Reviewing Additional Resources

Definitions

The What’s New Viewer(WNV) is both a framework and a web page:

All SAP products share the framework, a database of release notes, a front-end web experience, and a subscription system.
SAP SuccessFactors inserts its release notes into the framework and configures the front-end web experience for our customers’ needs.

Release Notes are the individual rows and topics you see when you click Read More.

Recommended Actions

We recommend that you do these things now:

Subscribe to the What’s New Viewer: Subscribing to What's New Viewer Changes | SAP Help Portal.
Bookmark the What’s New Viewer in a desktop browser: SAP SuccessFactors What's New | SAP Help Portal.
Bookmark the Product Release and Road Map Information page.
Bookmark the Product and Customer Updates page (authentication with S-user ID required).

What’s New Viewer Audience

The What’s New Viewer is constructed for administrators first, partners second, and the broader public third because it helps people who:

Maintain their organization’s business processes.
Configure enhancements to innovate on behalf of their organizations.

We recognize that other roles might want to know what’s new in a release. SAP SuccessFactors creates content that can be consumed by other audiences. For example, a Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) probably doesn’t need the details in the What’s New Viewer. SAP SuccessFactors creates the Release Highlights for that audience.

Access to the What’s New Viewer

Anyone on the internet can see the SAP SuccessFactors What’s New Viewer. We make it public so you can share links with anyone, whether they have an account in the SAP Help Portal or not.

We recommend, however, that you create a Help Portal account to access features like subscription and favoriting your filters.

What to Expect from the Content in the What’s New Viewer

The What’s New Viewer content helps you understand:

How a change impacts your configuration or current business processes.
How a change shifts configuration or behavior in your system.
Where you can get help with configuration.

Two Views of the What's New Viewer

The What’s New Viewer has two views: summary and details.

The summary view shows you the release notes at a glance. You see the title, a short description, and the metadata, which you can use to sort and filter. A list view is also available, but isn't used as often by the SAP SuccessFactors audience.

Summary View of What's New Viewer displayed.

The details view appears when you select a See More link in the summary view. The details view is the full release notes and includes links to even more information. The links are collected in one place at the bottom of the page.

Details view of What's New Viewer is displayed.

Navigating the Summary View

The SAP SuccessFactors What’s New Viewer content is a selection out of the What’s New database. To navigate the What’s New Viewer, it helps to think of it as a database front-end.

Basic Navigation

You can get help with the What’s New Viewer by selecting the Help button.

The Preview Label

If you see a Preview label, the feature, enhancement, or change is not yet delivered to your production environment. For example, if SAP SuccessFactors publishes the What’s New Viewer in April and describes changes that affect your production environment in May, you see the Preview label. You might be able to see the feature in a preview environment, or you might see a deprecation topic that has a future deletion date.

Search the Summary View and the Details View

To search in either the summary view or the details view, type your search text in the Header Search box and press Enter. The search scope differs:

When you search in the summary view, the framework searches all release notes that you filter into the table. It allows you to limit your search to release notes in a version, for example. You control the scope with the filter.
When you search in the details view, the framework searches all release notes in the table of contents. It is a more comprehensive search.

The Summary Search and Details Search boxes are displayed.

Filtering the What’s New Viewer Summary View

You can select values in drop-down menus to filter the table to see content that matches. For example, you can choose Compensation in the Product list to see all changes that affect the Compensation product. You can also select more than one choice in the list – more than one product, for example. If you select multiple choices, the What’s New Viewer makes a logical OR connection. For example, if you choose Compensation and Learning in the Product list, you see all changes that impact either the Compensation OR Learning products.

You can also combine lists. For example, you can select Compensation in the Product list and General Availability in the Lifecycle list. When you combine lists, the filter uses a logical AND. You see all changes that affect Compensation AND that are Generally Available. You wouldn’t, for example, see all generally available changes in all products.

If you don’t know what a filter category means, you can see a definition if you open the menu.

The What’s New Viewer includes filtering shortcuts:

Reset to Initial clears your current filter choices and returns the filters to their default selections. In SAP SuccessFactors, the only initial filter is Software Version. We default the summary view to filter out past versions.
Clear All clears all selections for all filters.
Hide/Show Filters hides and shows filters. It’s useful for small screens. After you make selections, you can hide the filter row.

