I’ve been working in support for a long, long time. Long enough to remember doing faxes as one of the primary forms of culminating with our customers. Through all those years (20 and counting), something I’ve always wanted to see more of was enabling the user to; “Help thy self.” I’ve done a fair bit to that end with, I suspect well over a 1000 KBAs and other knowledge assets published. But in all of this, from the time the internet became a standard way of communicating, I’ve had a dream;
Would it not be grand, if all a user needed to do when they get a software error, is click on a link that provides a solution to the error? I suppose there might be grander dreams;
- Software with no errors.
- Self healing software.
- Software that tells you what may go wrong if…
And so on.
But those dreams always were and are, firmly beyond my reach. I don’t code or design the software. But I do document and I am aware of issues and errors that the software I support may produce. How difficult could it be to simply link an error message to a possible solution? As it happens, more difficult than you’d think. In my experience staffing, priorities, political environment, networking environment (people networking) and more come into play. But finally, with a lot of work from Program Management, R&D, Support and more, in Lumira 1.28 all the stars lined up and finally my dream has seen the light of day. This is what a lot of error messages look like in Lumira 1.28:
Click on the hyperlink and you are directed to a non gated KBA (the KBAs are also available on the SAP Service Market Place) that list links to possible solutions:
Is this the end of the dream? Not quite:
- The KBAs only address HDB error messages.
- Not all HDB error messages pop and actual dialog. Some are “in line” so as to not disturb the workflow.
- Since Lumira depends on other components, not all error are covered by the HDB group of errors.
More work? Absolutely. The dream may not be in full color yet, but it lives and hopefully grows into full and vibrant colorful landscape that includes not only SAP Lumira, but perhaps SAP Lumira for BI Platform, SAP Lumira for Teams and other SAP software.
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