Has The New SAP Community Killed The Community?

[Former Member]

Hi,

It might be my own impression, but am I the only who thinks that the new SAP Community website has killed the community?

If I take ABAP development for example, what used to lively space with tens of blog posts and discussions every day seems to be a deserted land without any activity anymore...

(The only exception is horst.keller, who seems to be the only one who somehow survived the migration, but without any followers, I'm afraid).

[former_member193210]

Just learned something today.

By using the Excel template to access the page for a "Tag", I could then click on the "Follow" button.

Hopefully, I will now be able to follow what is posted under these different tags by clicking on my icon and selecting "Followed Activity" from the menu.

[Former Member]

It's good I have built reputation in SAP BRIM / Hybris Billing group before this change.

Personal profile is too poor when comparing with previous version, reputation points doesn't make sense anymore.

I must admit I'm not motivated to answer questions in this community.

Br,

Mario

[stefan_schnell]

Hello community,

I am a little bit surprised about the multiplicity of negative opinions about the SAP Community. I understand your concerns about the changes, many things are new and you can't find information on the usual place. But we all have had the possibility to shape this platform in a long beta phase and the most members didn't. We all know before that these changes will come. In my eyes the operator doesn't kill the community. Now it is our task to build the SAP Community with our feedback.

Cheers
Stefan

[Jelena]

Stefan, you must have missed the numerous critical feedback posts in the Open Beta space on the old SCN. The community members did what we could. Community was not consulted when a decision was made to go ahead with the migration.

Unfortunately, we have no tools to build the community on this web site. The social features that were added in SDN to SCN migration and that helped to shape the community are no longer available. And I don't see any new tools. If you have any specific suggestions then speak up. Personally, I don't see how one would build a community on this website in it's current form.

[ricardojasso]

Stefan,

There appears to be a misconception in the intention or objective of a beta release or beta phase of a software product. A beta phase is started when the product is almost done with almost all its features completed but which still is prone to errors due to known or unknown bugs. At the time of a beta release there's not much a user can do to influence the shape of a product. All that is required of her/him is to test it as much as she/he can and report all bugs encountered in the phase. So, blaming it on the users is IMO unfair.

Maybe the team intended to use such a “beta” phase to gather missing or unknown requirements from the community and work on the given requirements using an agile development process. But this clearly didn’t work and again, blaming the users for doing a poor requirement gathering and design job when they have no control over the process is IMO unfair.

Regards,

Ricardo

[SimoneMilesi]

Stefan,

Jelena and Ricardo stated all, loud and clear.

But I want to try to be a bit more constructive than my usual mood.

Ok, let's go! How?

Because right now I feel i'm just a builder with pail and shovel to play on the beach and I'm required to build the Taj Mahal.

So, please, show how my pail and shovel can do the work.

[former_member42743]

Yeah, I'm not sure what you expect from us moderators and users. Most were simply testers, not designers. A Beta version is supposed to be close to production release. It's not going to be modified to any great extent once in Beta. Beta is supposed to be used to identify the final bugs caused more by having large numbers of users and having users do unexpected things that designers never anticipated. It is not a redesign of the product. Please search on page 2 of these "Answers", (which really should all be comments), forJurgens comments. Jurgen was by far and away the most active contributor in SCN with over 65,000 points. He was surprised by the decision to roll this out.

I mean honestly, can you really defend rolling out a text centric application, (blogging, questions and answers) and you don't even provide a basic spell check with it? Honestly? Who does that in this day and age? That isn't something that moderators should have even had to cover in a beta test.

You said "we all have had the possibility to shape this platform in a long beta phase". Did you suggest any changes that were incorporated into the released product?

[Former Member]

Yes, it seems as if only "Active" Q&As are kept alive for a few days? I wanted to post a reply to a question here:

https://archive.sap.com/discussions/thread/3963623 which was active less than three weeks ago. The only place I see the Q&A is in the "Archive" section. No ability to rate or reply. What?!

This is SAP's idea of what should be in archive?

Shutting down threads after a few days is no way to maintain an active and meaningful community!

[Steffi_Warnecke]

Hello Kevin,

all questions (with at least one reply) from the old SCN went into the archive during the migration to the new platform.

But that was communicated before the move.

Every new question created now will of course not be put in the archive after a few days of no activity.

