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Where is the old SDN ??????

Former Member
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hi,

i am confused........where is the good old SDN ? i can't find anything here. Even not the

right forum.

best regards, Martin

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

marilyn_pratt
Active Contributor
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Hi Martin,

On the "homepage" of the New SCN ( http://scn.sap.com/welcome ) are links to a helpful forum finder: ( http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-18971 )

It maps the old forums to the new.

The idea behind this redesign was to create an environment where your questions (in this case discussion threads or forum questions) could be raised in the context of topic areas or community spaces that relate to your topic of interest.  Of course if you only wanted to ask ABAP questions you could go directly to the ABAP Forum(s) and urls to those are found in the mapping.

Or you could find your forums by looking at

ABAP Dictionary http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/application-development/dictionary
ABAP Objects http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/application-development/objects
ABAP Performance and Tuning http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/testing-and-troubleshooting
ABAP, General http://scn.sap.com/community/abap

But each of these forums now lives in the context of a topic area that has much more than "just" questions and answers.  There are helpful blogs, documents, rich media contents that are all associated with an area.  You can "follow" topics and get updates on particular themes.

Generic questions or rants or off-topics are welcome in the Coffee Corner as always:

Coffee Corner http://scn.sap.com/community/about

I can move this thread to the About SCN forum area so others can see it as well.

Answers (8)

Answers (8)

Former Member
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I agree to most of the above. I totally dislike this new blog-like version of the forum. And indeed I can hardly find any relevant information anymore. Including my own posts from the past.

marilyn_pratt
Active Contributor
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This might not be a full consolation for you T. Jans-Beken, but you can find your own posts from the past by using the links in your own profile.  You would click on your own name here in this discussion and follow the content tab on your own profile.

For example: http://scn.sap.com/people/t.jans-beken/content link would let you look through and filter your content, by content type and date posted.

You can also track those conversations you participated in (like this one) by viewing the link on the left side of your content profile that shows you participated in the following: http://scn.sap.com/people/t.jans-beken/content#filterID=participated

Activity is a more recent snapshot of one's activity: http://scn.sap.com/people/t.jans-beken/activity

In certain ways that makes it easier to follow where you have posted and contributed across content types, discussions.  While I understand the frustration of those who find the navigation challenging and non-intuitive, finding ones own content should actually be a bit easier once you know how.

Please let me know if these links enable you to do so.

Marilyn

Former Member
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Thank you Marilyn, I was indeed able to locate my own posts with the above information.

Former Member
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hi all,

old version was user friendly, clear & efficient.And I was using it for years

This new SCN is just a crap.

It apprears that it has been concepted by people that didn't used SDN.

Seeking an information is just too complicated, interface is so bad, & completely unfriendly.

As a lot of SDN Forums ex-users, I moved to others SAP Forums, that I won't name here, but

you'll find them easily on google.

I can easily imagine, that SCN has been developped in SAP India for half price.

We see the result.

Can someone just tell me if it's possible to recover my old messages that were on SDN?

Fab

Former Member
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I dislike the new scn. Why fix something that's not broken. I have to use google to find stuff on your site e.g. google the following "site:scn.sap.com abap forums"

If you change 5 - 10% it's fine, but the total makeover was a ridiculous idea.

Former Member
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yes, its very unfriendly layout of sdn.scn. iface very difficultly to find the sdn forum.and any body guide me to my destination(forums).

Former Member
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The new SCN is just that: New. So, it will take some time for anyone to get used to. It still has some issues that SAP is working on. I didn't like it first, but having used it for a few days, I'm starting to see the many new neat features and capabilities.

Former Member
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Personally I think that the number one priority of any website design should be to keep it simple and intuitive for the end user. The fact that you have to spend a day or 2 to get used to a site - will put many new users off a site entirely. I really hope its just a matter of SAP ironing out the kinks.

Former Member
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Thank you for your replies. i see that i am NOT alone with my opinion......thats sad enough !

this new design is a totaly crap ! i want to know WHO is developing such user-unfriendly things.

