how to use new sap community

[former_member185116]

Respected moderators,

How to use this new SAP community platform,

what is the need of changing the interface , when users world over are accustomed to the old interface(which was user friendly)...

what is the need of displaying the country flag,(as it is a community belonging to sap users worldwide)...

please provide some document at the starting page on how to use new community (like tags etc.)

thank you..

vinay reddy.

[matt]

It's not moderators who control the functionality available. That's the site owners and administrators. 🙂

[former_member190293]

I'm just asking myself: what was the aim of rolling out the new platform which is fairly unusable in its current state and has lots of bugs? You call this "better user experience"? We hardly need such type of experience, I guess.

[engswee]

Unfortunately, there wasn't enough critical mass "actual" participation during the Open Beta. Many were just looking for the easy 5 points and a nice shiny Beta Tester badge, therefore there were a lot of "nice look", "looks great on mobile" etc. And before long, when the poll was conducted to ascertain the community's feedback, it managed to to achieve the meager 3.46 (the bar was 3) out of 5 to go ahead with the launch. A few of us tried to push back but our little voices were never going to be enough to hold it back...

So the way I see it, the community collectively is as responsible as the SCN/1DX team for where we are today. As they say "be the change that you want to see".

There is no going back, so everyone has a choice to

a) complain about where we are and do nothing

b) go somewhere else if there is any

c) do something positive about it, i.e. report bugs, provide feedback, help a fellow community member find their way

#justsaying

#mytwocents

[former_member190293]

Hi Eng Swee Yeoh!

I'm agree with you and now I try my best to adopt myself to new community behavour and to help others to do the same.

Regards, Evgeniy.

[Steffi_Warnecke]

Oh Eng, I wish I could share your post in a status update. Instead... to the coffee corner!

[joachimrees1]

Hi Eng, thanks for this thoughts! Maybe you want to re-post your comment as a blog, so it can be liked and prominently displayed / featured (either by the "power of the crowd" or by administrative means)?

[former_member42743]

Thanks Eng, but I respectfully disagree.

It is NOT the end users to be the final arbitrator of this site. This is an SAP owned and managed site. It is their public face to the community. Yes, it is a valuable tool for many of us, myself included. But many of the issues being discussed were reported during Beta. It was buggy during Beta and it is buggy during rollout. Were there any real focus groups of non-SAP people brought in to review it at different stages of development? Like at the begining and not just Beta? Beta is a little late. There are always consultants on the bench. I'm sure any number would have jumped at the chance to be paid to spend a week at Waldorf or local SAP education centers hammering on the system and providing input. I'm sure key partners of SAP would have let some of their people attend.

UI Design and appearance aside, users shouldn't have to deal with buttons that don't work, pages that need to be refreshed to make action choices work, poor design of getting tags mapped from the old communites, blogs improperly mapped over, any recent questions being worked on at cut-over being abandoned in the archives and many features that we had that were just left behind. Spel ck anynoe? Have you looked at your list of followers or those you are following? Nice alphabetizing there huh? Being limited to two attachments a posting?

Sorry, the beta testers and community were not responsible for what they got. We were not consulted on the selection of Wordpress. We were not asked about color designs. The issue of the excessive white space was brought up many times in Beta, the worry about tags was brought up many times. I even believe the colors were brought up in Beta.

Craig

[htammen]

I think it was absolutely necessary to rollout a new, fresher platform. Currently I am sitting in my kitchen and write this on my smartphone. This wasn't possible with old SCN.

But the most important reason for the new community is that it has the potential to bring back quality to it. I was very eager on SCN at the beginning of the platform. After some time I lost interest cause many people just pasted some useless links from help.sap.com to get some points. That way the platform became useless for me. At this new platform those comments and replies will hopefully be down voted. That shows those people that their comments are not welcome.

Another point is usability and acceptance. Today's UIs must not be made for people like me who are 50 years old. They have to be made for the 20 year old people whom we have to show that SAP doesn't mean old fashioned and boring. These young people will work in another way as we do. I can talk about this cause I have a 20 year old daughter and I see how she is doing.

Have a look around and see what other companies do (Google, Apple, Microsoft,...) They are all going new ways. Do we want SAP always to be years behind? In the last years I could, for the first time, tell my (SAP) customers: SAP is going a step ahead and that's a wonderful feeling.

