Rename "BPM and Workflow" forum to "SAP Business Workflow"

[pokrakam]

G'Day,

99% of posts in the [BPM and Workflow|; forum deal with SAP Business Workflow. It was originally intended for ccBPM which - though they share some underlying architecture - is basically XI / PI.

A few ccBPM posts occasionally appear in the WF forum, but they are generally not answered and more appropriate in XI. These days I usually move them to XI when it's clear that the 'local' population won't answer it.

So to avoid confusion for people I propose to rename the forum to SAP Business Workflow or at least something that doesn't confuse it with XI.

Any input welcome.

Cheers,

Mike

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Mike,

This is a Suggestion for improving the Quality of Communication so that Threads will not be having zero replies or not answered.I have seem so many times that there are a lots of good scenarios which are not having even a single replies because the person who is asking his query, are not able to put it well because of complexity of the scenario.

Not only that case some times, The queries are not clear to any of the repliers and Questions are just not answered from forum end and if anyone refer them in future then there is not complete benefit of such discussion.

So what I feel their need some more features required if we could add in to the forum.

Like - one Basic Feature Copy and Paste the screen shots...

It can reduce the complexity of discussions very much; Ppl can put their Queries easy with proper clarity.

It's a suggestion and feedback, what I feel to share with you all.Hope it will be helpful to make the site better....

With Best Regards

Dev.

[pokrakam · Accepted solution]

Hi Dev,

Thank you for your suggestion, here are a couple more suggestions from the [Rules of Engagement|https://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/HOME/RulesofEngagement]:

• Post a new topic in a new thread: This thread is about forum names

• Search before you post: This has been discussed several times in this very forum (try putting 'screenshot' into the search box).

Regards,

Mike

[former_member184657 · Accepted solution]

I know this post shouldn't be here...but just want to add this comment.

Show up at the ABAP forums and you'll find incomplete and illogical questions being answered with copy-paste material and link-farms 😮 

pk

PS: My 2 cents to renaming "BPM and Workflow" forum to "SAP Business Workflow" to add legitimacy to this post

[marilyn_pratt · Accepted solution]

It's a done deal. Just waiting on Gali to activate the change and then help from you guys to identify and moderator to dump (move) some of the posts to the proper bins.

Also, after TechEd Las Vegas, I'm counting on some new members of both communities to pitch in (BPM as well as workflow). We've met some really interesting folks who are taking an interest in these topics.

[pokrakam · Accepted solution]

Just a quick note to say thank ye very muchly for bringing this topic to an end

I got the email too, just horrendously busy at the mo, will reply later this afternoon.

[marilyn_pratt · Accepted solution]

As soon as this is actually in place, I'd love for you Mike, (now that you've gotten your feet wet as a blogger) to announce it in a blog with links and an explanation of what topic goes in what forum (summary is/will be provided by our other moderator Saujanya GN). Nice way to bring this story to a public completion. I'm glad we were able to move this forward. Power to the people.

[pokrakam · Accepted solution]

Done, announcement and a little background on the different flavours of BPM are at:

[A new forum, and the difference between BPM, BPM and BPM|]

I just wanted to add a public thanks for the efforts of all involved. I really intended this to be a fairly minor issue which grew into something far bigger than a forum name, but the end result was worthwhile.

Cheers,

Mike

[paul_abrahamson_sap]

Yep I agree, SAP Business Workflow, glad to see it's in the pipeline, Marilyn.

[Former Member]

Hi,

Kindly rename this forum as "SAP Business Workflow" or simply "Business Workflow" soon. It ll b very useful to identify by the new users. If it remains as "BPM and Workflow", surely somebody get confused...

Regards

Raaams...

[Former Member]

ok. and when does this Forum now gets renamed??

[pokrakam]

@Kjetil - agreed, GP and WF are completely incompatible. This was my biggest gripe with GP and still is with SNWBPM. On the other hand GP is no longer being actively promoted or developed (but still supported) so we have probably reached a plateau as far as the userbase is concerned.

Edit: Forgot to add, I also think that when Galaxy SAP NetWeaver Business Process Management starts to roll out it should get it's own forum in Emerging Technologies. Also for the same reason that it's completetely incompatible with WF.

