Starting up Companion for Desktop Assistant On Prem

[davidhortop]

I am interested in hearing others’ perspectives on the best way to make Companion for Desktop Assistance and Companion appear in-application for our users.

Currently, we have a link to a group.dnt file on a website that users can open if they plan to use it that day. To date that has only been me as we are only in test mode with Companion for Desktop Assistant. I have read Shane Lipke’s response to Dilara Ugurlu’s post Launching Desktop Assistant for SEN On Prem from last December and checked the references he provided. Our currently approach seems to be what is recommended in Chapter 5 of the Producer Manual (ref: 5.11.3 Using the DNT File).

Senior management is interested in having Companion automatically turned on for everyone (~41,000 users). We are thinking that perhaps a small program could be added to everyone’s start menu so that the .dnt file is automatically opened and it is turned on during start up. However, we have been warned that there could be performance impact to this approach as it will be checking for relevant content every time they move to a new screen. Perhaps this will be self-correcting if users experience performance degradation and learn to turn it off when not in use.

Another alternative could be to make it possible to open Companion from the SAP East Access screen using the Help menu or the Performance Assistant (first screen capture). I don’t see a similar button or menu on our Fiori Launchpad (second). Perhaps it just has been configured yet.

I would like to hear from others who have turned on Companion for a large user base. Did you experience performance issues? What did you do about them? If there is anyone who can point me to instructions for setting up access to Companion from the help menu on the SAP Easy Access screen or somewhere on the Fiori Launchpad, that would be great too.

[KristinaKunad]

Hi David,

This is quite an important question you’re raising here. For SAP Companion for Desktop, as you say, it really depends on the infrastructure – the sizing and the access. I’m attaching the PDF of a session I did a while back on rollout of what was then called Desktop Assistant.

I think the performance impact would be relevant if you would add the start task to everyone’s startup-procedure, which would mean that over 40k users access the same URL at roughly the same time when they start their computers in the morning. This is a high load, but not impossible to manage. Maybe you can calculate the expected load on the website, maybe even run some load tests if possible. But I think if it spreads out across the day, it shouldn’t be an issue.

I think it’s absolutely valid to put the link to SAP Companion for Desktop into the ECC help menu. We’ve covered this with a specific transaction – please see details in this guide: https://help.sap.com/doc/234ddc0d8e004c12b458aef79d867b9f/2211/en-US/SAP_Help_Extension_ECC_en-US.pd...

You can also activate a custom icon in the Fiori toolbar and start the SAP Companion for Desktop from there. It’s really just a link and your SAP consultant can help you with this.

Yes, for S/4HANA cloud customers, the SAP Companion launches natively when they click the ?.

Take care,

Kristina