I wanted to introduce myself, my name is Kari Hagedorn and I am the new Product Manager for Epicor Learning. We are looking to improve our learning experience and we want to hear from you. We are looking for feedback on our current learning content and how we can improve the self-service learning tools to meet your needs. Are you finding the content you need to improve your day to day user experience? What do you like? What don’t you like? What is missing from your learning experience? We understand your time is valuable and hope you will share your perspective. Thank you!
Welcome! I think overall the content in the learning center is fantastic. I can’t get my users to use it very much because its too confusing them to understand how to log into the learning center. I know there is “epicor identity” now, and I set that up for myself, but for my users who only have learning center access (and not EpicCare access) there doesn’t seem to be any way to set that up. So literally every time somebody wants to use the learning center I have to teach them how to log into it all over again.
Are you taking comments on the rest of the Epicor documentation or just the learning center? Because I have a lot to say about the move to zendesk (its horrific) and the Epicor’s decision to no longer maintain actual reference documents like the tech ref guide, ice tools guide, user customization guide, etc.
It would be useful to have help content that is easily accessible at the point of use. For example, if a user is entering a job and they need assistance, they should be able to go to the help menu and access learning materials specific to that task. Additionally, it would be helpful to have a system in place (such as annotations) that allows company-specific learning content to be injected at the point of use and integrated seamlessly for the user.
At one point I had used reflection injection to do this with confluence documents of ours, but it got to difficult to maintain the customization alone. I used to have tags named the same as screens, upon launching a screen it would look in confluence for that tag and if it found it enabled a linked button that took you right to that tag search. Below is an example of what I called Contextual help from Job Entry. I just lost steam doing it in classic, knowing I would have to totally pivot for Kinetic UI
Yes precisely. We HAD this in classic. Now with the move to zendesk you get a list of stuff that is mostly not relevant to where you actually are in the program. And you have to go on a wild goose chase to hopefully find something (anything) related to what you are doing. Its literal insanity.
PLEASE bring back the technical reference guides, these are desperately needed.
I find the zendesk documentation to be maddeningly useless. It brings me to tears. I don’t know how to express in writing how awful the experience is.
Its barely searchable. Even when you somehow manage to find a relevant page, you can’t just read it because you have to constantly click to expand or click to go to a different section. You can’t save where you were or bookmark anything (no pdf download available) so the next time you need to reference that information you have to search for it all over again.
PLEASE bring back field help. This is our most-used tool in Epicor to understand what any given field does. It is absolutely impossible to find a simple field definition in zen desk and the field help is gone in kinetic. Yes I know you can still see the technical details, but not the actual help information that tells you what that field does.
Some easy means to annotate information about a field that is company specific maybe presented similar to Field help and a way to link to company specific supporting documentation wherever that may be stored (Confluence, SharePoint, local share, etc)
Like in my initial example when a screen opened it evaluated if a page resolved for tags named the same as the screen through a BAQ and would add a button to the help menu to “Launch Job Entry Context Help” type of thing.
Same. It works ok for now, but as time goes on and more things change its going to become less of a viable workaround.
I have communicated these documentation concerns quite a lot (to epicor education, in support cases, to my account manager, etc). I don’t know what else to do to convince Epicor that actual reference documents are still needed. If anyone else is concerned about this I hope they speak up too.
Companies like Microsoft use a DocAsCode tool which produces online documentation but also generates PDFs (from the markdown and not “print” ugliness*) I’m not sure if ZenDesk has a similar capability.
Yes Zendesk does offer the ability to have a pdf version of an article but my understanding is that Epicor would have to create and attach the pdfs, it doesn’t happen automatically.
Id like to see you just copy ServiceNow and how they handle Certifications for the masses not just Consultants. In addition when their Consultants get certified, you know they had to put in blood, sweat and tears. In the Epicor ecosystem consultants with badges, know less than my interns. I am unsure as to why that is
In DocFx, whenever your CI is activated (Push, PR, etc.) it rebuilds the static web site and creates the PDF from the markdown while also linking the pdf to the site.