Filters and Their Values

We include filter categories and the members of the category so that you can filter the release notes to what you want to see.

Product, Module, and Feature influence the parts of the product. Use them to narrow down changes based on the part of SAP SuccessFactors that we changed.
Enablement, Action, and Lifecycle describe the level and type of disruption you should expect from the change.
Software Version, Valid as Of, and Latest Revision describe when a change happened.
- How to Combine Software Version, Valid as Of, and Latest Revision | SAP Help Portal
- Valid as Of Is the Production Date | SAP Help Portal
Feature, Major or Minor, and Type are minor filters in the What’s New Viewer.
- A minor filter can still be important to your business process but isn’t broadly important across all customers.
- SAP SuccessFactors Minor Filters | SAP Help Portal

SAP has special values for all filter categories:

Unavailable means that no one at SAP has looked at the value to set it. You usually see Unavailable for technical reasons.
Not applicable means that SAP has looked at the value and that none of the values in the enumerated list apply. Read the text of the details to understand why you see Not applicable.

What's New Special Filter Values of "Unavailable" and "Not Applicable" | SAP Help Portal

Saving Views and Sharing

We make the What’s New Viewer for sharing, so it has features that help you send filtered copies of the summary view. You can personalize the summary view for yourself and different audiences.

Favorite, Download PDF and Share selections are displayed.

Consider creating favorite filters for different audiences. For example, if you have multiple products in your organization, consider saving a Compensation filter for your Compensation business owners and a Learning filter for your Learning business owners. When the Compensation team asks you what’s new for Compensation, you can, with one click, get to your filter. Or, consider creating a Deprecation and Deletion saved filter. When you need to check things that we’re retiring, you can recall the filter.

To create a saved filter, log into the SAP Help Portal. Next, make your filter selections (for example, Compensation OR Learning AND Generally Available). Finally, select Favorite and then follow the on-screen prompts.

Hint

We recommend renaming the filter to something that makes sense for you. For example, What’s Generally Available for Compensation and Learning this release.

To share your filter selections, select Share. Sharing is helpful if you need a colleague to see a smaller set of changes. You can:

Go to My Favorite Pages, load a saved filter, and share it.
Make original filter selections and share them.

When you use the Share button, you send a URL to the web page, so the person receives a link to a dynamic web page. If, however, you want to share a static list, select the Download PDF button. You might want a PDF of the summary table, for example, if you are concerned that a recipient might accidentally change the filters and want to be sure that they see the exact set you want them to see.

Caution

When you export the table summary view in a PDF or CSV, you export the rows and columns in your current view.

Changing the Results List in the Summary View

You can change the view of the summary view by changing the page size, the columns you show or hide, and the sorting by column (ascending or descending). By default, the page size is 25 rows. To change the page size, change the number in the Show Entries list.

By default, we show the most common columns in the table. To change the columns you see, select Hide/Show Columns.

The default sort of the table is by product, then module, then feature. You can change the sort or sort order by selecting a column header. If you select a subscription link, it is sorted by the latest revision.

Downloading the Summary View

You can download the summary table view as a PDF or CSV file.

Download the CSV file so you can open the summary rows of What’s New Viewer in a spreadsheet and edit the table.
- Select Download CSV to download a delimited file and then choose a delimiter – some geographic locations work better with different delimiters.
- The See More links automatically download.
- The number of columns and rows you download is determined by your current view, so select all in Show Entries and All Columns in the table view.
Download a PDF of the summary table if you want a read-only copy.
- Select Download PDF in the summary table view.
- Consider creating a custom PDF of the detailed document view.

Navigating the What’s New Viewer Details View

The details view is arranged like any other content in the SAP Help Portal. It has a table of contents, sections, search, etc.

On the left, you see a table of contents that allows you to browse the details view.
In the toolbar, you see options to save the page as a release note, to download a PDF of the document, or to share the URL to this page.
On the right, you can jump to sections of the page.

Table of Contents, navigation bar, and toolbar are highlighted.

A release note is a technical announcement of each change we make. Each release note is a single page in the details view. You can find more marketing-focused content on SAP’s main website; when relevant, we link to it. However, the What’s New Viewer pages give you the technical details of a change.