If you have open questions of your own that are not yet answered, you need to create a new question, can link to the old one (so everyone sees the solution-seeking had already begone and what was discussed earlier) and start from there.

.

Regards,

Steffi.

[former_member190818]

Hello,

I'm completely lost with the new community. Can't able to see all the contents of the topic and I'm not able to submit any Q&A. Everything is in waiting status for some moderator.

Away from this discussion, I want to give one more feedback on SAP Cloud solutions. SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer is totally dump when compared to their competitor. One small change I've to wait half day to implement. Such a horrible system it is becoming. I am an ex-employee of SAP and no idea where SAP is leading to in particular to Cloud.

Regards,

MB

[former_member111991]

We all need to direct all issues identified,to make SAP-SCN more effective.

SAP-SCN is our knowledge centre,that we should never forget.

Thanks.

[former_member226850]

i agree too.

[Former Member]

I agree. This is definitely worse than I ever imagined. I used to be able to do a Google search for 'SAP' and any key words I wanted and quickly find information on what I was looking for including OSS Note info. Now all I see is a hit on the initial question or key words with a "REPLIES (#)" at the bottom that does not link to anything and says "Archived". When I search the Archived section of the Community, I can't find the replies there either. Big loss of functionality in my opinion!!!!

[Jelena]

Hm, I have not had many issues with Google search after the indexing (or whatever was happening there) got a chance to get done after the first few days. You might want to open a separate question on this with specific examples.

[vinita_kasliwal]

I think the notification not being sent to the mail is the biggest disaster

who really has the time to keep logging in to check the reply to the question which was posted I use to do that once a day and then go back based on what reply im getting

but now its just once... and rather than answering questions its more fun reading these sort of posts where everyone shares similar feeling now since around a month and It doesnt feel like things are going to be any better...

sigh .. I too miss the old community

[Former Member]

All Moderators / SAP Community Team,

Really this new SAP Community is complicated, i don't see any value additions by this so called "new" version. Now so much confusion.

Regards,

Chandra

[matt]

Once again can I point out that moderators have very little say in what goes in regarding the functionality and administration of the site itself.

[JL23]

it's like accusing the traffic police in case of road holes 🙂

[former_member42743]

More like blaming the police for the traffic backup when the traffice engineer decided a traffic light at every intersection was a good thing and none of them would be synced with each other. When the engineer who designs it communtes to work on public transit in an entirely different city.

[loyd_enochs3]

Matthew, I am sure we all know that moderators have little ability to change things, but moderators have far greater opportunities to get messages to those who can change things than us users.

[Former Member]

Matthew / Jurgen / Craig,

I want to repeat Loyd Enoch's below comment.

Loyd Enoch's comment

[JL23]

Okay partially your assumption may be correct even it is just an extreme short cut.

We became moderators because we are subject matter experts and showed an high engagement with our participation in answering questions and caring about the community by alerting moderators on bad content.

And some moderators (there are more than 500) are invited in community projects and have this way some kind of influence. Like myself who is among a dozen others in the advisory council for this transition. We had an earlier hand on the new features, we could test and give feedback sometimes months sometimes just days ahead of the entire community.

I was able to test blogs and questions & answers, isolated from any integration which came very very late into the game, I am not sure anymore if I even saw it before Beta was opened to the public. Even the tags were just test tags and I did not see the list of tags earlier than anyone else here.

And if you followed my and others activities in the Beta forum then you would know that we had almost addressed anything between May and September, ahead of Go-Live. The Go-Live date was also a surprise for us.

But what will you do if you have to leave your apartment because the building will be demolished by the end of the year and construction workers have not yet finished their work on your new house? You either have to live on a building site for a while or you move to a hotel which was not possible for this community.

I felt not being heard as an individual (yet I know they listened), I expected the storm, I saw the storm from a distance and was glad that I spend these days on a real little island in the Indian ocean 🙂

[Former Member]

Jurgen,

Agree. Really liked your examples from day to day life. I am sure you are wonderful process expert and system integrator.

And i have full confidence that new community will be on track in coming days, and idea on which new community developed will be successful.

With this comment as individual SAP Community user, i wish to inform all Moderators, SAP Community Developers & Team that please go ahead with your plan, "big systems are not built in a day". However it will be, i am an avid user of SAP Community.

