SAP Enable Now Implementation – Technical Workshop

Connecting the dots!

Software implementation is a serious business. This also applies to a learning platform like SAP Enable Now. Successfully implementing Enable Now requires the right people to be involved, strategic decisions to be taken and certain prerequisites to be met. My Enable Now implementation strategy consists of 7 steps, which I would like to explain in 7 blog posts. Written from a consultant’s perspective and based on my personal experience.

SAP Enable Now Implementation Approach

This second post focuses on the Technical Workshop. Technology may not be the most exciting topic, but a smoothly working application is one of the basic requirements for a successful software implementation. This also applies to Enable Now. The application must be stable and easily accessible and should have an acceptable response time. Therefore, involvement of the IT department is necessary at an early stage. Too often, things that seemed obvious in advance turn out to take more time and cause delays.

Single Sign On

A recurring phenomenon in every Enable Now implementation is setting up Single Sign On (SSO). It's obvious for all of us to enter a username and password only once. Not having SSO for Enable Now is not really an option in my opinion. In fact, if you're going to use SAP Companion, SSO is one of the main prerequisites.

Setting up SSO for Enable Now is mostly done in parallel with SSO for S/4HANA, Ariba, or SuccessFactors. What often not is realized is that we need quite some people to get it done. Someone who manages the Active Directory. Someone who handles network traffic and is the security guard for communication ports. And the SAP Enable Now administrator. Once we have done everything on our side, we have to submit a support ticket, because something needs to be done by SAP Support as well to get the SSO service running. And while the activities itself might not take a lot of time, lead times can be quite long. I remember a case where SSO was arranged within a week. Unfortunately, I also remember one where it took over 2 months and suddenly came on the critical path for go-live. Starting early is therefore crucial.

The consequence of not having SSO ready in time recently became quite clear again when we had to start the SAP Companion training without SSO running. What happened were all kinds of notifications and pop-ups we had to work around. And we managed, but in the end it is very disruptive and distracts from the actual content of the training. In addition, temporary users had to be created and later converted to SSO users.

SAP Companion Integration

There may be better tools for creating screen simulations. There are certainly better eLearning tools then Enable Now. And there is plenty of software available for creating impressive quizzes. But combining your company specific content with SAP's standard content and accessing it via the regular question mark in S/4HANA is something that makes Enable Now quite unique at this moment. Since this question mark is already active by default, it seems logical to think that no further action is needed. Unfortunately, that's not how it works. The question mark delivers nothing more than SAP's standard Help content. If you want to make it company-specific or extend it with your own content, we need to have a connection between your SAP application (e.g., S/4HANA) and Enable Now. One of the frequently asked questions around this topic is how to handle the fact that we are dealing with applications that often have a DEV-QAS-PRD landscape, while SAP Enable Now is  single tenant only. For an Enable Now consultant it´s very straightforward, but from IT's perspective it might not be that obvious.

Setting up the integration with SAP Companion is different for each SAP product. For connecting the Enable Now Manager to an S/4HANA system, we need a technical consultant. Traditional customizing transports that go from DEV to QAS and then into PRD. The connection with SuccessFactors is similar but doesn't go via transports. And to connect Ariba, we  do the settings in Enable Now and then include a single link in Ariba. All well documented by SAP, but someone must take care of it. And as mentioned, it's very helpful to implement SSO first. Otherwise, error messages and pop-ups will keep coming when clicking the question mark.

New Releases

One of the main advantages of a cloud solution is that you don't have to worry about new releases anymore. They come automatically and basically you don't have to do anything for it. Or do you? I think it's good to pay some attention to it. Enable Now has 2 releases per year. In May, the major upgrade with a lot of new functionalities. In November, the smaller one with minor changes. About 6 weeks before release date, the license holder is informed by email about the upcoming upgrade. The email no one in the organization knows who receives it. It tells you that your Enable Now environment will be copied to a new temporary tenant, where you can test the new release for 4 weeks. There you can check if everything you've ever designed and set up is still working the way it was meant to be. And there you can also have a preview and learn about some nice new features you always wanted to have.

I know very few organizations that seriously spend time on this. Yet I think it is important to pay attention to and not wait until the new release overwhelms you. Wouldn’t it be annoying if on a Monday morning (indeed, upgrades are done during the weekend) if no one can access the content anymore? Attending a webinar or reading the release notes upfront could have prepared you. It doesn't have to take a lot of time. You know when it is coming, which makes it plannable. And it's absolutely worth the time investment. With SAP’s recent acquisition of WalkMe, things will certainly change in Enable Now in 2025. What that will ultimately look like is not yet entirely clear, but it certainly is a good reason to keep a close eye on the new releases and communications from SAP in the coming months.

Conclusion

Even a cloud solution requires attention from technical perspective. For a long time, I considered this as a kind of black box and assumed it would work out fine. Until I experienced a situation where (for multiple reasons) the lead time for configuring SSO was over 2 months. For weeks, we searched and went through logs looking for the cause. This cannot be prevented completely, but we can take a big step by starting on time. Especially if we are also dealing with a situation where, for example, workplace management and network management are outsourced to different service providers.

Next Time

Now that we have the technology running, it's time to think about how we're going to use Enable Now. The functional part.

Making decisions about what you will and won't use (yet). Defining a long-term target and designing a path to get there. In my next post I will focus on the Scoping Workshop.

Let’s Enable!

Transform an SAP project into a success that goes beyond time and budget. Make your SAP solution is truly adopted by your people. Enable Now is SAP's platform to accelerate the development of training materials and support effective training and support of employees. A foundation for creating and optimizing learning content. Not only for SAP, but for other applications as well. The knowledge and experience of Let's Enable guarantee utilization of the full potential of Enable Now.