Of course the new platform has to be polished a bit or maybe a lot. But we shouldn't just complain about it. Instead think about the opportunities it will offer after the first complaints wave has faded away.

If their weren't courages people in history who tried new things we still would ride on horses.

Helmut

[Jelena]

I would love to report tons of bugs and see what others have already reported. How should I do this? I have no idea.

There should've been a huge post on the home page with a big link "click here to report a bug". And an equally big link "list of already reported bugs" with some ETA for the fix (well, one can dream). [Note: there is, in fact, a link labeled "Report bugs...". It's written in small letters and one needs to scroll 2 times and look closely to find it. Also it leads to a long blog where one needs to find a link to create a question. Oh, and the tag is not pre-filled, so hopefully you didn't forget to copy-paste it from the blog. Still - how do I see what has already been posted with "Using SAP.com" tag? No clue.]

I have a job to do, I don't have time to read blogs on how to report a bug. Those who are interested in the feedback need to make it very easy and simple for everyone to submit it. Post a big link on the home page instead of a stock photo of people drinking coffee and laughing.

And don't even try blaming this whole thing on lack of community participation in Beta. Na-ah. We did our fair share. You can see that a lot of input was if not ignored then pushed for "after the go-live". If memory serves, we asked for another round of testing but a decision was made to go ahead regardless. SAP should be thankful people still come to SCN, even if it's just to complain. Option D "do something while complaining" is also very viable IMHO. Why does it always have to be "all or nothing"?

[jcgood25]

559 discussions is a good place to start:

https://archive.sap.com/discussions/space/scn-beta

Agree with you Jelena that you have a right to complain 🙂

[VeselinaPeykova]

Sorry Helmut, but I will respectfully disagree.

Have you tried from your smartphone to find out where exactly is the last posted comment to a multi-paged thread? Right now, what I do from my laptop, is press CTRL+F, type the user name which you see in answers list (sometimes this is not even the name of the person, who commented), use find next and look at the timestamps, which are also don't help much if more than an hour has passed. If I cannot fin the name on the first page, I go to the next page, repeat the same exercise, then the next one - I hope you get the idea... How easy is this to do from a smartphone? My own phone is S3Mini, by the way...

I don't agree that any respectable community could afford to dismiss the existence of more senior people or not consider the less fortunate with any form of impairment.

I am a bit younger than you (still in my 30s), I play a lot of computer games, read on my Kindle and tinker with software. Nobody, who knows me in real life, could say that I can't embrace the new. Before I became a SAP consultant, I worked in a design company, and I can still appreciate a well thought-out, creative and fresh design. This page has none of these qualities. I won't go into details why - there is a limitation of maximum characters in a single post and it is almost 23:00 already.

I completely understand, that there is no such thing as a bug-free solution, but there no good excuse for bad design.

 In the last years I could, for the first time, tell my (SAP) customers: SAP is going a step ahead and that's a wonderful feeling. 

I can see that we are very different: when people ask me 'Did SAP really change?" I point them to https://go.sap.com/bulgaria/index.html and let them form an opinion by themselves.

[VeselinaPeykova]

It took me a while to write this big comment, which led to another bug, reported by Jelena (thank you!). I copied the whole text to the clipboard, refreshed the page, pasted it again and pressed 'Submit'. I would not dare to think how frustrated would I be if this happened while typing from my phone. And on top of that, I tried to use code to indicate quoting (you have to look closely to see the very light gray box on a white background) and the text in it looks awfully different to what it was, when I posted it. WYSIWYG... sure it is.

[engswee]

Here you go Joachim - https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/13/scn-not-scn/

[engswee]

And I respectfully agree with all that you said... (and it took me three attempts to add this comment... sigh)

[engswee]

Nope. It's not always "all or nothing", option D is fantastic! Thanks for reminding us of that.

[SimoneMilesi]

Helmut, now, please, post any technical/functional thing with just a single screenshot via your mobile phone and let me know...

SCN should not be mobile-first focused since it has always been a tool for tech/functional people to share their experience.
The backend is always desktop, sorry if you believe the opposite.

And this way a desktop-oriented community is more useful.

[joachimrees1]

Thanks Eng!

[former_member196331]

I hope The new Community is Not good. By Comparing Old One, it's Not Attractive or User Friendly,Definitely it's(community) need lot of Changes,(By comparing Old One).I don't know What are the Reasons behind for Changing the style of the community, May be Strong(economy)
reasons are there.

