The Lion, The Witch and the SAP Documents

The other day I was searching for enhancement options in the EWM putaway strategy. A quick Google search surfaced a recent question on SAP Community. Unlike circa 2009 “solved it myself” material, this one had an actual answer from an SAP-flaired account. The answer was “are you looking for information? Here ya go!” Bloop, a link to the PDF file.

In SAP world, stumbling upon a PDF document is the equivalent of finding the four-leaf clover. These files typically have the juiciest, most useful technical details that you won’t simply find online or in SAP Help.

Naturally, seeing such an answer made me jump like The SNL Target Lady: “WHERE DID YOU GET THIS?!!” And, just as this issue was going to press, I got the treasure map. Behold, readers! There is a page for SAP EWM where the PDF how-to guides are hiding behind a link. Are there similar pages for other subjects? Oh yes—there’s the 'all products' page.

These pages might not be new to the functional folks who focus on one product and know where the goodies are. But to the developers who deal with a multitude of subjects, this might as well be Narnia behind the fur coats in dusty SAP Help wardrobe.

All these pages and documents are public and are hiding in what to SAP folks must seem like plain view. But they’re actually not that easy to discover if you don’t know exactly where to look. I’ve asked several very smart developers and none of them knew this SAP Narnia existed. The truth is, we don’t even usually go to SAP Help, we just google.

And I bet there are even more documents floating about, linked in SAP Notes and whatnot. It’s one of those items I’d shout out from the rooftops but instead we barely hear about. It looks like we need a guide to find the guides. JP