For more than 20 years in the SAP Business, finding the right information has always been challenge for me. The following list will provide an overview of the most important resources from my personal point of view. Although most of them are pretty obvious, for
- SAP Newbies, this may help to get their arms around SAP topics
- SAP Professionals, this may serve as a link archive to the different resources
- SAP Smart a.. , that already know everything about SAP, please just ignore
- The World Wide Web:
Off course the Web in general provides with SAP.com, Wikis, Partner Web sides and accessible through search engines like google, yahoo, bing and others. In addition to the generic sites, I’d like to point out my personal favorites. - SAP Help Portal
The online help provides tons of information around SAP Solutions, Transactions, Life Cycle and SAP Best Practice freely accessible to anybody - SAP Service Marketplace
The Service Marketplace provides for SAP Customer access to notes, support and release information as well as to download patches. - SAP Partner Edge Portal
In case you are an existing or potential SAP Partners, the Partner Portal is the right resourse for you. - SAP Collaboration Network (SCN)
The facebook of the SAP Eco System provides social network infrastructure with all the bells and whistles. (But since you are already here, you know about it ,) As a Logistics consultant, I really love the MM Community which has already solved a lot of my issues. - SAP Publications
from SAP Press and others can also give a high level overview into generic topics. However in these fast moving times, the information may be already outdated until it is printed. Especially if it comes to details, I didn’t benefit much from it (yet). - SAP Events
like SAPPHIRE, TechEd and User group meetings (ASUG, DSAG, ...) combine the knowledge transfer with personal networking possibilities. The most beneficial session I have attended are ones, where customers have presented their own experiences with SAP implementations. - SAP Partner
Your System Integrator of choice gets paid for providing you the right SAP information asap.
- In case it doesn’t, you should question your SI
(- In case you are a System Integrator, you always need to stay one step ahead of your customer;) - SAP Education
The leading IT Education provider is the right resource for all your training and education needs around SAP. The Trainings options are easily accessible through the Training and Certification Shop.
... and finally the most valuable recourse, the - Personal Network:
Whether across the desk, down the isle, at the coffee machine or a quick phone call away, there are lots of friendly people who can either solve the issue or point in the right direction. Nurturing the network from previous projects, training classes or user group meetings will pay off big time in tricky situations.
Thanks for taking the time reading through this list. Any comments, agreements, disagreements and especially hints to additional resources are very much appreciated.
Stefan Gerber
