Application Development Discussions
Join the discussions or start your own on all things application development, including tools and APIs, programming models, and keeping your skills sharp.
cancel
Turn on suggestions
Auto-suggest helps you quickly narrow down your search results by suggesting possible matches as you type.
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Has The New SAP Community Killed The Community?

Former Member

‎10-27-2016 6:28 PM

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).

90 REPLIES 90

Jelena
Active Contributor

‎07-18-2017 7:31 PM

0 Kudos

I honestly have no idea what you are talking about, who are those "some" and where/when they "say" such things. Sorry but posting an opinion not supported by factual evidence on a public website and then expecting everyone just to agree with you seems rather unreasonable.

Well, more fact-based comments are already provided below. Might want to take this as a learning experience.

VeselinaPeykova
Active Contributor

‎07-19-2017 9:52 AM

I am aware of Helmut's app, in fact, I endorsed it in one of my blogs and I participated in the recent app testing.

It is strange, that you mention the app as an argument, because it is developed by a SC member as an alternative to the non-existent navigation at site launch (we got the Excel file, which became the basis of the app after the production start). It is still superior (IMHO) to anything that the team has come up with to address navigation issues since then.

I am also familiar with the way to find links to blog comments (shared the method in October).

The problem, which I tried to point out, is that this is not the link, which you encounter in activity stream/notifications. It is also not available from the direct share link (which most members will assume as the proper link for sharing). If you see a notification in your activity stream, which points to this answer, you will not know, that it is positioned on page 3, so you will have to construct the url manually by substituting the page number several times, until you find the right position. Do you sincerely believe, that website users need to do all these additional steps to obtain a proper link to a comment? This is done by a company, which is selling the idea of user-friendly software...

The fact, that you consistently reply to your own answer (thus triggering notifications only to yourself) instead to members' comments, speaks volumes about the ease of use and intuitivity of the platform.

Former Member

‎07-20-2017 12:59 PM

0 Kudos

I completely agree.

This happens only when a thread has more than one page as you said in other comment. I dont think it will take much time to fix it.

Still I assume that this is bug. Having said that this is not something which is hard to achieve.

Do you sincerely believe, that website users need to do all these additional steps to obtain a proper link to a comment? This is done by a company, which is selling the idea of user-friendly software...

Share link is really cool feature and i love it.

Do you honestly think that below sentence is acceptable? Making fun of freshers/new ones/young ones.

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

Thank you.

VeselinaPeykova
Active Contributor

‎07-20-2017 1:58 PM

0 Kudos

I can see, that you still encounter difficulties figuring out how comments/answers and notifications work, or you cannot distinguish the comments of one member from another, or you overestimate the significance of the Mentor's lemon badge.

For the first problem I could recommend reading sajid.amir4's blogs, for the second - you can probably try creating a custom CSS (less scrolling, different colors and fonts might help a little).

Fixing links is a trivial matter, which should be extremely easy to solve, but the fact that it is just one of the plethora of little (and bigger) bugs and design flaws, reported ad nauseam with no positive outcome, makes it increasingly hard to keep a positive attitude.

If you happen to follow a few moderators and more active members or if you spend time browsing discussions and see the countless times people try to educate members how to assign the right tags, how to use comments and answers, how to mark an answer as accepted, you would realize, why your comments made people jumpy and react more harshly than they usually do.

I am not sure what kind of reaction is expected from me regarding Jelena's comment, as I am not a moderator, but an ordinary member - just like you. If you believe, that a comment is against the site rules, all you need to do is report it via the 'Alert moderator' link below the corresponding comment body.

Former Member

‎07-20-2017 2:41 PM

0 Kudos

I have been participating in https://archive.sap.com/documents/space/pi-and-soa-middleware space since 2006. I reply and post. I never encountered any comments like that.

I wish I could hit the button as i never hesitated to hit "Alert moderator" to report duplicate threads,replies not related to the question,etc..

mmcisme1
Active Contributor

‎10-30-2017 2:01 PM

Well - as you can tell - you are not the only one! I do hope people come back a bit if only to point out the issues they have. And Keep doing it. Maybe we can work to make it better again.

A community is just that - a group of people who are trying to reach the same goal - my definition. Our goal is to get questions answered, talk about issues, and understand new things. Not to try to figure out how to use the platform.

The platform matters. We all have a limited amount of time. We don't want to spend that time trying to figure out how something works. So when you come here and see something that doesn't work - I suggest you write a blog - start a conversation like this one.

If you are a developer - you know nothing works right the first time. I think the frustration is that it seems like no one is listening. In this, I am frustrated too. The sense of community is broken. The activity has been slower. A lot of the new blogs are on HANA. That's great. I'm filing them for future use. My company isn't one of the 1000 on HANA. I wonder what percent of SAP customers that is. I asked. I was told that it is being upgraded/moved to faster than expected. But until then, what do we do? I go to the archived answers/questions a lot. So maybe the community has not been as active because not as many people are on HANA, and it feels like this site is not for the "old" ABAP stuff.

Now the platform - For me I wear many hats. One would be a developer and that's the one I wear most often.

So if I step back and pretend for a moment that I worked on the new community platform. If I think of the new SAP community as something new, and don't compare it to the old. What are the most important things that are wrong? Is anything done correctly? What are my end users (us) saying? What are the quiet people not saying? What can I get implemented quickly for a small win? I check with the users if they are working around the system and not with it, there is a problem. Where did the developer miss my requirements? Is the design flawed?

So now I've thought about it. Where is the list? What is being worked on? What will be worked on? Has someone heard what we have to say? That's a big thing - communication. If I completely missed the requirements, my users want to know what I'm doing to "fix" the issue.

So:

Here are where jerry.jandapointed me to the release notes. ( Of course, the WIKI isn't working right now. )

https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/WHP/SAP+Community+Release+Notes

I hope to see people come back here. We had a great community. We still have a nice one. People care or discussions like this one wouldn't be taking place.

I am not the developer, designer, or project manager for this site. I am a user. I am using my voice to ask for improvement. I hope everyone does the same.

Michelle

former_member230675
Active Contributor

‎11-05-2017 8:51 AM

0 Kudos

Hi,

If we select a main tag, then the sub tag should show possible values under the main tag. Whereas now we can select any thing. It is not following proper hierarchy.


It is very unfortunate SAP can not put a simple validation for their own website / product.


Then How can SAP convince their customer.



Thanks


Abdul

JL23
Active Contributor
In response to former_member230675

‎11-05-2017 8:58 AM

0 Kudos

what kind of sub-tag do you have in mind?

I personally would consider such kind of hierarchy (if that is what you mean) redundant,

e.g. if you choose MM (Materials Management) and would then also select (MM Purchasing) as sub-tag

But some questions might be cross modules, e.g. stock transfer questions which affect MM and SD, or account postings in a goods receipt could be MM and Finance, statistics eventually MM and BW.

This is not at all a hierarchy and would not be possible with your wanted validation.

former_member230675
Active Contributor

‎06-01-2018 8:29 PM

0 Kudos

https://searchsap.techtarget.com/feature/New-leadership-and-redesign-may-spark-SAP-Community-revival

Any update from SAP on the revival of community?