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Jagmohan_Chawla
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
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As customers start their journey implementing SAP Products such as S4HANA Cloud Essentials using SAP Cloud ALM, a common question that comes up is how SAP Cloud ALM and Roadmap viewer are related, is the content same or different. Lets try to understand the details

  • What is SAP Cloud ALM

  • What is Roadmap Viewer

  • When to use which tool

  • What are the similarities and differences in these tools


 

What is SAP Cloud ALM


SAP Cloud ALM is a tool that is designed to help you in your SAP product adoption journey, focusing on cloud products initially and have a seamless implementation experiences. It covers various use cases such as

  • Project and Task Management

  • Process Management

  • Change and Deployment management

  • Test Management


You can know more about this here  and also on open SAP course, SAP Cloud ALM in a nutshell.

A big advantage of using this tool is it comes preloaded with SAP Activate methodology content and Business process content so the customer gets a jumpstart.

SAP Cloud ALM is generally available. Customers with SAP Enterprise Support, Cloud Editions can request access to SAP Cloud ALM. You need to go to the SAP ONE Support Launchpad and select the tile "SAP Cloud ALM Access Management".

What is Roadmap viewer




The Roadmap Viewer is the tool to access the SAP Activate methodology implementation roadmaps. The implementation roadmaps provide end to end procedural guidance to help new and existing SAP Customers navigate through an SAP software implementation.  The roadmaps are organized by phases, deliverables and tasks with accompanying linked accelerator assets that provide the right information at the point in time that it is needed in the project. The content is continually updated and provides the detailed guidance behind the SAP Activate methodology. You can access the roadmap viewer here.



Are these tools related


The simple answer is yes. Both SAP Cloud ALM and Roadmap viewer support consumption of content authored by SAP Activate methodology This means that irrespective of which tool you choose you should see the same task content. As mentioned earlier when task repository pushes a new update , the latest content is made available in both tools.


 

 

Please note SAP Cloud ALM supports a lot of Process content and Test management content which is not available in Roadmap viewer.

When to use which tool


It depends on two main factors ,


  • Which SAP product you are using currently

  • What is the stage of your implementation.



Before signing a cloud contract you may want to explore the content provided by SAP Activate Methodology using Roadmap viewer but once you sign a cloud contract for a product supported by SAP Cloud ALM, that should the the tool of choice.


SAP cloud ALM currently supports only the these roadmaps from a task content perspective

This list will be updated continuously as the list of products supported by SAP cloud ALM will increase going ahead. Roadmap viewer supports a much wider range of SAP products including on Premise products.

 

There are other differences as well other than the content, which are summarized below.

Getting Access


Roadmap viewer is available by a URL in public domain but SAP Cloud ALM is available only via Entitlement .

Working Environment


Roadmap Viewer is a view environment. You can view roadmaps but you can not track any status completion. SAP Cloud ALM brings the activate content to life as it enables collaboration such as adding comments, task assignments, due dates and status tracking.

When you log on , you get a reduced list of tasks assigned to you or the roles you have been assigned and you need to focus only on the upcoming tasks.


Once you get to the task details, you can add comments to indicate your progress and also set the completion status.


As a user , you get a freedom to reduce the tasks by hiding complete tasks or tasks assigned to other team members. You can thus create a condensed view using filters which is optimized for you.

Support of roles



SAP Cloud ALM has an additional capability that you can access the list of roles provided by Activate methodology. This list is not available in Roadmap viewer. You can assign people to these roles and track progress of tasks.

Scope Dependent vs Scope Independent


Roadmap viewer always shows the state of content irrespective of business scope or requirements. The content in SAP Cloud ALM can react to your business scope.  As an example tasks can appear or disappear based on your business scoping. Also you can create business requirements and track their progress by creating follow up tasks.


The content from Activate methodology shows up under the source Template in SAP Cloud ALM.

Extending content


In case you have a reason to extend or enrich content , or in case you are a partner who wants to bring existing content to SAP Cloud ALM , it is possible by mass upload easily. You can

  • Adding a single Task

  • Mass upload of Tasks

  • Mass upload of Deliverables




It is not possible to extend task content in roadmap viewer.

Regular Updates


Please note that Activate methodology content in both Roadmap viewer and SAP Cloud ALM is updated regularly

Summary


SAP Cloud ALM is a tool designed for end to end lifecycle of an implementation , Roadmap viewer is a tool where Roadmaps published by SAP Activate methodology are published. A limited set of those roadmaps are available in SAP Cloud ALM.

Next Steps


You can visit this blog post that contains other blog posts in one central place for Project and Task management in SAP Cloud ALM
Project and Task Management capabilities-Master List

You can also follow me by clicking jagmohansingh.chawla to get the latest updates

 
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