Jelena
Active Contributor
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Abdullah, you must be very lucky (or have lots of free time ) if you were able to use SCN for a few days. Today is the first day I'm able to do anything here. This whole week I'd go to SCN but by the time I get to the forum and adjust the list so that I can read it, an hour would be gone. It is still a bit on a slow side (compared to old), but at least I'm not kicked out anymore (knock on wood).

Marilyn, maybe you can explain - what is the reason for splitting SCN in those "communities"? And what is the added value? I am sorry but "lives in the context of a topic area" sounds just like one of those SAP promotional articles - very fancy language ("synergy", "solutions", "mission critical", etc.) with no actual meaning. What exactly is in this change for the ordinary SCN members? What did it improve?

I've been on SCN for many years and have myself posted many suggestions and comments, but don't recall anyone ever suggesting "Oh, let's split forums into dozens of separate pages, so that no one can find them!".

I liked the old SCN where we were all members of one big and somewhat happy community. Now I feel like I'm crashing someone else's party.

P.S. Why is "Coffee corner" now called "About SCN"? I liked the old name better, it was more appropriate.

Former Member
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Regarding the coffe corner remark. I agree with that, the discussions in coffe corner were most often not about SCN, but about anything members of the SCN were interested in or discussing.

Personally, I'd want to have an explicit Coffee Corner Place/Space (will never understand that) back. Actually I am demanding an explicit Coffe Corner P/S.

anton

marilyn_pratt
Active Contributor
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Hi Jelena,

Let's start with the easy answer.  I agree with you and strongly dislike the idea that "Coffee Corner" is called (or rather is under) "about SCN".  I'm hoping a change is made on that count and quickly.  I even suggested engaging with the community to find a better name for the community space "About SCN" and perhaps making a coffee corner as a separate entity.  I imagine that such a change will be implemented by popular demand.

About the "splitting".  That's a more complex topic.  The "old" SCN you speak of (and believe me that I've been around for a number of iterations of "old" "new" "new/old") was never one big happy community from the moment that we created something beyond forums which actually was pretty much from inception.  This isn't *just* a forum space or a community of forums.  SDN was always a combination of a repository of content (Library), webpages related to topics AND forum discussions that were embedded using the same 3rd party vendor we are now using for the wider platform (Jive).  Our jive forums were reached by a forum structure and they were also linked to on our homepages and content spaces.  Overtime we evolved a system for moderating forums and increasing our moderation to include external moderators (external to our tiny team) but forums (although a very important part) were only *part* of the community landscape. 

Here is an old Historical picture from 2005 .  We artificially divided community (forums, weblogs, webinars, events and later wiki) from the content side of things.

The way I see it, rather than continuing to work with Forums as an isolated content area, we have folded the “repository” (articles, video, elearning) into the forum topics and once the structure was “overhauled” it was mapped to the SAP environment….and yes, some of those names and categories might seem like “SAPanese” but they are a requirement so that sites like sap.com and SCN speak the same topic language.

Bloggers, authors, SAP content creators, SAP note writers, SAP Support, are also part of the community not just forum participants. 

Finding a way of “housing” everything under one roof was always our challenge as you see from the old diagram….and the Jive environment, while not perfect, is a way to have some consistency in terms of content management.  Old SCN was a bunch of sewn together functionalities hosted on a platform but governed by different vendors.  At least for this implementation we have only 2 ports of call: the Jive environment and the wiki environment rather than the 5 we were reliant on in the past.  Many of them had reached a point where they no longer could provide any growth opportunity. 

So let me also say that what we did in the past was an evolution and there were many many times when folks were not really satisfied with the performance and behaviors. 

I'd like to think of this as an additional opportunity to re-ignite passions around making this a more useful and communicative environment.  Will it take time?  Yes.  Will it irk folks transistioning?  Yes, as people don't take easily to change and also won't like what they may perceive as degradation of service.  But I believe that over time (and we have been growing for over 8 years), the community will help dictate improvements as they always have in the past.  I hope you will continue to be a person Jelana who continues to challenge us to improve, to re-think, to engage better.

ross_goodman
Participant
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I would challenge you to build a site that at least starts off being as useful as its predecessor. Starting with retrograde functionality not a very good platform to build anything from, least of all user confidence and satisfaction! The new siter is crap compared to the old site.

