What sources of SAP Help Are Available?

SAP's strength (extremely deep and broad functionality) is also its potential Achilles' heel. Flexibility and functionality typically mean complexity when it comes to ERP packages.

That means it sometimes takes rocket science to figure out how to configure SAP to do what you need it to do.

This page is designed to speed you to the best possible SAP help sites, so you can get your questions answered, and go on your way, successfully configuring SAP.

First, here's what we think a good SAP help site is, and what it is not.

A good SAP help site is:

A good SAP help site is not:

With literally thousands of SAP related sites available, we probably missed a few good ones. We focused on the sites that have active forums where members ask questions and other members provide answers.


ASUG

ASUG's content is mostly behind a firewall, so you need to be an ASUG member to access it.

If you go to the top menu bar, and click on Communities, then Special Interest Groups, you'll get to a list of over 50 Industry and Product focused SIGs. Click on a particular SIG link and you'll see a page with Discussions and Documents.

These groups have active participants who do try to help each other by answering questions posed by members.

The documents posted on this site are not as helpful as the discussions. Our testing revealed that many of the documents are SAP PowerPoint marketing presentations, and do not really answer any specific questions that SAP clients have.

Back to the main menu bar, and there is a separate tab for Discussions.

We have it on good authority (namely, the head of our SAP practice, Jocelyn Hayes) that if you ask a question on the ASUG Discussions pages, you will usually get the correct answer from a client or installation member. That's huge, and that's why we're rating this site as one of the best SAP help sites.

SAP Help Rating: Top Tier SAP help site.


IT Toolbox

IT Toolbox is one of the biggest, most popular SAP help sites. We did a search on SAP "pricing conditions", and the site returned 10,941 results.

The quality of the questions and answers seems to be quite good.

The rest of the site is pretty much people flogging (er, blogging) their stuff. Of course, our SAP blog is way better and extremely useful.

SAP Help Rating: Top Tier SAP help site.


SDN and SCN

SAP's own community network sites, SDN (technical) & SCN (everything else) have literally a million plus members, and many thousands of blogs, forum entries, white papers, wiki entries, etc.

We tested the forums by searching for hits on "pricing conditions" without any date restrictions. Here are the search results.


The forum posts were further broken down by status:


SAP Help Rating: Worth your time.


SAP Fans

My search on "pricing conditions" resulted in 1100 results. The questions seem reasonable and answers seem good. I found several posts every month with this exact phrase. I also looked at the SD category (one of 40 separate categories) and found an average of 3 posts every day, indicating fairly high usage of this site.

SAP Help Rating: Might be worth your time.


Training-Classes.com

If you are looking for other types of training, check out this directory of training classes.

SAP Help Rating: Worth your time.


Help.SAP

This site is huge. Many thousands of pages of SAP's own help text. But is it hugely helpful? The text seems mostly hit or miss, and certainly doesn't compare to detailed white papers about specific SAP topics. Compared to other ERP software help text, this is about average and not totally useless, but a far cry from 'real help'.

There are no forums to ask and answer questions, but I figured with a name like http://help.sap.com it has to be good. (Apologies to Smuckers for that one.)

It isn't good, even at what it tries to do. (Notable exception: The glossary is good.)

SAP Help Rating: Time waster.


Search SAP

We were surprised when we searched for "pricing conditions" at SearchSAP, and only had seven results. Right away, this did not look like a useful way to spend our time. Ten minutes later, we had our verdict.

SAP Help Rating: Time waster.

Please Note: The Learn SAP pages on this site are intended to be brief summaries for SAP customers who are encountering SAP for the first time. For more advanced knowledge, please review the articles in our SAP Library, and our SAP Training offerings for both Super Users and Project Teams.