shown on the Production instance?

[ShaneLipke · Accepted solution]

Hi Angad,

Unpublished content is not visible to end users in SAP Companion so if you unpublish a content object, it will no longer be visible to end users.

If you just start modifying the content object, it does not automatically unpublish that object. That is, it's possible for an author to be working on a content object while a previous version of that object is still published and available to end users. Once the most recent set of changes are then ready to be distributed to end users, the content object can then be published and the new version will appear.

In general, I would suggest that you not modify content through a Production. Your non-production system can still point to the same Workarea in Manager so Production will also show the content once it's published but authoring content in Production is typically something to avoid.

Regards
Shane

[AngadJadhav · Accepted solution]

Hello Shane,

Thank you for the quick and precise response. Yes, as you rightly said, we will not modify content through a Production. As the same Workarea will be pointing to Production as well as a Test instance both, we will modify the content in the Test instance only.

In short, I consider the following process:

• First, unpublish the content from the Workarea. On unpublishing, the content will no longer be displayed in the Production.
• Modify the content in the Test instance connected to the Workarea.
• Finally, publish the content from the Workarea (Enable Now Manager). As a result, the modified content will reflect in the Production.

[DirkManuel]

As Shane says (and in response to your reply to his response), you do NOT need to unpublish content before you change it. In fact, I would absolutely discourage you from doing that, because as soon as you unpublish, users will see NOTHING. SAP Enable Now is specifically designed so that users will always see (only) the last published version. So Authors can change it, and create a new version, but the users will still see the last published version and not the latest version (with the new changes). This video explains it fairly succinctly.