Former Member
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Hi Marilyn - I don't want to sound like a whiner but the site is really not intuitive. These days, with the available technology and programming skills out there, I can't imagine it being too difficult to allow people have a dashboard for themselves, where they can drag-and-drop forums, links of interest to them, items/people they want to follow, etc. etc. in other words allow easy customization. Maybe this site allows that but it is not intuitive enough for me to figure this out without watching videos, reading instructions, and so on. I am still having issues in following my forums. Even the word 'forum' is not used anymore. Why couldn't there be simple 'favorites' for me to tag items with and just see them instead of going through a maze. If there are easier ways that I cannot take the time to discover, I apologize for my ignorance. I don't want to look like a relacritrant dinasour that cannot embrace change but I was hoping for easier transition. We shouldn't have to have a Ph.D. in webpage design to navigate through this site (my M.Sc is not getting me anywhere so far).

Best regards

Nigel_James
Active Contributor
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I guess, like the Microsoft Ribbon, a big shift takes a while to adjust to, myself included. I am finding things tricky to find also but I do like that forums are integrated into topic areas. So in a topic I can see all blogs, forums aka discussions, articles etc. I prefer splitting the site by content type.

If you like your content like that there are ways to filter and search by that but given the new capabilities for authoring content I am not going to create an RSS feed for every blog.

I think the benefits of this re-platforming and re-organisation have been huge and I for one am a big fan.

(just try doing that on the old site) There is a bookmarks facility and did you ever try to create a blog on the old platform? This new platform is far better for blogging. I can even include formatted source code:

var awesomeness;

awesomeness = 1 + 2;

There is a lot to discover in this new SCN and while there are many tweaks to be made (suggestions are welcome) but look at the goodies that you have.

FTR: I have been around SDN as an early beta user since it was first rolled out in 2003 and this is the best it has ever looked.

Cheers,

Nigel

Former Member
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Hi Nigel,

have you ever really tried to use that source code formatting feature? IMHO it's almost unusable:

- try to copy a larger (say 50 lines) block of code into that editor (which actually is the usual use case for bringing code into a blog - or do you write code inside the blog?) and then view it;

-- for me using FF10 I get part of the code  outside of the control in white letters on white ground only visible because of the spell checker marking invisible words outside that control

-- trying to mark several lines to copy or delete it does not work

-- isn't it absolutely usual everywhere else to use a monospaced font for displaying code? Not here, so the formatting of the code alway looks weird unless you manually align anything

-- what's probably the most used programming language used on this platform - ABAP. We do have syntax highligthing for many languages, but ABAP?

IMHO, this are not minor glitches, this is a FAIL!

anton

detlev_beutner
Active Contributor
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Hi Anton,

To add some pain: Issues about source code formatting have been reported repeatedly, at least different of them without a single answer in the bug forum (, , ).

Quite, hm, "funny" (?) if Mark Yolton writes "I hope Rick and Eli and others have added their comments to the bug database and are not just ranting here and hoping someone somewhere will do something." (http://scn.sap.com/community/about/blog/2012/03/17/new-scn-day-5-status-update#comment-296456, underscore added by me).

Nigel answers a bit like Mark F - "come see the great things". There is some good reason to declare the transition a fail, but of course, now we will have to live with it. But it would be much easier for all people involved if nobody would try to defend the very big holes. There is something people can learn, but not if some people ignore the fact that the migration has come at a point in time where it should not have come, because the quality was too low.

One of the signs for this is this: People go into the bug forum (one could discuss the technical implementation of that alone) and report issues but don't get any answer for over a week. (And then get some rebuke to "not just ranting here and hoping someone somewhere will do something".) Again - obviously there is too much to care about so that something like this happens, I'm convinced that the SCN support team suffers from this itself. But then one should draw a conclusion from this and realize: Big **** happened. Declare this in public. Let's get the SCN team and the suffering users on one side. And the SCN team should focus on good communication - which, as shown, does not work really good at the moment (but the reason is clear, things get defended which are not defendable).