@Florin - I'm also awaiting a decision one way or another. No matter what the answer but it would be nice to get one...

Edited by: Mike Pokraka on Aug 28, 2008 11:03 AM

[marilyn_pratt]

It's obvious that the bulk of the content here is Workflow, so renaming this forum for explicit Workflow content makes sense.

Our problem is getting a moderator for the BPM forum. If we split these we need to be sure there is moderation (that usually means 2 moderators) for each topic. SAP Business Workflow as well as BPM.

That's the stop point. My hands are tied if we don't get internal folks raising hands to moderate each of the two after split.

[pokrakam]

>

> It's obvious that the bulk of the content here is Workflow, so renaming this forum for explicit Workflow content makes sense.
> Our problem is getting a moderator for the BPM forum.  If we split these we need to be sure there is moderation (that usually means 2 moderators) for each topic.  SAP Business Workflow as well as BPM.
> That's the stop point.  My hands are tied if we don't get internal folks raising hands to moderate each of the two after split.

Hi Marilyn,

Thanks for your feedback. That's the first mention of a split, why would that be necessary? Apart from unanswered questions there is no BPM content, that's my whole point for raising this issue in first place. None whatsoever. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Rien. Nix. Null.

If it's going to cause major internal uproar I'm equally happy to leave it as is, I just made the suggestion based on how the forum has evolved. If it evolves into something else two years down the line then we can change it again... nothing wrong with being a little bit dynamic

BPM (as in ccBPM) falls under XI/PI and that's where all the questions are being asked and answered. SAP Netweaver BPM is a completely different issue and should be discussed separately.

Thus if we should start discussing splits, it should be XI. Mind you, given the state of it, it's maybe not such a bad idea. It is the Netweaver category's answer to ABAP General! However any initiative and resulting anouncements concerning a split should be on the XI front.

Cheers,

Mike

[marilyn_pratt]

Frankly, I advocated the original change you requested: Simply change this forum name to SAP Business Workflow or Business Workflow The push back I'm dealing with is around the concern (and a valid one) that we simply toss BPM away. And I'm talking about the "new" BPM as in Galaxy.

That's where my hands are tied and I'm still waiting for definitive execution orders.

As moderator Mike of Workflow, you would also be faced with doing a bit of weeding (perhaps to XI) and then it would be up to the moderator folks in the XI/PI space to also determine whether they need to and can sort and make more granular their topics.

Having personally done this for the community on the ABAP front (manually) to jump start them, a few years back, I can tell you it ain't an easy task.

I've put in another call to product management around this.

Hopefully we can sort the change and the corresponding BPM forum creation out with them.

If there isn't any content in the Galaxy forum coming in after such a split then that would need to be reevaluated by the Product Manager.

I also am frustrated that this has taken such a while to resolve.

[pokrakam]

Hi Marilyn,

I wasn't having a go at you, sorry if it came across that way. My point is if there is that the creation of a Galaxy-BPM forum should be a completely separate issue that has nothing to do with the topic of this thread.

Also, if there is no content then we're not really tossing anything away. We can only 'split' something if there are two resulting parts. 12 out of over 37,000 messages contain 'ARIS' (only one from this year, an unanswered question). Harldly what I call a serious division.

Of course it is possible that the overwhelming workflow content of the forum dissuades people who are interested in those things which the "BPM" part was originally intended to represent (ARIS, Solution Manager, Collaboration tasks, etc.).

As far as the new BPM/Galaxy is concerned, this was never part of the picture until now. I have seen the technology on a few occasions and even taken part in the ASUG/Sapphire influence council sessions, and I know enough to say that the two technologies (workflow and BPM) are worlds apart, completely incompatible and even targeted at different areas of the enterprise. It could even be argued that Galaxy-BPM should belong under BPX. Forum turnover should also play a part in deciding where to split or combine topics, and at current volumes in the BPM/WF forum I do not see space for anything else that is not directly related.

As far as weeding goes, luckily there's not a lot and 90% of it is either spam or XI.

If you need a moderator for a new BPM forum, I would of course be happy to chip in since I am also interested in it. It will take some years for it to pick up significant volume since the product isn't even commercially available yet.

