About a year ago we started our new pilot of the
SAP Community Groups, this was to add additional options such as discussions and to expand functionality around our event listings! Over the past year we have managed quite a bit in this area from the
Partner Groups (
Ariba related announcement, SuccessFactors related announcement) to over 30 additional groups focusing on helping to make connections in individual cities and around topics like
Enterprise Architecture.
Accessing the area is super simple, it's your same login you just simply need to define your "username" or better said "display name" to start with.

You can even change it later on.
Then it's just a matter of stopping by and
saying hello, or maybe even joining the
SAP TechEd Group to keep up to date on everything related to
SAP TechEd.
For those who have already joined many of the conversations happening you might have noticed that you have a label/title next to your name, like
c436ae948d684935a91fce8b976e5aa7

This in terms of the platform is referred to as your "rank" and you can find out more information about it
here.
So what is a
rank?
A rank is the set of activity thresholds a member must meet and the rewards the member receives as a result. The rank ladder is the full set of ranks available to earn, from easiest to earn at the bottom of the rank ladder, to hardest to earn at the top of the rank ladder.
Unless of course you are an employee in which case your rank will simply be shown as "employee" or the SAP logo as opposed to:

The more you contribute, the higher your rank will go and over time we will be adding additional features and functionality based on rank so getting started now will give you that head start!
Speaking of new functionality, we are also looking for
folks to interview around our Profile project (bringing all the aspects together for a more seamless experience).
As time progresses, you will see more and more use of the Groups area for different topics and activities (like
Devtoberfest) and you will see more and more integration of UI, navigation, profile, etc as well.