The SAP Help Portal site has been an important resource for customers for many years, and has amassed a huge wealth of information over time. The site has undergone a complete redesign aimed at making it easier to navigate and find content, making a shift towards design and usability in the user assistance area.

The site now focuses entirely on the new search, which is powered by SAP HANA, and offers significant improvements in speed of results. Results are then sorted by product and can be filtered by content type, language, and product version.

Search-Based Paradigm

By moving to an entirely search-based interaction, the new help portal has done away with long, click-through navigation structures for content that some visitors found frustrating. The search had to be built from the ground - no small task, as SAP Help Portal is home to more than 82 million documents in various languages and hundreds of product versions. This was all done based on SAP HANA full-text search and offers suggestions and auto-completion as well as advanced filtering of results so users also find what they are looking for faster.

Product Pages

The site-wide search can take users directly to a specific document or to a product page, which offer a clear and logical grouping of topics. The links are sorted by category and only the top links are shown on the product overview pages. Of course, users can still find all content assigned to that product using the search on the product page - this time, the search is restricted to topics relevant for that specific product.

Users can also easily switch to see content for an older product version or language. By pre-sorting and showing only the top content, these pages aim to remove complexity from even the most sophisticated products, and this approach will help SAP to achieve a consistent knowledge experience for SAP products.

Underlying Platform

The new SAP Help Portal site is built on SAP cloud platform technology and provides the foundation for more intelligent ways of using information, including multimedia content. The platform also serves content directly into the UI of SAP cloud applications like SAP S/4HANA, and will form the solid basis for future advances in SAP's content strategy, such as machine learning and even more intelligent integration of content.