Can we help ourselves to help ourselves?
Hi all,
Many of the contributors and members of the CWG are experienced VC users or maintainers. However we have a lot of members who have joined because they need to know more. In fact we all want to know more. One of the challenges someone new has to deal with is the SAP Help for VC. For someone new I dont think it is that helpful as although most of the information is there it is not really well organised and lacks a focus on good design practices.
More recently we have been lucky to have "Variant Configuration with SAP" written by Uwe Blumor, Manfred Munch and Marin Ukalovic that finally provided a wealth of detail that had been missing. Not to mention many of the excellent third party tools that cover gaps that SAP hasnt looked at.
However between the two ends of this spectrum of SAP Help and the book there is a gap I feel. Not sure exactly what the gap is and how we fill it, but it is somewhere between providing a good information resource, good practical examples, and a platform that delivers it.
In the forums there is so many excellent questions and excellent answers but it is not always easy to find them later. It sort of needs perhaps a wiki area where we can contribute knowledge, solutions etc that all can find easily.
There is a need for it. Way back in October 2007 to February 2008 I created some lessons that covered the basic elements of building a simple VC model. Even still to this day I get emails from people who have found it through the wonders of search engines and found that the lessons help connect the dots. The lessons are also available in the CWG at my blog entry on the topic
But what would be really good is to have some examples in the sandbox that are referred to in somewhere in our help resource. Often people would like to see an Order BOM in action, or deconstruct a function, or even perhaps build a library of functions that members can access and copy.
Also in the document share we have many excellent presentations from the conferences but it is often difficult to find the one you want. It would be good if these could be catergorised and searched.
Anyway that is my blog on the topic, and I realised I hadnt blogged for a while so I thought this would be a good topic. Maybe there are already thoughts happening in this direction but if not then it is a direction I would like to see. Anyone else interested??
Phil