What will happen to Communications?

[Former Member]

So I'm being selfish here, this is important for me personally. I haven't really had time to be active on SCN lately. Sometimes when that happens, the only thing I have time for is to scroll through Communications. It usually takes me less than 2 minutes. I tried to see how the new platform would help me stay up to date in the future and I have a hard time seeing how the Activity Stream (Activity, Notifications) would give me the same service as Communications does today. I can see that there is a filter for activity types but not all activity types are covered or maybe they are grouped differently?

That said, it is very likely that I haven't understood something about the Activity Stream and even more likely is that I do not know the technical capabilities of it, e.g. what could be done with a REST API shouldn't there be a query by default that satisfies me. Basically, what I would like to see is something like (in pseudo code)

show activity where activitytype eq 'mention' or activitytype eq 'reply' or activitytype eq 'tracked' or activitytype eq 'bookmarked' and activitydate gt today-30 and sorted by activitydate desc

In other words I wouldn't want to see activity of the tags or people I follow because it takes too long to scroll through. Would it be totally unreasonable to request the ability to customize/personalize filters in the Activity Stream?

[oliver · Accepted solution]

Hi Samuli,

thanks for the feedback! To answer your question directly, we don't know yet. We start simple and won't have much functionality in Activities but the basic following. It shows activities from members you follow, content or managed tags (tags that represent products, etc).

The Communications feature in SCN is not very common in other collaboration platform that I've seen and not easy to understand. But it is my primary tool when I check for relevant content and comments, and I only track low activity spaces. And I stopped using the activity stream completely.

But there is a more general problem here. You can do the following actions on any persons, tag or content in SCN: Follow, Track in Communications, and Receive email notifications. You end up with two different streams to track and email notifications, which are separately managed from the various email notifications you can configure in your preferences. To me this is very confusing.

With the new SAP Community, we don't have email notifications yet, and the numeric indicator in the header isn't implemented either, but both should come soon. Clever default email notifications and simple configuration options are also necessary.

Long term Activities will evolve and I hope we will find a good way to surface relevant member activities and content, and send you notifications for very important or interesting activities.

Oliver