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The Future of SAP Community Network

former_member181915
Contributor
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Now that you've had a chance to read Maggie's blog about the vision and future for SCN, let us know what you think? We are hear to listen and to respond to your questions, concerns and suggestions for the future of SCN. Please use #1DXCommDest when discussing so that we can quickly respond.

Jeanne

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

stefan_koehler
Active Contributor
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Hi guys,

i am a little bit surprised as the latest platform change to Jive is not that long time ago. From my experience with SAP and platform changes - i just have one strong wish in the future: Please don't destroy any content (e.g. like blog posts) by changing the platform.

It happens too often with any SAP platform change in the past and i am pretty concerned due to the following statement ".. we will move off of the current platform by the end of 2015, transitioning to a best of breed model for improved user experience and ease of moderation. We plan to move blogs to WordPress, questions and answers to AnswerHub,  and replace the rest of the required functionality with additional integrated solutions."

I also hope, that the login issues with different client platforms will be fixed with the new platform (especially as it works on other community platforms, which also run on Jive).

Regards

Stefan

Answers (10)

Answers (10)

patelyogesh
Active Contributor
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#1DXCommDest


Are we making sure that all BUGs we have in SCN going away with new version?


-Yogesh

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Rather optimistic, aren't you?

Cheers, Mike

SAP Technology RIG

patelyogesh
Active Contributor
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optimistic - YES

I am deling with issue below

-------------------

User Management:
- No tool is available to consolidate user IDs (ENHANCEMENT)

Result: If a community member changes company and/or user ID, the new ID cannot be merged with the old user ID, points and content cannot be transferred

--------------------

-Yogesh

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Hi Yogesh,

As am I (from 2007) along with many other people.  But I will raise the question in the next 1DX review as I am interested in whether the capability will be in the new environment. 

Cheers, Mike

SAP Technology RIG

patelyogesh
Active Contributor
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Thank you

Former Member
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Hi Jeanne,

I am new in this community and was inspired by the SAP Event in São Paulo, Brazil, that take place yesterday.

I see a tendence of building networks and get them stronger with adding services, all over the web and in all spheres.


Facebook with what´s app and mobile payment, Ford with Microsoft about connected cars, Google with b2b, LinkedIn with expanding to pay to recruit, etc.

All big players ar expanding their network to the business sphere.

What is exactily the future proposal of SAP with this network of 2 Mio people?

I am working for a non-profit organization, that provides services and information for SMEs to get in the brazilian market or to get in the geman market. We are thinking a lot about what would be the future of doing business. How will people will get informed about a solution for their need.

Perhaps we can colaborate to get a good concept that is good for all involved people.

Kind regards,

Desiree

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You can count on me testing the new platform.

1dxcommdest

Br, Alex.

jude_bradley
Active Contributor
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Yes, I'd be interested in testing the new platform..

1dxcommdest

lbreddemann
Active Contributor
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I guess anybody actually reading posts in is highly interested in what's coming up with the new community platform.

While I certainly have my opinions on what we should get in the new world and what shall be retired, I rather want to point out some alternative approaches to many problems we've seen around here.

By accident I just stumbled over this Learning Vs. Discussion by Jeff Atwood [Video] | BrightTALK presentation.

It quite long to watch, but if community functions, intentions and culture is worth 40 mins (after that there's some audience discussion) your lifetime to you, I highly recommend to give it a go.

Personally, I like the idea of splitting Q&A forums and discussion/chat forums. This could make a lot of frustration disappear.

Second best to me is what I'd say is the inverse to our current incentive system. Measuring and encouraging actual reading of posts, documents and articles as well as "being accustomed" to the community seem simple yet very powerful ideas to me. Boy, that would stop this whole point chasing at once without giving up on incentivizing site visitor engagement.

Anyway, like everybody else I am looking forward to see the new community - in many ways I think it will be so much better (as it can't possible get worse for some aspects).

p.s.

I didn't really get what you meant with asking to use ... you mean when using twitter? Or here on SCN? Wouldn't comments referencing the blog or this discussion anyway be seen by the SCN team?

ErvinSzolke
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
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Hi Lars,

I watched the video you showed and I found it really interesting.


My two cents regarding the future of discussions

  • dynamic just-in-time post loading -- when scrolling down on the page (instead of breaking the conversation to separate pages with 'next/previous page' arrows)
  • moving posts (not only threads) -- good example is Maggie's blog and this discussion, I assume improvement proposals should show up rather here and not in the blog. Another example I can see in our space: often happens that a user creates say 3 questions about different topics, and then reflects to our answers in the wrong one.

Best Regards,

Ervin

lbreddemann
Active Contributor
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Hey Ervin,

very diligent to have already watched that whole thing!

As much as I like the just-in-time post loading (especially with the information on how much more there still is, that they've implemented on Discourse) I am a bit surprised that this is your favorite, since here in SCN we don't even have paginated content.

Being able to branch off new lines of discussion surely is very helpful - I'd love to see that.

What I also really would like to see would be that the many different interest groups within SAP would take this moment of opportunity and engage early in discussions on the community future.

Large groups like AGS support have set up large scale programs to "use SCN" for their own purposes (e.g. dealing with customer requests before these become support incidents).

Unluckily such one-sided decisions to "enter the community" have led to some rather not so great examples of content and community interaction.

Would be really great to see this not being repeated and I trust you will keep up your good work that it won't

BTW: using the tag in comments (like here) really doesn't do anything. The tag-search doesn't seem to pick up tags in discussion replies... (soooo time to make a platform switch... hehehe)

ErvinSzolke
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
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Hallo Lars,

Reading is fundamental (I always believed in this) -- and watching (videos) is fundamental too. If I see a doc or vid is referred then I take the time to read/watch it first and reflect only afterwards.

