A short lesson on how awesome Smart Help is.
In Oracle UPK speak, there are targeted and non-targeted applications. Targeted applications are Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards, SAP and a few others. Non-targeted applications are either custom built or other
third party off
the shelf applications. For most targeted applications you'll see better object recognition (during recording) and also Help Integration for that application. Help integration means that someone technical modifies
the help link in your application to call up
the UPK content that has been created. If you have seen this presented before, this is usually where
the term context sensitive help is mentioned and
the Do It mode shows off.
The fact that UPK builds context sensitive help for its targeted applications automatically is awesome enough, but there is a whole new world out there and it's called "custom and\or
third party apps."
For
the purposes of Smart Help and this discussion, I'm talking about
the browser based applications. How does UPK support these apps? It used to be that you had to have your vendor try to modify
the Help link to point to UPK or if your company had control over
the applications configuration menus, then you get someone on your team to modify this for you. But as you start to use UPK for more than one, two or three applications,
the administration of this starts to become daunting. Multiple administrators, multiple player packages, multiple call points, multiple break points, help doesn't always work
the same way for every application (picture
the black white infomercial with an IT person trying to configure a bunch of wires or something funny like that). Introducing Smart Help! (in color of course, new IT person, probably wearing a blue shirt and smiling). Smart help eliminates
the need to configure multiple browser help integration points, and adds a icon to
the users browser itself. You're using your browser to read this now correct? Look up at
the icons on your browser, you have
the home link icon, print icon, maybe an RSS feed icon. Smart Help is icon that gets added to
the users browser just like
the others. When you click it, it first recognizes which application you're in and then finds
the UPK created material for you and returns
the best possible match, for (hold on to your seat now) both targeted and non-targeted applications (browser based applications). But wait, there's more. It does this automatically! You don't have to do anything! All you have to do is record content, UPK and Smart Help do
the rest! This technology is not new. There are customers out there today that use this for as many as six applications!
The real hero here is SMART MATCH. Smart match is
the technology that's used to determine which application you're in and where you are when you click on Smart Help. We'll save that for a one-on-one conversation.
Like most other awesome features of UPK, it ships with
the product. All you have to do is turn it on.
To learn more about Smart Help, Smart Match, Targeted and Non-Targeted applications, contact your UPK Sales Consultant or me directly at
[email protected]