The SAP Jam Collaboration 2018Q1 release is out and we’re excited to share new ways to share information and collaborate. There’s an over-arching theme of improving the employee experience via collaboration within several high-level topics that we’ll dive into.
For details on notable items discussed here and for the numerous “smaller” capabilities not discussed, refer to the SAP Jam “What’s new and release summary, Feb 2018” that is located on the SAP Jam Help portal at http://help.sap.com/sapjam then select “SAP Jam Collaboration”.
Continuing the customer-driven enhancements to the very popular intranet capabilities is the ability for the company administrator (normally IT) to identify and delegate content management permissions to specific people.
In many organizations, the people posting the content on the intranet (IT) are not the content owners or subject matter experts. We think this should work differently – why not allow the content owners, or at least someone in their organization responsible for managing content to be responsible for their own content?
This empowers departments and teams to publish on their own schedules, with news and content that is relevant to their respective audience(s) – without having to work through the IT organization. Here’s some examples of how this important capability could benefit various organizations:
Also related to the company home page dashboards, allowing content owners to see the most engaging content items and the most engaged users over four time period options: the last 4 weeks, 3 months, 6 months or 12 months. Additionally, a new leaderboard for content items company-wide as well as per-administrative area, then showing the most engaged users for those items. These dashboards all the company administrator(s) to know what content is providing the most value.
New in this release is the ability to integrate SAP Jam with Google Analytics so that the same reporting provider you use for your website (or even products) can be used to provide insights into how your users utilize SAP Jam. This integration is very easy to set up – the company administrator simply provides the Google Analytics tracking ID in the administrative console. Once done, SAP Jam automatically sends the necessary information and click-activities to Google Analytics transparently behind the scenes.
If your organization utilizes a corporate template for Microsoft Office documents that include non-default fonts (for the operating system your company standardizes on), SAP Jam will now recognize fonts that are embedded within the documents ensuring that intended font is accurately displayed within the SAP Jam in-UI preview.
The wiki editor, which is used for wiki pages, blog posts, forum posts, now has a new upper menu for editing, viewing, inserting, formatting and tables to make it consistent with common desktop applications, and enabling screen readers for accessibility purposes.
The SAP Jam mobile app has been updated with some great customer-requested capabilities that will make collaborating while on the go even easier. For those that haven’t tried out the SAP Jam mobile app yet, it is a great way to not only stay on top of what’s happening in your company when you’re away from your computer for short or extended periods of time – providing access to all the information you would from your “normal” computer – but also being able to continue to contribute to discussions and information sharing.
The SAP Jam mobile app now supports pinch-zooming of documents as well as panning the view and swipe-to-change pages.
When uploading large files, the upload will be completed at a faster rate. Additionally, when uploading multiple images and videos simultaneously, you can now control how much data is used and how long the upload will take by choosing a compression size. This will be very useful for areas where Internet connectivity is sub-optimal or heavily congested.
External group members are an important capability for SAP Jam, enabling employees to quickly, easily and securely inviting external parties such as contractors, suppliers and even customers to collaborate. This release includes three notable enhancements for collaborating with external parties.
For SAP Jam customers who use SAP Cloud Identity as their identity provider and SAP Identity Provisioning System (IPS) to provision users into SAP Jam, externally defined groups can be imported as SAP Jam member lists using the SCIM protocol.
These external groups become SAP Jam member lists and can be used to define the membership of SAP Jam groups. SAP Jam supports both flat lists of users in a member list and nested member lists where multiple member lists are used as the source of other member lists.
Once imported into SAP Jam, company administers can make the member lists available for use by the whole company or they can be marked as private so only company administrators can access the member lists.
When external users no longer have the use of their SAP Jam accounts, they can take steps to permanently remove their account and remove all references to them within SAP Jam. For example, just as when an employee leaves the company, if an external party discontinues their account, all references to their name will be replaced with “Alumni” within SAP Jam.
Lastly on the topic of external users is the new capability to have a home page dedicated to external parties. This page can be used to show any sort of information that would be useful to external parties such as quick tips to utilizing SAP Jam or company news.
The real-time messaging capability which was recently introduced to replace the private messages and chat capabilities now has a new “thread info” panel. This panel provides easy access to common actions such as:
Also available in messages is a new quick-search capability to find a specific message thread or for users to start a new thread with.