Cheers,

Mike

[marilyn_pratt]

 Mike Pokraka wrote:
I wasn't having a go at you, sorry if it came across that way

Didn't come across like that to me. You're just doing your job and I'm grateful for that. And I'm frustrated that while trying to do mine (support your efforts and others in keeping it smooth here) things are moving too slowly.

Thanks for doing diligence and further checking the contents. Just spoke to some IDS Scheer folks about engagement. I'm sure if there was a proper place to position Solman/Aris questions there would be re-kindled interest. But it does seem like the vast majority of the questions here are workflow focused. Period.

We should rename. Let me try yet again to get that done.

By the way, I dug up a very old correspondence from May 2006 with a past BPM forum moderator and it explained the original dilemma like this:

BPM is not a functional module. It is generic.
It spans the complete software lifecycle so some elements are not technical (such as the whiteboarding that takes place before even beginning to consider what or if software such as SAP is needed) through to the software automation layers (such as workflow or customizing) and beyond that to performance analysis, task management or process mining.
There are technical aspects (such as engineering a workflow or orchestrating a b2b process or the WS-BPEL standard) and there are business aspects (such as defining the KPIs and planning the processes). It depends on the roles involved and the phase of a project.
It is evolutionary. Some aspects such as workflow have been around for a long time. Others, such as XI are relatively recent improvements to the SAP offering.
But above all, SAP NetWeaver integrates the existing and new aspects of business process management so it is useful even in conjunction with existing pre-NetWeaver installations. So expect postings that range from technical to business in this forum (but not functional).
For a good example of the SAP NetWeaver integration read Thomas's blog at
https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/2437 [original link is broken] [original link is broken] [original link is broken]
So the trick would be to create a similar post that makes the distinction between bpm(1), bpx, bpm(2) and change management clear.

Marilyn

[pokrakam]

That sounds like the wise ramblings of a certain Alan R.

> So expect postings that range from technical to business in this forum (but not functional).

That - along with much of the other stuff - also reflects my personal opinon of what I'd like to see. My motivation for starting this was to stop wasting people's time who keep posting there to no avail.

On another note, haven't we started the whole BPX thing for this exact purpose (the business parts of BPM)?

If you need more due diligence:

178 out of 37,000+ posts (0.5%) contain 'BPM'. A random sampling of those shows I'm not far off the mark with my "90% spam and XI" guesstimate, it's probably slightly less. At a generous estimate I'd say that leaves about 30-50 'good' BPM needles in that haystack.

I'll probably have some time next week to start shifting some of that out in order to get a headstart on the 'weeding' process.

Cheers,

Mike

[marilyn_pratt]

Mike Pokraka wrote: On another note, haven't we started the whole BPX thing for this exact purpose (the business parts of BPM)?

Yeah, and that would mean TWO BPM forums. One on the business side and one on the Technical side for the product thingy Galaxy whatever we call it.

With your metrics that would be 2 forums with 2 posts in each: welcome, and rules of engagement.

All joking aside, this is what has also slowed down getting the final answer.

M.

[pokrakam]

>

> Yeah, and that would mean TWO BPM forums.  One on the business side and one on the Technical side for the product thingy Galaxy whatever we call it.

Ah-hah! And that's exactly why I think we should start something new in Emerging Technologies and observe the content to see what type of people use it and move it when it becomes mainstream.

I know it's pitched at the BPX-type users, but some us want to get our hands dirty, and SAP have gotten it wrong with GP so who knows where this ends up going.

Alternatively we could of course continue this discussion at TechEd. Gala-BPXy is still on it's way to public market so another month or two without a forum won't do much harm.

Cheers,

Mike

Edited by: Mike Pokraka on Aug 28, 2008 8:51 PM

[marilyn_pratt]

then wish me luck selling this to my manager tomorrow

See you at TechEd in any event.

[pokrakam]

No worries, appreciate your efforts.

Had I known it would stir up this many waves I might not have bothered, but then again perhaps this is a good thing for reasons beyond just a forum name.

Cheers,

Mike

[marilyn_pratt]

Candidly. I'm thrilled you have done so Needed to get this resolved 2 years ago and you have powerfully given the push. PMs have agreed (thank you Saujanya). I speak to management shortly.

