- SAP Managed Tags:
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? My name is Jitendra Kansal (nick name: JK). I am from north-western part of India, JAIPUR, Rajasthan. My hobbies are cricket, cycling, snookers, foosball (table soccer), reading current affairs, blogging, listening music. My friends say I got a smiley face, can make people smile (not sure but I always try ...). I am currently located at Mannheim, Germany, helping my customers building and executing their end to end digital transformation journey. I am mainly involved in SAP mobile, Cloud & UX stuffs. My responsibilities involve design and develop enterprise-grade mobile solutions for my customers, starting from gathering requirements, understanding their business process, designing & developing solutions and delivering it. Customer delight, security, UX and cost factors are the highest priority. I am in the SAP world since 2010, I started my journey at Infosys, Hinduja Technologies and now I am with Tech Mahindra. Tech Mahindra is one of SAP partners with 107,200+ employees across 90 countries.
How did you learn about SAP Community and what made you want to join?
During my first assignment at first company Infosys in 2011, I had to show a proof of concept to my customer based on Sybase Unwired Platform. Due to lack of skillset among the team, we were stuck in between. When one of the senior colleagues came across this issue and said “Why don’t you post your question in SCN?” I had no clue what he was talking about. He briefed me about SCN and later I signed up and posted my query in the SAP Mobile forum and within few hours I got a response which helped me solving that issue. That is how my Journey on SAP Community started. I thought this place could be the best platform to learn and explore more on SAP mobility stuff and therefore I started exploring across this different #SCN spaces for any related documents, blogs and threads.
What motivates you to contribute actively in the Community?
There is a rapid evolution going among SAP technologies and hence market is demanding it. Every day I feel there is so much that I don’t know about and have to learn. SAP community helps me to get information about latest and greatest of SAP offerings and at the same time helps me in accelerating my current skills.There are many community members working for different SAP partners, customers and even for SAP who have been actively involved in various community forums, sharing their experiences across SAP products, helping other community members answering their queries, posting blogs etc. I try to do the same and enjoy it as well. I try to figure out how on-going discussions or any latest blog post could help me in my project activities. It could be a best practice document, any alternate way of getting things done or so. At the same time, I can recommend any new stuff coming in market to my customer that could be a benefit for them in terms of driving innovation, lowering TCO etc. Being active in the community helps building the network that could help me personally as well as professionally.
A part from this, there are various forums I have been actively involved. ... like: openSAP. .. Through this SAP community also, I get knowledge about upcoming local events like SAP Inside Track, Community meet-up (#SAPStammtisch), SAP Code Jam where there are equal opportunities to learn, share and meet community peers. And I am honored to be part of SAP Mentors program, Being a member I get involved with SAP product and development teams closely in providing feedback on what's real, what's valuable, or what's meaningful. This helps SAP to improve their products and to provide a better service to its customers, partners and individuals. So at the end it's a win-win situation for both. It also helps to know more about a community member through different initiatives like Blog It Forward, Member of the Month, Developer Heroes.
Why would you encourage professionals to join the Community?
SAP community covers wide topics from SAP offerings where individuals can learn about new stuff, share their knowledge and even ask their queries. At the same time, you can find updated info on upcoming openSAP course, nearby local community events and even SAP events like SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP Code Jam, SAP TechEd and so on.
SAP community got its new home, it has moved away from spaces, now based on TAGS.I recommend to go through Getting Started page, where you will find lots of useful information like community topic pages, tags and so on. Must read SAP Community Rules of Engagement (RoE) which will give a good overview of how to behave. Look for any technical topic by navigating to its respective page (I prefer to use this link https://detammenitsapcommunitytags-p001984trial.dispatcher.hanatrial.ondemand.com/index.html (preferred browsers are Chrome and Firefox) thanks to Mr. Helmut Tammen for creating this UI5 app, it helps a lot), you can even follow experts active for a particular tag. I would encourage every community member to read these awesome blogs
https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/01/the-true-value-of-a-community/ https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/09/zen-art-unlearning-expertise/
Finally, any advice for us? How can SAP help strengthen the Community?
As we all know that new SAP community platform was launched sometimes back but with limited functionalities, there are much expectations from community members to have integrated all required features like Email notification, tagging, better UX and many more. I am sure, within some time this platform will be better and with more features.