Finally, there is a new ability for developers to create embedded data “cards” within message threads. Within the messages capability, you have been able to incorporate a bot, or autonomous (non-human) participant in your conversation. These bots are applications that can act as humans and respond to commands and questions that are posed to them.
In this release, a bot can return a visual card that shows data from a third-party application such as data from our out-of-the-box integrations to SAP Hybris Sales and Service Clouds and SAP SuccessFactors Learning. When the data is presented via the card, the user can now interact with a visual button response instead of with the former text-only response.
Note: bot interaction with specific SAP or third party data providers is not provided by SAP. Customers must develop their own bots utilizing the SAP Jam application interfaces (APIs) and/or via the SAP Cloud Platform which the SAP Jam APIs are part of. (side note: did you know SAP Jam provides collaboration functionality to SAP Cloud Platform? If not, check out our API information at http://help.sap.com/sapjam or directly at: https://help.sap.com/viewer/p/SAP_JAM_COLLABORATION and view the “development” topic).
That’s it for this release’s “big ticket” items. For more information about any item here or to learn about the “smaller” enhancements, refer to the SAP Jam “What’s new and release summary, Feb 2018” that is located on the SAP Jam Help portal at http://help.sap.com/sapjam then select “SAP Jam Collaboration”.
For details on notable items discussed here and for the numerous “smaller” capabilities not discussed, refer to the SAP Jam “What’s new and release summary, Feb 2018” that is located on the SAP Jam Help portal at http://help.sap.com/sapjam then select “SAP Jam Collaboration”.
Intranet and company home page (for IT and departments)
Empowering departmental content owners to self-manage their information, documents and communications on the company home page / company intranet
Continuing the customer-driven enhancements to the very popular intranet capabilities is the ability for the company administrator (normally IT) to identify and delegate content management permissions to specific people.
In many organizations, the people posting the content on the intranet (IT) are not the content owners or subject matter experts. We think this should work differently – why not allow the content owners, or at least someone in their organization responsible for managing content to be responsible for their own content?
This empowers departments and teams to publish on their own schedules, with news and content that is relevant to their respective audience(s) – without having to work through the IT organization. Here’s some examples of how this important capability could benefit various organizations:
- Corporate communications can publish executive blogs and company news on-demand. This would be useful for announcements which need to happen at a specific time, or requiring restricted access to information before it’s announced – like for mergers and acquisitions.
- HR can publish information about new employee benefits or have a home page for newly hired employees during their onboarding period, connecting them with information and tools during their first 90 days.
- Sales can have their own home page that highlights the top accounts and opportunities for the quarter, showcasing the teams that are driving revenue. Optionally, the sales organization can restrict their information to only within their organization via the administrative areas capability (which also has several updates in this release, not discussed in this article).
- Service and support can rally the team around high priority service escalations, giving visibility to all agents worldwide of what is happening in their regions, or within specific product lines.
New company home page dashboards for engaged users and engaging content
Also related to the company home page dashboards, allowing content owners to see the most engaging content items and the most engaged users over four time period options: the last 4 weeks, 3 months, 6 months or 12 months. Additionally, a new leaderboard for content items company-wide as well as per-administrative area, then showing the most engaged users for those items. These dashboards all the company administrator(s) to know what content is providing the most value.
Companywide
IT and company administrators
Company-wide reporting, and clickstream analytics via Google® Analytics®.
New in this release is the ability to integrate SAP Jam with Google Analytics so that the same reporting provider you use for your website (or even products) can be used to provide insights into how your users utilize SAP Jam. This integration is very easy to set up – the company administrator simply provides the Google Analytics tracking ID in the administrative console. Once done, SAP Jam automatically sends the necessary information and click-activities to Google Analytics transparently behind the scenes.
All users
Embedded font support for Microsoft® Office documents and PDFs.
If your organization utilizes a corporate template for Microsoft Office documents that include non-default fonts (for the operating system your company standardizes on), SAP Jam will now recognize fonts that are embedded within the documents ensuring that intended font is accurately displayed within the SAP Jam in-UI preview.
Wiki editor menu updates
The wiki editor, which is used for wiki pages, blog posts, forum posts, now has a new upper menu for editing, viewing, inserting, formatting and tables to make it consistent with common desktop applications, and enabling screen readers for accessibility purposes.
