Concerning SAP enterprise SOA / ESA, NetWeaver and other SAP products, you can find a lot of information on the internet. One important resource is the SAP Developer Network (SDN), where you can find a lot of articles, forums and blogs to various topics. Another one is the NetWeaver area of the Service Marketplace (customer or partner login required), where there is information on the products, release information and so on.

Also very important is the SAP Help Portal. There you find extensive documentation for the whole product range (sections: mySAP ERP, SAP NetWeaver, mySAP Business Suite, SAP R/3 and R/3 Enterprise, SAP for Industries, SAP xApps, SAP Solution Manager). I was looking a lot at the NetWeaver section, but I got confused by the structure every time. First of all you have different main topics: IT Scenarios at a Glance, Power User’s Guide, Technology Consultant’s Guide, Administrator’s Guide – Technical Operations Manual, Administrator’s Guide – Security Guide, Developer’s Guide and SAP NetWeaver by Key Capability. But when you choose one it does not mean that the topic name is always visible when you dive further in. Example: You choose Developer’s Guide, then Fundamentals, then Creating Composite Applications - what happens? At least I get lost as Creating Composite Applications becomes the top of the tree and I don’t see that I’m in the area of the Developer’s Guide. Furthermore there is no way to get one layer up again. The thing get’s really confusing when subsections of the guides link between each other as you sometimes don’t realize that you are in another area. As all the guides are touching the topics from a different (but sometimes overlapping) view and the navigation structure often is very deep, it’s hard to gather all the possibly important information for one topic together and even after weeks I found new sections I haven’t seen before. So if anyone has recommendations on how to better deal with those help pages I will really appreciate it.

To get a better overview and to have the possibility to jump up a layer after I got lost in a subsection, I created a document with the navigation structure of the SAP NetWeaver 2004s SPS09 guides/documentation. Of course there is not the complete structure in there but at least part of it. In areas related to the Composite Application Framework, Visual Composer etc. you can dive deeper than in others. But at least you get an overview of the whole documentation. I don’t know whether it helps you, at least it helped me a bit (although it did not solve the problem completely).

So if you like, here is my excel sheet:
SAP NetWeaver 2004s SPS09 Navigation Structure.

At the left side of the rows you find + / -, so you can open or close specific rows of the excel sheet.

After clicking on the link in the excel, the SAP Library opens. There you have to click on the icon at the right of the headline to locate the document in the navigation structure.

Categories: SAP enterprise SOA