Has The New SAP Community Killed The Community?

Former Member · ‎2016 Oct 27

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 Member · ‎2016 Oct 27

Yes. It's hard to find anything now, or to zero in on a subject area. The BW question & answer forum: I can't tell if it even exists anymore.

Former Member · ‎2016 Oct 28

Had the same impression. For the BW links, here they are:

nru_house · ‎2016 Oct 27

I do agree, it has killed the enticement of getting online on forum site to answer or read Q&As.

former_member89972 · ‎2016 Oct 27

Could not agree more !!

Avinash

Former Member · ‎2016 Oct 27

Well that no just your impression but mine too. Just try to go straight from top menu to Community-> Q&A you land in huge infohub with thousands of questions from all components I'm not interested and you? Who need such feature? And from Community -> Browse community you just land in a Browser try to pick up Abap Development and you see "featured content" and then below blogs and later... questions but last 5 that take whole screen..

SimoneMilesi · ‎2016 Oct 27

Apart the questions&answers that somehow still works (i prefer do not say a word about the quality and fruibility), yes, the community is dead.

I open a discussion under coffee corner space and the feeling is the same among most members.

former_member186338 · ‎2016 Oct 27

Somehow is the right wording! Members are using answers instead of comments, discussions are unreadable, nobody close discussions etc...

SimoneMilesi · ‎2016 Oct 28

Ok, a bit of mea culpa from us users is in order to be done 🙂
It's not so intuitive but it's up to us to close the discussion and accept the answers.

This problem was already present in the old SCN with tons of questions never closed 🙂

former_member186338 · ‎2016 Oct 28

Question closing - it's even less intuitive then in previous SCN 🙂

SimoneMilesi · ‎2016 Oct 28

I can agree, but the "accept answer" is easy to find (and few people uses it) as well the difference between answers and comment it's not so hard to understand and apply.

Yes, the forum-structure to follow a complex discussion is gone and it's really hard to do but at least, if people uses answer-comment right you can follow a whole branch 🙂

SimoneMilesi · ‎2016 Oct 28

Addendum: i'm the first critic about the new community (and you can check my post about BETA and here in Using SAP.com) but SAP will never ever admit the false step and there will not be any radical change (until a new "new community") so we have to adapt if we want to keep things alive (somehow).

matt · ‎2016 Oct 28

Ah - I wondered where the coffee corner had gone

SimoneMilesi · ‎2016 Oct 28

Wait! You moderators do not have access to the Uber Alles Hyper Secret and perfectly working version of the community? 😛

agentry_src · ‎2016 Oct 28

Hey Simone,

What aspect of this prefuctly werkng vurshun as you have noted. [fully functional Death Star?]

Regards, Mike (53 fingered little Dutch boy)
SAP Technology RIG

Hey, it's Friday and a little levity is required.

former_member196331 · ‎2016 Oct 28

Yes, Yes I will Agree, Here is Interesting Thing is,If any new thing comes, It has to Add something to Existing One, But Now, New things has came But old Things were forgotten.

I hope Present Community should be previous and Old One should be Now. Then it suitable.

People were used Blackberry, Suddenly they changed to any normal phones. It's not easy to Use. If they use from Starting on words normal phones No problem.

Former Member · ‎2016 Oct 28

I can't agree more. Why are we beating around the bush? The "New Community" is a desaster in every kind of aspect. Flower-Power Toy-UI (who the hell thought we are working on a 2 1/2 inch smartphone display?), Presentation , Usability (Somebody ever heard you have to download a spreadsheet before you can use a website?), Navigation, Searching, Content, Communication, everything! And if you read coffee corner (only place which you can find immediately) the reactions are ridiculous marketing phrases.

I'm so unbelievable frustrated about this...

former_member185116 · ‎2016 Oct 28

Hi shai,

I do agree with you .

i am sorry to say that new community failed in all aspects.

ankurch · ‎2016 Oct 28

Hi Shai,..

I do agree with you,...

its much complicated and I can't even make myself to participant on it anymore,...

former_member186746 · ‎2016 Oct 28

It didn't kill the community but it has been severely wounded though.

Community participation is obstructed by atrocious design and hideous pain inducing colour scheme.
We were able to glance many questions at once and decide then which were interesting to answer. Now you can see about a dozen updates at a time, so if a question has been answered 12 times in a short span your entire notification is about 1 question before you have to physically click the more button.

I still participate but at least two thirds less than I used to.

Kind regards, Rob Dielemans

former_member230675 · ‎2018 Jun 01

SAP CEO was saying that he is going to revive the community.

So far no changes.

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

Former Member · ‎2016 Oct 28

Yes - completely agree

former_member185603 · ‎2016 Oct 28

I agree also. new interface is creating lot of confusion. Many questions posted in BI Platform area past couple of weeks are not appearing any more.

former_member182503 · ‎2016 Oct 28

Hello Shai,

I think that badly wounded would be more precise. Pain is natural when we talk about changes but the pain level on this new SCN is higher than they expected.

Anyway, I think all we, as users, can do is keep trying, giving feedback, answering questions, writing blogs and move on. We are the moving parts of this community. Hopefully, in the near future, the UX will reach a maturity level that we all expect.

Remember: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger (or wish you were dead).