[former_member200650]

I too feel not so user friendly the new interface. The old one one was so user friendly... When we are progressing we should always try to accommodate some new extra features in addition to the old one.

Really disappointed with new interface...

[former_member198060]

I agree with the thread starter here. I find the new interface nearly unusable. Sure new things always require some learning curve and so on.. but this is anything but intuitiv. It feels like the "oldschool" message board which was the heart of SCN has been ripped out and stumped upon. The old message board seems to be so much more user friendly from a UI perspective.

Also it seems the main area (the content) is getting lost in all kind of "community" playground stuff.

SCN should not try to become a second facebook, this is a place from technical people for technical people who care about the content.

[yaniv · Accepted solution]

hi Vinay,

the reason for the change is that we wanted to give the users a better user experience and offer better tools than we did before.

a good starting point on how to use the new tools and services can be the "Get Started" button on the top right, just near your avatars. it will give you some basic information and guides to get started with.

thanks for being part of our community!

Yaniv

[SimoneMilesi · Accepted solution]

Hi Yaniv,

I'm sorry to sound a bit rude and that probably you are not responsible for this but... really?

"A better user experience" rolled out with a 3 page of bug / missing features list (check the old post on SCN)?

"A better user experience" which turned out into more than 200 threads of complains, problems, things not clear? It's all here, just filter "Using SAP.com" tag.

C'mon! Do not try to sell us this without a well covered back!

Take ANY Fiori course on Open Sap and the 1st thing you have to do is "Emphatize with your users".
I did not see anything like that, except if you think "Emphatize with your users" is the bunch of blog posts with "Ehy, new BETA is sooooo cooooool!" we had.
I'm old enough the remember the Microsoft FUD campaign: this looks exactly in the same way.

A bunch of blinky marketing without digging into the real problems.

As Eng, Jelena, Veselina and many others pointed out, we did our best providing tons of critical feedbacks but we have been ignored or everything postponed "into the future" (maybe the DeLorean at TechEd was for this: help us to get some kind of need features).
You (I see you work for SAP, so take the You for "SAP" 🙂 ) have to stop being so forced happily and to throw FUDs to us when without any question there are a bunch of issues!

Honestly, the closing "Thanks for being part of our community" sounds like a mockery to me (i admit that different culture means different feelings, still all of this sounds like i'm gettig threated like a stupid kid: a pat, a candy and everything is ok): which community you can have or build if the tool to do it is broken?

And i wholy avoid the "quality vs quantity" thing because you just have to check the ABAP Development to see how it's working so GOOD!

With all the respect I always have for others' work, this is a mess I feel ashmed to present to a customer (and before than a community, we are YOUR ) a product like this.

BR

Simone

[former_member181891 · Accepted solution]

Hi Simone,

I do empathize with the pains we're going through right now, as a community.

Allow me to share a little bit about me, so you can understand my perspective here: I have been with SAP for about 4 years now, primarily working on the product support side and recently (July 2016) moving over to the Community side. In both of these roles, I've worked quite a lot in the community platform to share information about whatever my topic area or project was at the time. I've only recently become heavily involved in the new Community platform rollout and have been able to apply fresh eyes to the system that my team and Oliver's team and others have been working heads-down in for the past 2+ years to roll out. I will simply say - I get it. I get your frustration and I am working hard with my team, Oliver's team, and the UI/UX team to make the improvements we all desperately need to see implemented in the experience.

I will make you a promise: I won't sugarcoat anything. Things are not shiny and perfect, but ultimately, the move to this platform is the best future-facing plan for this community to thrive.

As we move forward together, there are a few things I'd ask you to consider:

• There was a business need, primarily technical, to move off of Jive sooner than later. Bottom line, it had to happen. Was the timeline difficult? Sure. But it was necessary.
• We operate an agile development shop. This means that we develop in iterations continually, so you should not look at what we have today as the final product. Your feedback was not in any way ignored, it just may have not been implemented yet.
• Within these first few weeks post launch, the technical team is focused on working to smooth out bugs that arose as a result of the migration/launch.
• We are already planning our first 90 days development roadmap to deliver significant improvements to areas that you all (and our team) already identified as critical (e.g. navigation, search, UI, etc.), building on ideas submitted in beta and in IdeaPlace
• We are also working on the 2017 roadmap, as Oliver committed to in his blog post.

