What is this Mentors Quarterly anyway?

[OttoGold]

New Mentors Quarterly (Q1 2011) is out! of all times, first one in this year covering quarter 1 of 2011. But not everything what´s important was said and I feel the whole thing could use some more explanation. Like answering all the basic questions: What , Who, When, Why.

This is what this blog is about – what is Mentors quarterly project and what´s in it for you:

• What: Mentors Quarterly is an old fashioned way – paper magazine look and feel - of delivering content about what is new in the world of SAP, what is hot and spicy, what are the things that SAP Mentors are working on, events they attend, projects started by the Mentors, opinions, experience and best practices by SAP Mentors.
• Who: the SAPMQ magazine is meant for publishing the content from SAP Mentors and, about them. We plan to invite other members of the SCN Community who can provide their valuable opinions and experience in the future as well.
• When: As the name is says: every quarter. So expect three more issues coming this year.
• Why: I asked a question about how the SCN Community members picture a SAP mentor some time ago. From the answers I received I got a feeling that the Community members expect all the Mentors to be active on SCN and don´t understand who are Mentors who are less active on SCN or not active at all (active means: provide content on SCN). So a natural step for me was to help bring the Mentors activities closer to the SCN members (Mentors´ content) and this is the result. I think about this “magazine project” as a way how to provide a single source of Mentors´ content, be it Mentors active on SCN or not.

Thank you for everything

There are many people I owe the thanks. I am afraid I cannot name everybody, but I will do my best. Unfortunately I don´t remember the order of appearance so I will name them in order they come to my mind.

Thanks to the first Quarterly team (Thorsten Franz, Michelle Crapo, Tammy Powlas and Matthias Steiner). Without them you would not read the Quarterly. At the beginning the only thing we had was the idea. The Mentor initiative members were discussing some more “communication channel” for ages. One of the ideas was the Mentors newsletter; others were about cooperating with SAP Press and many more. I had the previous experience with running a magazine (for few years as a teenager) and so knew what to do, where to start, how to start and especially FINISH the thing (successfully). These fur nice people joined me and we have proven that it is not difficult to start something new and hopefully nice and useful for the Community.

I also thank the Mentors who joined the original group and provided their insight and valuable content for the second Quarterly. I know they are all very busy and still were able to write something for the Quarterly and joined the Mentors´ magic as Mark Finnern calls it.

I also have to thank Markfor his help, feedback and his colleague Jodi Fleischman for creating the new logo for us. Without Mark and Aslanthere would be no Mentors initiative. And thanks to Aslan you can get the new Not authorized to view the specified document 7840. Thank you, friends.

I would also like to thank Abesh,Martin Lang, Marilyn Pratt, Gali Kling Schneider and the rest of the SCN team who helped with uploading the Quarterly on SCN, were the first readers and hopefully become the contributors for Quarterly one day soon.

I would also like all the readers because without them what would be the purpose?

Looking for feedback

We already got some feedback on both the issues. Some pieces were on Twitter (you can use hash tag #SAPMQ and/or add the Twitter handle of one of the author who published articles in the Quarterly – that means: you can provide direct feedback to the author or comment on the whole “magazine project”. To speed this up for you, here are the links to the Twitter accounts of the original group, use Search to find the newcomers to the groups if you want to reach them directly: @steinermatt @tpowlas @thorstenster @MichelleCrapo @ottoGold).

Some pieces of feedback came through email, mainly by friends (but I would answer the emails from strangers as if they were friends anyway). I also opened a First Mentors Quarterly is out!. Unfortunately not many Community members found their way to the thread. I also asked for feedback in the Mentors forum (unfortunately not opened for public), but the goal was clear: get as many opinions as we could so we can make Quarterly even better the next time.

To make this even simpler the Quarterly team started a Gmail account: mentorsquarterly –at- gmail.com where you can provide feedback as if you would drop a line to a friend and we will try to answer it, learn from it and hopefully make you an even happier reader of the next issue.