I'll take the chance and have a chat tonight with someone, I hope I get some insight and are able to to create some comprehension for what's missing / still failing.

Best regards
Detlev

hofmann
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Yes, it will take a while to adjust, but it will also take SCN to adjust. I have nothing against the concept of the spaces and that the blog editor makes it easy to blog. But why is a standard response when it comes to new SCN problems: "have you blogged lately"? Less than 1% of the users are bloggers. The rest is using the forums and is searching for documentation and articles.

For instance, the SAP Portal area is divided into 5 spaces (or more). These have to get merged into 1 space. This fragmentation isn't helping and I hope that all these subspaces were only created because of the content merge. And this consolidation can only be the beginning.

detlev_beutner
Active Contributor
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Hi Tobias,

The portal area was also devided into sub-forums in the old SCN. BUT - when looking at the portal forum (old SCN), you saw the merged content from "below". In the new SCN this is not the case (even if the software is capable behaving similar). The KMC forum content has not been migrated at all (and for days now, nobody admits this and nobody talks about the background or if this will be done in the future), in "theory" has been moved to "/ecm" (even if KMC of course is part of EP, but SAP seems to try to sell OpenText, forgetting existing customers using SAP solutions) and the portal space itself offers discussions, too.

Long story made short: It is even worse...

Best regards
Detlev

hofmann
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Hi Detlev,

I learned yesterday the hard way that the KMC forums are in Nirvana. Had to do a KMC report and my sources / bookmarks and Google searches showed ... nothing. So it was me, some PAR files and jad.

But I'm convinced that SCN is working on it and some day the content will come back. As long as it comes back into 1 space, because the navigation paths are killing me. Me deepest respect for everyone that manages to find the portal area the 1st time without problems using the mega navigation (read: can I have a search box for the navigation? The SAP Portal 7.3 comes with one ...)

detlev_beutner
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Hi Tobias,

You are very positive that you are convinced that they are working on it... I hope to get some more info tonight. But what makes me unsure so far is that no-one has ever talked about this issue, nor responded to my remarks and questions (which I put very explict as my last comment under my blog).

The navigation is one of the biggest problem for many users. At least I hope that someone realizes that the status quo is unacceptable. Yeah, the easiness of the good old forums has gone 😞  But that can be attacked, if one wants to...

hofmann
Active Contributor
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Detlev,

I simply see no sense in giving up hope. I hope that the KM forum content is on the to-do list, but other problems with higher prio are treated first. That's the same reason why I hope that SCN is already planing to consolidate the # of spaces.

We (the beta testers) actually raised the issue of the navigation but the answer was simple and showed that SCN too looked into it: its bound to the corporate taxonomy => SCN cannot simply implement its own navigation. Maybe after the go live changes can be implemented.

And for all the other problems: I blame Jive.

Former Member
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Completely agree Martin.

As a Business One user, I now can't find anything relevant at all, & I was a frequent user of the old forums

Former Member
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I also completely agree with most the comments about this new site... it is difficult to find anything, it is extremely cluttered and un-friendly.. When something is working fine and people are happy with it, why is it that things have to be changed drastically? It is not like we have tons of time to try to figure out all the new things plus trying to find out where the things are now hidden. So frustrating... was there a user survey asking if they complained about the old site? Things were pretty good.. granted, you can always improve things for the better.. but this one is just not it... yes, for sure we will get used to it at some point but all I can say now is that this is not a friendly front-end anymore... It might be a good idea to put everything together but for users that are interested in one or two parts of the network, this is an overwhelming site... it makes you tired just looking at millions of panels, links, icons, etc. that are displayed on a narrower strip now thanks to the ads and notices and sidebars.

michael_ruth3
Contributor
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This new layout sucks,,,typical SAP style, can't leave well enough alone.

Former Member
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I also find this new layout very non-intuitive so you're not alone. It appears to be one of those designed by committee things... I will try to give it a bit more time in the hope that all of a sudden everything will become clear...