I think there are cases where we have pagination, and honestly I don't really like it.

Example: Also I would not say it is my favourite, I just like this approach, better than pagination.

Regarding the rest what you said... yeah... 500% agreed, and believe me I put a lot effort into this, I could talk hours about this topic (maybe rather via phone, btw reeeally long time no speak, so maybe I call you next week as I am curious how things are going and I'd gladly discuss this topic you have mentioned).

Take care,

Ervin

P.S.: oh, I almost forgot

lbreddemann
Active Contributor
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Let's do that Ervin!

And: dang, you are right about the pagination. I never realized that we have this here. Looks like I have the tendency to only attend short discussions... there goes my sub-average attention span again...

A great weekend to everybody .

- Lars

TammyPowlas
Active Contributor
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Wow, Lars, I watched the first 40 minutes and I enjoyed it too with similar takeaways

I realized too that I am not listening as much as I could and the importance of civility

I liked the comment "good people trapped in bad software"

I liked the progression too of "visitor > novice > regular > leader > elder"

Thank you for sharing and I hope to see similar features in the new platform.

lbreddemann
Active Contributor
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Glad you found that one interesting, too.

Their reputation system is definitively more fitting to what I'd like to see than our SCN points...

Hmm... looks like it's one of those times, where everywhere I look I find interesting posts that relates  to the current topic.

This Seth's Blog: 'Connect to' vs. 'Connect' makes a very good observation about community interaction. I feel this is happening here in SCN as well. Maybe it's even the major aspect.

Is the community there to connect SAP with customers, partners and users, or to connect all parties with each other eventually even without SAP being involved?

Is SAP, while throwing the party (e.g. providing the platform, some content etc.), happy when guests are starting to have fun without them?

And even more: is SAP the only one here to decide about that? (my opinion: I don't think so)

Gosh - I think I stop here, realizing how much I hijacked this thread already...

former_member183750
Active Contributor
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So, I've been following this discussion without piping in until now. Great points raised all over the place - risk of broken links, choice of platforms, etc. . What prompts me to write is your question:


Is the community there to connect SAP with customers, partners and users, or to connect all parties with each other eventually even without SAP being involved?

I hope that SAP is always involved. And I have not heard anything to the contrary. I know from experience with the old Diamond forum for Crystal Reports, that you can build the park, but they ain't coming. Not unless you maintain it,  keep it clean, provide security, provide the entertainment, the wieners, the drinks and so on. Without SAP's participation, the park (SCN), will just wither away much as Diamond did.

My plucked nickel's worth - payed as the gate

- Ludek

former_member181915
Contributor
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Hi Ludek and Lars,

I want to respond to the question as the lead of SAP Community Network and the Community Destination project.

The purpose of SCN is for members of the SAP Ecosystem to be able to work easily together and with SAP to improve people's lives.

That may sound a bit idealistic, but it is the purpose that drives me and my team to work some crazy hours and declare that we love our jobs. (Trust me, I've said it and heard it from many of my teammates too.)

The question of whether SAP would stay involved is YES!  The community is SAP's voice of the ecosystem and, as we move forward in our cloud journey, this is more important than ever. One of my goals this year is to increase innovation based on interaction with Community and the SAP Mentor program. A goal I'm happy to have because I believe it is the right thing to do. Not only are we going to formalize some of these opportunities to collaborate (e.g. the Community Destination project), we are working with SAP board areas to increase interactions between Community and SAP employees, starting with Products & Innovation.

Kind regards,

Jeanne

denis_konovalov
Active Contributor
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- will the new SCN retain all the content of current SCN, blogs, discussions/forums threads, documents etc...

With any platform change this part is one of the most challenging. How will this be done ?

If content is not migrated - I fear we will lose a huge amount of participants.

Former Member
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Hi Denis,

I agree 100% with you. We cannot loose nothing in this transition ! Participants and the content !!!

Count with me to test and keep one eye in our "treasury".

former_member110461
Active Contributor
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Sounds interesting, so I'll tag it #1DXCommDest.  Some potential functionality which would be nice:

  • A nice log on experience
  • Integration with twitter for responses to blogs (I know several sites do this)
  • Works well on a mobile (refer to number 1 too)
  • A good search engine (please do not use TREX!)

I am unfortunately one of the people who ended up going away from SCN and used more of twitter to remain engaged with the community.  A lot of this was due to it becoming hard to use and the UX not making sense to me.  Hopefully a new UX will be designed around the user in a manner which makes it easy to use and contribute.  It also ties into SAP now talking about UX - let's see the walk

Paul

JasonLax
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
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Twitter responses....or even from Facebook, perhaps? Sounds interesting. Search is being worked on.  It's a separate workstream that I'm part of and the existing limitations of TREX have been recognized.  More to come on this as things develop.

Former Member
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Love the best of breed approach and the fact that you are also considering custom development to improve the platform even further.

Former Member
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I look forward to one merged identity and to improved tools for blogging. This will help us be more focused on SAP solutions and less on issues with SCN. Thanks for the heads up; I look forward to hearing more about it as the roll out approaches.

Gretchen

former_member181915
Contributor
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Hi Gretchen,

Merge accounts continues to be more complicated than it should be, especially for community, where we have reputation, authored content, etc.

We'll continue to work on it, but it may be resolved only after the December launch.

I know it is a big problem with lots of people wanting it resolved. We will do our best.

Jeanne

TammyPowlas
Active Contributor
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I'm looking forward to participating in the new SCN

matt_steiner
Active Contributor
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Know what - for me... I just have to look at the list of people involved: Marilyn, Gali, Audrey, Oliver, Brian, Jason and Michael ... all those people breath community spirit and hence I know that they will do everything in their powers to make the next SCN the best experience to-date.