Regards,
JN

Devraj · ‎2016 Dec 04

I think it has killed several SCNers already. The only hope if any is to see now new ppl (who never experienced the old SCN) use this website (sorry cannot call it a community) and make something of it

ricardojasso · ‎2016 Oct 28

Shai,

I cannot tell if it has completely killed the community. There are 4,500 + questions now which means people still participate. But how many of this questions are actually being answered beats me. But I can tell you for sure they lost one participant: me. My contributions has stopped since the go live of the new site. It's too painful to use and too time consuming. I'll come back next month to see if the next scrum sprint has been implemented hoping the many design flaws and bugs have been fixed.

Regards,

Ricardo

agentry_src · ‎2016 Oct 28

And how many of those questions are using the tag "Using SAP.com" to report bugs and receive loads of comments? You know... Like this thread?

Regards, Mike (Moderator)
SAP Technology RIG

VeselinaPeykova · ‎2016 Oct 28

I dare say somewhere between 36 and 387 - depending on how you sort them 🙂

No guarantee, though...

ricardojasso · ‎2016 Oct 29

389 out of 4595, that is, an 8.5% of the total.

Take them all out if you want. Still you're left with 4,206 as of now.

And please, point me to a straightforward direct link to the Ideas Place from the Community main page and I'll gladly post my suggestions there despite the fact that it is not our obligation to post ideas to have the system fixed from a design point of view. If you are a good designer you should not wait for customers and users to tell you what they want from the system. They can tell you they need a house. It is up to you to design a beautiful and efficient one, not just one that meets the areas requirement. And this is specially true for a commercial product. Then again, this is not.

agentry_src · ‎2016 Oct 30

Hi Ricardo,

Where do you get the counts?

Here is the straightforward link to Ideas Place, specifically for the SAP Community (New SCN). There are quite a few Ideas already posted, though most are simply function/bug fixes rather than enhancements. Or to put another way, things which were done poorly or just wrong in the go live which now desperately need to be fixed.

Regards, Mike (Moderator)
SAP Technology RIG

ricardojasso · ‎2016 Oct 30

Main Q&A screen:

Using SAP.com Q&A screen:

By the way, you can see all the wasted space in both images where I can see only one question in each. To see more I need to scroll down. The ratio questions per page is very low. Taken from my laptop screen.

Jean_Sagi · ‎2016 Oct 31

Hi,

I cannot find a link the the New SCN Ideas Place.

Could anyone please point to the right direction?

J.

agentry_src · ‎2016 Nov 01

For Ricardo and Jesus,

Idea Place for SCN:

https://ideas.sap.com/ct/ct_list.bix?c=3F1503D6-1AE6-409A-A17A-8360D3F46A40

Not sure I included it in my previous post and thanks to Ricardo for pointing out the counts method (seems a little obvious in retrospect, but sometimes a large clue bat to the head is necessary!).

JuergenPitz · ‎2016 Nov 02

"There are 4,500 + questions now which means people still participate."

Yes, there is participation. But why? Because there is no other place.

Juergen

raghug · ‎2016 Oct 28

The LE (warehouse management) community has gone from about 10 questions a day to 21 questions in total since the switch over. The ABAP tag seems to be picking back up - I guess programmers are used to wading through interfaces that are less than ideal.

While the system is not very useable now, how about we put together priorities so that we can help SAP will have the biggest pain points they need to fix. Now I wish we had a place to put a poll!

My big 3 are -

Filter the questions on tags
Central place to manage followed activity.
Separate (at least visually) questions versus responses in the lists (activity and questions)
Yeah, I said big 3, but this is a biggie too - Followed activity is littered with stuff that I didn't follow - This may be something that can be mitigated with a fix to #2 above.

Private_Member_7726 · ‎2016 Oct 28

2. = "a Tag Manager" 🙂

4. is IMO next to impossible to fix so long as "multi-tagging" is permitted (or one can restrict the the activity list to "primary tags")... The whole primary/additional distinction is a bit mysterious to me

ricardojasso · ‎2016 Oct 28

The list of activities is useless as it is right now. Why would I want to be notified if someone liked a comment or upvoted an answer? It just clutters the list with unimportant information. It should be restricted to new questions and new replies (answers/comments) only.

agentry_src · ‎2016 Oct 30

I think the main issue with Activity Stream is not the kinds of content, but rather no ability to filter for the stuff you really want to see or filter to remove that which you don't (upvotes, likes especially).

Then it becomes controllable and useful rather than something to be ignored because, as you said,

It just clutters the list with unimportant information

Cheers, Mike (Moderator)

SAP Technology RIG

former_member28818 · ‎2016 Nov 01

Hello Michael,

I completely agree with you on this. The Activity Stream as it stands now is definitely inundated with repeated (almost irrelevant) activities from user's subscriptions. We definitely need to allow the users a more streamlined experience through features such as Activity grouping, separating out user's own activities, and implementing tag filters. I also believe that we need to re-assess some of the activities in whole and not show them in the stream at all to increase relevancy and importance of activities.

We have already started the grooming process of such features and these will start development when we have refined the requirements further. I am happy to keep you updated on any major developments

Thanks

former_member193210 · ‎2016 Oct 28

I have to concurr. It took me a few days to find the Excel map to the various "Community Tags", but nowadays these hyperlinks often bring me to a page showing 0 results (as in https://go.sap.com/community/tag.html?id=666118459887932219928019980895838).

Even using these "Tags" in the Q&A does not help since most of the query results come back as "Archive" material.