SEN Workarea design, existing documentation?

[Wallace]

Hello,

Seeking/hoping some guidelines exist already. The company I work for, as I suspect many now, is seeing growth in the SEN use cases. This is a positive thing! We continue to improve, both routines and end-users work lives with the tools.

At the moment, I'm facing a bit of a challenge - a "good enough" balance on workarea design. Enough workareas to support our needs, but not so many we are fragmented and sub-optimized. With this, we also want a balance of administrative tasks, as we don't have an large population to focus on administration - we prefer delivery.

We also have different business groups and software deliveries, so items like SAP Companion Desktop could have items which should be active for one group and not another.

Here's a picture of what I see in our world, now and coming.

[ShaneLipke]

Hi Wallace,

Not sure exactly what you are hoping to understand but your diagram seems to indicate that there are multiple system that access content from Enable Now. This is true and you could include many other systems that now also access content from Enable Now, including SF and Ariba. My only advice around any of this is to keep it as simple as possible. For example, I would not create a new Workarea just because ERP content was being access by SAP Companion, SAP Companion for Desktop, and Signavio. All of that content can be structured and made available through the one WA, given that it's the same content, just being delivered in different ways. Keep it as simple as possible.

Regards
Shane

[Wallace]

This is not an answer, but an attempt at further clarification and perhaps some more questions. Easier to put it here than comment on both Shane and Dirk's answers.

Grateful for the answers, I was somewhat concerned I had asked a really good question, or a really bad one. Feels like I landed somewhere in the middle.

For now, my plan is to run "S4" Companion(web) extended content in separate workareas by system chain. The reason for this: I expect different content could be built for the same item and as Dirk mentions, this enables more freedom on the versions. We already have 2021 S4 but some work coming next year (I hope) brings 2022 S4.

I saw a short video about Signavio setup, it seems more robust than other software connections - allowing items into SEN, SEN doing updates, making them visible to Signavio. We thought Solman would work that way for us but we weren't as successful there. So Signavio was a bit of a wildcard.

SAP Companion Desktop is an area of concern for me - one primary use for us will be Sapgui/Transaction Codes. With multiple solutions staying on gui(both ECC and S4) for a while, my concern is two different solutions build different Desktop Assistant content for the same tcodes, or even if its only one tcode the Desktop Assistant content could be flavored so it should be used for only one solution.

We're also maturing, so I expect some of this could be solved in HOW we put this in front of end-users (learners) using groups or other means.

Hope this helps clarify some of the why and thought behind the picture.
Looking forward to your thoughts after this (a bit lengthy) clarification/response from me.

Wallace

[DirkManuel]

My two cents:

Arguments for multiple workareas:

• Better separation of developers (e.g. by business organization, esp. if one org doesn't want Authors in anther org being able to edit their content - at least until SAP give us Group-level permissions!) or you have different groups responsible for maintaining different content, with no overlap.
• You can brand/customize separately for each Workarea.

Arguments for a single Workarea:

• Easier for Authors to work across orgs
• Much easier re-use
• Consistency

I tend to use a single Workarea where I can for Training content, but then I'll typically have one Workarea per system that I connect SAP Companion to - it makes it easier to update the product version number if you know ALL the content in unsorted is for the same product. But on that point, if you are in EXT mode for Learning, you may need to have separate Workareas per product, as you can only connect ONE standard Workarea to ONE client workarea.