SAP Knowledge Warehouse is SAP AG's product-line offering for knowledge management. It is a software application that facilitates the development of documentation, and the delivery of this documentation to the users of a product or system. It is typically implemented alongside other SAP products (such as SAP R/3) to provide user documentation on the use of those products, although technically it could be used as a stand-alone product to provide documentation for non-SAP systems or products.
SAP Knowledge Warehouse provides a basic authoring environment, and relatively robust version control (including check-out/check-in functionality), but it is not really a 'knowledge management' product — it is more a document repository.
SAP Knowledge Warehouse allows documentation to be provided to users in three possible ways:
- Via a web server that provides access to the entire documentation set
- Via context-sensitive help from another SAP application
- Through the creation of stand-alone Windows Help files
One of the advantages of SAP Knowledge Warehouse is that it ships with a full set of SAP's official standard documentation for all transactions. Companies implementing Knowledge Warehouse can then modify (or 'enhance') only those documents for transactions they have customized, and users will be able to refer to the standard SAP documentation for everything else.