Summary Paragraphs

At the top of each page (stamped 1 and 2 below), you see the title and a short description. It’s the same title and short description you read in the summary view before you select the See More link. We repeat it so that you know you’re in the right place.

If the change is simple, you might just see the title and short description, along with later sections like Configuration Requirements or Technical Details. But if the change is bigger, we briefly explain the purpose of the change, maybe provide more details, and tell you why we are changing the software now. We might also include screenshots to describe the change.

Role-Based Permissions

If you need role-based permissions to configure or see the change, we include the permissions in a section called Role-Based Permission Prerequisites. If you don’t see the section, it’s because there are no permission prerequisites.

An example of Role-Based Permission Prerequisites section is displayed.

What's Changed Section

When it makes sense for the release note, you see a before and after screenshot in the What’s Changed section. Sometimes the change isn’t visual (changes to an API, for example), so you won’t see screenshots. Sometimes the screen is new, so there is no before screenshot.

Configuration Requirements

The Configuration Requirements section (stamped 1 below) explains the scope of the configuration, including unexpected behavior or the consequences of the configuration. It is a basic summary of configuration and not full configuration help. You can find full configuration help in the related links (stamped 2 below). Requirements for the configuration can include things like:

Prerequisites that must be in place before you can configure the change, enhancement, or feature. They are usually outside your control – for example, a provisioning switch or an integration package.
Impacts that you might not expect. For example, if you configure the change, you may not be able to return to a previous configuration.
What happens if you don’t act? For example, if you don’t include the release note in your change management, you run the risk of a changed business process.
Restrictions of the change. Restrictions are expectations that the software doesn’t meet yet. For example, maybe it only works when the language is English, or it only works in particular browsers for now.
How to opt-out of the change.

An example of the Configuration Requirements section is displayed.

Technical Details

The Technical Details section repeats the values in the summary table. Select the links in the left column to read definitions of what we mean in the row. For example, select Module to see how we define module. If you see an empty value, it’s empty on purpose. For example, we don’t always have demo videos for our release notes.

How to Find Corrections

You have three ways to find corrections to the What’s New Viewer:

If you subscribe, we push a list of changes to your email inbox.
You can sort or filter by Revision Date in the summary view.
If you are in a details page, you can look for the change note that describes the change, and you can look for the Latest Revision date.

When SAP SuccessFactors makes a mistake, we want to be transparent about it. You’ll find a change note that describes the change and an updated Latest Revision date. The new revision date triggers the subscription email.

You won’t find change notes or revision date changes for minor changes, including typos. We only update the revision date when the changes affect your change management processes.

You also won’t find a revision when we enhance something we’ve already released. For example, if we enhance Writing Assistant in 1H 2024 and then again in 2H 2024, we wouldn’t go back and update the 1H 2024 release note.

How to Find Changes that Require Action to Avoid Disruption

Although you know your system best, SAP SuccessFactors can predict disruption that requires action. We use the Action value to express the likelihood of disruption:

Required typically means a high likelihood of disruption, up to and including technical disruption. For example, your action can be required to avoid an outage because of the change.
Recommended means that your current business processes can be disrupted unless you act. Often, this means retraining or change management.
Info-Only means there is little need for action to avoid the disruption.

When looking at change management, prioritize Required and Recommended. Read the details to understand what sorts of disruptions are possible.

Deprecations are a unique disruption, so we announce deprecation with the Lifecycle value:

Deprecated means that something in the software is on the way to being removed. For example, we might replace an old framework with a new one that performs better.
Deleted means the thing is no longer accessible in the software. We keep deletion announcements in the What’s New Viewer so that you can look up when things were removed.

We are careful not to overwhelm you with deprecation announcements. We don’t, for example, make deprecation announcements for the normal enhancement of a feature. For example, if we add machine learning reports to a page, we don’t deprecate the old page. It’s an enhancement to the existing page.

Conducting Risk Assessment with What's New Viewer | SAP Help Portal

Lifecycle Describes the Development Lifecycle Phase of the Software | SAP Help Portal

How to Scope Configuration Work

Some of our changes require configuration, and some don’t. We use the Enablement value to describe work:

Automatically on means you do not need to configure anything to get value from the change.
Customer Configured, Contact Enablement Partner, or other values mean that you must do some work to get value from the change.