[KKilhavn]

I agree with a name change to SAP Business Workflow (or perhaps just "Business Workflow"?

I think the topic "Guided Procedures" should have its own forum. It is certainly related to "Business Workflow", but there are so many differences that I would say it should rather be in its own forum. The are big differences in interface as well as in underlying technology as far as I can understand.

Not that I know a lot about GP, but from my few small attempts I have gathered that my workflow knowledge is of little help when trying to create a BP. The only knowledge that seems to be needed for both is the process knowledge.

[marilyn_pratt]

 Kjetil Kilhavn  wrote: I think the topic "Guided Procedures" should have its own forum. 

That is a very valid point your raise. Again the problem is getting moderation as we make these more granular.

[narin_nandivada3]

Hi Mike,

It would be easy to identify if the name would be SAP BUSINESS WORKFLOW so that if any one is new to this place he/she can identify easily seeing this name...

Hope this name gets changed

Regards

Narin.

[vivekkrishnan]

Mike,

Its good to have the name as SAP Business Workflow.

Regards,

Vivek K

[Former Member]

My suggestion is to change the name of the forum.It will be better if it is changed to SAP BUSINESS WORKFLOW as MIKE said.It will be easy for new workflow learner to identify the forum if it is changed.

[former_member184495]

Hi Mike,

rightly said, no one attending BPM threads here and are very few.

So probably create 2 different threads one BPM and other SAP Workflow/Webflow.

Regards,

Aditya

[marilyn_pratt]

Pushing for a final answer.

[pokrakam]

What timing, I was just going to post a "Can we settle this one way or another".

Whilst I personally agree with your earlier points, I started this based on the content and recurring posts like [this one|; and poor souls that never get an answer to their GP questions. I think the comments here bear this out.

It may have been a good idea to have a combined forum in the beginning, but when one topic's popularity drowns out all else to the point that other topics rarely get answers for then it's becomes counterproductive.

May I make a suggestion that when the time comes for Galaxy that new graphincal BPM tool with the long and annoying name (1), we create a relevant forum in Emerging Technologies?

Guided Procedures is still a sticky one, perhaps it needs its own forum? A quick search for the "Guided Procedures" among the forums (past 90 days) reveals:

All forums: 151

Netweaver category: 97

Within Netweaver we have

Composite Application Framework: 56

BPM and Workflow: 9

Adobe: 7

The numbers need no explaining...

Cheers,

Mike

(1) You have no idea - or perhaps you do - how many groans there were from the BPM comunities when "SAP Netweaver Business Process Management" was announced at Sapphire! Partly for reasons of potential for confusion and partly because it lost a lot of the original 'Galaxy' appeal...

Edited by: Mike Pokraka on Jul 30, 2008 4:37 PM - Corrected official product name in footnote.

[Former Member]

+1 Mike.

Totally agree with your proposal.

Regards,

KKR

[Former Member]

G'Day,

What Mike has said is a very good suggestion. Nowadays Workflows are very much required by all the clients.There are more WorkFlow consultants Required and it would be better to have a Dedicated Forum only for WorkFlows. I would be glad if it's SAP Business Workflow

Regards,

Dheepak

[Former Member]

Hi,

Its a very good suggestion, It would be better if the name is

SAP business workflow.

Kind Regards

Hari Sankar M

[keohanster]

Hi Mike,

Well, you probably already know what I think ;).

If there is little to no traffic for BPM, then let's call the forum what it is, SAP Business Workflow - Or Workflow and Guided Procedures?

Sidebar: I posted a question to various forums a few weeks ago, regarding 'How can SAP, and ASUG WF/BPM serve you better'. I am summarizing the responses I got below, in hopes that it helps guide you in your quest. The names have been excluded to protect the identities, but I think there is some very valuable info in here. Particularly the final point - which I will follow up on with the respondent.

Anyway, you didn't ask for it, but here it is.

> 1. Have you attended any webcasts related to SAP lately?

No. Not lately, and not ever. (I suppose I am old-fashioned...)

> 2. Are there any topics related to Workflow and BPM that you think are

> important for the 'community'?

Integrating workflows and guided procedures - e.g. enhancing existing workflows to use browser interfaces.