- The “edit” menu includes the following options: undo, redo, cut, copy, paste, paste as text (helpful when pasting from formatted text), select all, and find and replace.
- The “view” menu includes the “source code” option (which is how you can also enter HTML editing mode), visual aids, show invisible characters and show blocks.
- The “insert” menu includes tables, special character, horizontal line and date/time actions
- The “format” menu includes bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, code, blocks, align, and clear formatting actions
- The “table” menu includes table, table properties, delete table, row, column and cell action.
SAP Jam mobile app
The SAP Jam mobile app has been updated with some great customer-requested capabilities that will make collaborating while on the go even easier. For those that haven’t tried out the SAP Jam mobile app yet, it is a great way to not only stay on top of what’s happening in your company when you’re away from your computer for short or extended periods of time – providing access to all the information you would from your “normal” computer – but also being able to continue to contribute to discussions and information sharing.
Image and document preview
The SAP Jam mobile app now supports pinch-zooming of documents as well as panning the view and swipe-to-change pages.
Faster file uploads
When uploading large files, the upload will be completed at a faster rate. Additionally, when uploading multiple images and videos simultaneously, you can now control how much data is used and how long the upload will take by choosing a compression size. This will be very useful for areas where Internet connectivity is sub-optimal or heavily congested.
External parties (people outside your company, i.e. contractors, suppliers, customers)
External group members are an important capability for SAP Jam, enabling employees to quickly, easily and securely inviting external parties such as contractors, suppliers and even customers to collaborate. This release includes three notable enhancements for collaborating with external parties.
External member lists
For SAP Jam customers who use SAP Cloud Identity as their identity provider and SAP Identity Provisioning System (IPS) to provision users into SAP Jam, externally defined groups can be imported as SAP Jam member lists using the SCIM protocol.
These external groups become SAP Jam member lists and can be used to define the membership of SAP Jam groups. SAP Jam supports both flat lists of users in a member list and nested member lists where multiple member lists are used as the source of other member lists.
Once imported into SAP Jam, company administers can make the member lists available for use by the whole company or they can be marked as private so only company administrators can access the member lists.
External user privacy
When external users no longer have the use of their SAP Jam accounts, they can take steps to permanently remove their account and remove all references to them within SAP Jam. For example, just as when an employee leaves the company, if an external party discontinues their account, all references to their name will be replaced with “Alumni” within SAP Jam.
External user home page
Lastly on the topic of external users is the new capability to have a home page dedicated to external parties. This page can be used to show any sort of information that would be useful to external parties such as quick tips to utilizing SAP Jam or company news.
Messaging and team-based collaboration
Thread info panel
The real-time messaging capability which was recently introduced to replace the private messages and chat capabilities now has a new “thread info” panel. This panel provides easy access to common actions such as:
- Renaming the topic
- Mute the thread
- See attachments to the thread (called “media”)
- Links in the thread
- Manage participants
Message thread search
Also available in messages is a new quick-search capability to find a specific message thread or for users to start a new thread with.
Message cards for bots to display business-process data
Finally, there is a new ability for developers to create embedded data “cards” within message threads. Within the messages capability, you have been able to incorporate a bot, or autonomous (non-human) participant in your conversation. These bots are applications that can act as humans and respond to commands and questions that are posed to them.
In this release, a bot can return a visual card that shows data from a third-party application such as data from our out-of-the-box integrations to SAP Hybris Sales and Service Clouds and SAP SuccessFactors Learning. When the data is presented via the card, the user can now interact with a visual button response instead of with the former text-only response.
Note: bot interaction with specific SAP or third party data providers is not provided by SAP. Customers must develop their own bots utilizing the SAP Jam application interfaces (APIs) and/or via the SAP Cloud Platform which the SAP Jam APIs are part of. (side note: did you know SAP Jam provides collaboration functionality to SAP Cloud Platform? If not, check out our API information at http://help.sap.com/sapjam or directly at: https://help.sap.com/viewer/p/SAP_JAM_COLLABORATION and view the “development” topic).
That’s it for this release’s “big ticket” items. For more information about any item here or to learn about the “smaller” enhancements, refer to the SAP Jam “What’s new and release summary, Feb 2018” that is located on the SAP Jam Help portal at http://help.sap.com/sapjam then select “SAP Jam Collaboration”.
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