All the best.

[matt]

0.000001% against 0.0000000001% 😉

[Jelena]

Loyd, I don't mean to brag but, as a highly decorated community member 🙂 , I even have personal contact information of some SCN team members. I was not able to change much. The only visible change from what I've mentioned is addition of "unanswered questions" filter. But it's pretty much useless because no one marks their questions as answered anymore.

Some strategic decisions have been made by some people upstairs for the reasons that are beyond the wide SCN community's understanding or interests. Unfortunately, we are the ones who are stuck with the consequences. Moderators and everyone included.

[ankurch]

My comment was deleted !! And i don't even get the notification!!!!

[Former Member]

Yes its true..

I have book marked many good Documents in my older version. Still i could not retrieve old documents.

If i use same Id and Password also i could not get it back

[former_member196530]

Hi ,

The new SAP community is like a Bhool Bhulaiya ( a Hindi term means

a maze/labyrinth/confusing ) .It will be challenging for the SAP aspirants and SMEs to get into track as they use to be in touch with entire community round the clock in Old classic SDN.I am looking for many surprise in future and feeling low since I am with the old one from 2007 .I think I need to learn the new tool before I share anything from my long SAP career to contribute and learn new stuff.

[former_member195402]

At least I will leave this community now. SDN was fine, SCN was okay, but this one is useless. Bye.

[siva_vasireddy2]

Yes it is True

[Jelena]

Yeah, except the tags on SO make sense and on SCN they don't.

"Member since July 11, 2017" suggesting to take time to the people who've been here for 10 years - wow, that's quite bold...

[Former Member]

why could't you continue with your old ids or change from your old to new.. what made you to create new profile

I blame SCN and Id got messed up while changing the mail ids. they dont have a option to merge accounts.

"Member since July 11, 2017" does not mean that i am using from July 11. dont predict just looking at the profile...

[matt]

Said a member since Member since June 21, 2017.... 😉

[matt]

But Jelana kept her name and is well known. sapbinary key is anonymous and I don't recall your input in the earlier SCN. It's not at all unreasonable to expect that someone with a recent time stamp is a recent member.

[Former Member]

I accept that...

Some say I need have 10 years old id, some say i should have got 15k+ points, some say i should have been selected as MOM/Mentor/Moderator to comment "take your time". woww.

It is like i have to spend 2+ years in support project before jump into writing code in implementation project. Anyway I keep quiet and leave this thread. forgive me if i have written anything wrong.

Thank you moderator( whoever it was) for accepting my previous answer.

[matt]

Sorry to disappoint you, but that was me pressing the wrong button, which I instantly undid.

[VeselinaPeykova]

I have been taking my time since OpenBeta launched and I can conclude, that I am not 'loving it' despite of my feeble attempts to fix whatever I can on my end.

I do not know how exactly you use the new site, but try something really basic: the link to your answer is https://answers.sap.com/answers/251244/view.html.

Paste the URL in a new tab - are you able to view your answer?

How long does it take you to find all threads, where you have participated by comments and answers and check regularly if there were any updates with more information on the subject since the last time you viewed them?

StackOverflow design is not a universal solution, which can be applied to every community and use case. In the majority of the threads, where I have participated, Discourse or even phpBB are better suited for the purpose.

[jcgood25]

First of all, if your attempts are 'feeble' then we have a very gloomy outlook. Because I am following you or the primary tag, this was the URL shared two times in my Activity Feed: https://answers.sap.com/comments/260990/view.html I was very fortunate to arrive here and actually read your comment by clicking page 3 and seeing the '6 days ago' parent answer where your comment was added. I consider myself very lucky to expand the collapsed comments link and find your post - I assume the pagination or comment collapsing prevented any sort of auto indexing to position the page directly on your comment.

[VeselinaPeykova]

Yes, links work neither with paginated threads, nor with hidden comments (after a show more link). It is just a coincidence that I commented to the newest answer.

Unfortunately, this is not something, that I can fix easily on my own. I am also incapable of elevating my own privileges and access the hidden reply option in nested comments 🙂

[Jelena]

Touche. 🙂 However, I have a link to the previous account in my profile. And, as you noted, correctly, I use the same name. By comparison, Google -> ""sapbinary key" site:sap.com" -> few posts dated only as far back as 5 days ago.