> 3. Looking ahead a year, what do you see as challenges in this area?

Processes that can be executed either in R/3 or in browsers, with information about the process progress etc, as in Guided Procedures. This will probably be the developers nightmare for the next few years.

1. Have you attended any webcasts related to SAP lately?

-yes I did - quite a few, but mostly on web related stuff and XI.

2. Are there any topics related to Workflow and BPM that you think are important for the 'community'?

- personally for me, I still find the guided procedure in Portals not so user friendly and limited. I think more education and influence around GP will be great. I think the community will also appreciate it.

3. Looking ahead a year, what do you see as challenges in this area?

- GP and UWL. I think the concept of "IT doing the first time and the business managing their rules" would be challenging. I have not yet seen this happen, especially on the logistics side. There is a session this year on the same topic at TechEd and I look forward to this session. Hopefully it will help us get some insight.

Right now I am struggling with even getting Workflow off the ground and getting the business to understand what Workflow is and trying to have them budget for it. Workflow is still new to the functional group and even getting them to consider Workflow verse alternatives is somewhat of a challenge. I really have had a great consultant that has taken me under his wing and taken the time to teach me. I think we would be a great story for a presentation.

My challenges for the next year, is how to get over the hump of selling workflow to the business and actually getting projects planned out. I don't know if anyone has an anwer to that one. My other challege is how to handle transfer of knowledge and maintaining workflow that has been built by consultants.

1) I have not attended many SAP webcasts (just one on Solution Manager in the past few months) I'm planning on attending one this comming Monday on BPM.

2) I think understanding UWL / SBWP differences, advantages, limitations on one vs the other, would be an important topic. Also more information on Extended Notiications

3) Challenges: Upgrades and impact on WF, Unicode and WF and having more WF ABAP OO objects delivered by SAP, other than the "Absence Notification" sample.

1. I havenu2019t personally attended but as a company we give a webinar once a week and weu2019ve had some great attendance

2. Technically I think weu2019re OK. We see the need to tell C-level execs where workflow / BPM can help them in businessu2026.

_3. Workflow is becoming more and more obscure in the SAP landscapeu2026

[martin_nooteboom]

I agree with Mike. I think it would be better to rename the forum. The focus is on Workflow and I don't think any ccBPM people check the forum. So I vote for renaming it.

Regards,

Martin

[pokrakam]

@ Marilyn: Yes the 'new' BPM occurred to me too, but then I thought that's a) still a long way off and b) from what I saw a completely different technology. Perhaps it's just the forum description that needs updating, but something there is currently misleading. Perhaps it's SAP Product Management itself that's misleading, becuause we have ccBPM and BPM which have zero in common from a development/implementation perspective.

The same actually goes for Business Workflow vs BPM (the new one, previously known as Galaxy). See, here we already need to be careful to avoid confusion

@ Saujanya: I will certainly keep you in the loop if there are any offline discussions - I would ask you to do likewise. So far everything is in the forums, I just wrote my original post here on the spur of the moment after finding one too many lost and confused XI questions posted in BPM/WF.

Anyhow, I have posted a note in the forum to get some community input.

Cheers,

Mike

[Former Member]

Hi,

I don't bother that much about the name, but it sounds good to me, renaming the forum to "SAP Workflow" to make it clearer what's inside and more easy to find it for those, who're looking for it

Best wishes,

Florin

[naval_bhatt4]

As we have alreadyhave a forum for BPM so i think its better to name this forum to "SAP Business Workflow".

[Former Member]

I agree to you SAP Business Workflow will be a good name but I hope the questions flow to the new forum. People might get confused as they know Workflow as BPM and Workflow forum.

Thanks

Arghadip

[marilyn_pratt]

I'd say check with your co-moderator, get some feedback from the community and when there is consensus we can implement a change. If I recall the name was the subject of much heated conversation in the past as BPM is now associated with SAP BPM which certainly includes much more than SAP Business Workflow.

I'll also ping some of the colleagues from product management to respond.

Marilyn

[Former Member]

Hi,

It is a good proposal Mike, because it would make it much clear.

But I would say lets wait for the response from the forum and

proceed further.

Please keep me in loop for any further discussions.

Best Regards,

Saujanya.