I hope we can continue to work together to build a community site here that we can all be proud of.

Best Regards,

Jamie

[kaus19d]

Yes Vinay, I agree, with your Green/Yellow color as Eye-catchy matter, but you have got to understand the search features are improved which is done to reduce the amount of same name threads or can say similar issue threads. For the points matter, it was already updated in he below blog,

https://blogs.sap.com/2016/09/29/points-no-more/

So, from now on, the Karma Points are introduced & that is only you can see yours only, not any others also.

Well see the thing is SCN is about You, Me & Everyone. That's why its called as us. So, we are here to make things work in a better way. Do not give up so easily. Everyone's co-operation can only make the result better. If you have an extra idea, you can always put in the Idea PlaceB. It aint gonna downgrade, so only the last option left is, you can suggest to have some features which are till now not introduced in the Current SCN. In fact, everyone can suggest.

what is the need of changing the interface , when users world over are accustomed to the old interface(which was user friendly)...

Its not that you just recently this week, only came to know about the SCN changes. The new SCN came into scenario to overcome the issues that were there in the old SCN. That is the requirement for a new version of any product in any company, I guess, to overcome/minimize the issues in the old. For example, while typing a discussion-thread earlier, there were no suggestion or similar content poping-up, which is introduced in this new SCN.

Thanks,

Kaushik

[former_member185116]

Hi ,

Our intention is not to blame or discourage any body .

With great Respect to Moderators and Designers , we tried to share our problems.

Thanks you all for your valuable suggestion and feedback.

Regards,

viany.

[Bashir_Hussain]

Hi guys,

I read almost all feedback comments regarding new platform and all are respectable, but kindly be motivated towards change rather blaming the team which actually did excellent efforts to come up with new look n feel interface plus other new features. Just be patient with it and you see that your all observations and concerns has been taking in consideration. Its only matter of time and we all are get use to this new SCN very soon. I personally like such kind of changes and new challenges.

Regards;

Bashir

[Former Member]

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for your above explanation, Then how a contributor will get motivate, without any points allocation, also how to see all questions asked by any user like FICO, CO, Asset Accounting etc, in old system we can follow the respective forums, so that all the activity questions in Que.

As per normal human tendency it will take some time to adopt the new changes, any way thanks for your efforts and value addition:-).

Regards,

Ravi

[former_member185116]

HI ravi,

i do agree with you,

with out points system and likes any member will not be interested in answering the threads..

let us hope the new platform would restore points system..

regards,

vinay..

[Steffi_Warnecke]

Hello Ravi and Vinay,

new platform, old platform... your motivation should never be points, because what's the use of those? What you gain from participating is knowledge and the good feeling of helping others. Both a lot more useful that a bunch of virtual points on a profile.

Sharing is caring, people.

Regards,

Steffi.

[former_member185116]

Hi yavin,

thanks for your reply,

my points in previous community were not converted to karma points in new community..

there is no like button and mark as helpful answer(which would encourage the members to answer)

regards,

vinay.

[matt]

You see the zero, with an arrow above and below it? Click on that to mark helpful/useless answers. And no - your points weren't converted. Everyone starts at zero.

[Siphi]

Hi,

I seem to have lost my membership to the validated learning community group.

[former_member839353]

In your above explanation, I would like to ask you how a contributor can be motivated without any points being awarded, and also how we can see all questions asked by any user, such as FICO questions, CO questions, Asset Accounting questions, etc. In the old system, we could follow the respective forums so that all activity questions could be queued up.

I believe that the new changes will take some time to become ingrained in the human mind. However, I am grateful for your efforts and value addition as well:-).

[former_member1056125]

Points are no longer used in the points system. A moderator modifies a site without making any decisions about its design. The situation cannot be reversed.

[former_member185116]

Hi yaniv,

thanks for your reply,

what happened to my points in earlier community,

while searching for old threads the correct answer was marked in light orange color , this is not eye catching ,

the green color as in old community was easily identifiable

i request the moderators , please restore the old community

or else maintain two communities in parallel..

hope you consider my request.

regards,

vinay.

[matt]

The points system has gone. Moderators just moderate the site - we don't make decisions about the design. This is where we are now, and it isn't going to go back.