Since the platform migration last year so many of you have asked "Where is ABAP?" and "Where are the questions about ABAP?" - we heard you loud an clear. We are therefore thrilled to finally be able to answer your questions as we are launching new Developer forums today!
This will be the new home for our developers and technical audience in the SAP Community, and we are starting with forums on the following topics:
- ABAP: Forum for everything about classic ABAP development, as well as all ABAP Cloud related topics, including ABAP Core Data Services (CDS), ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model (RAP), and ABAP for cloud development.
- Artificial Intelligence : AI in general, SAP Business AI, Joule, Joule Agents, Joule for Consultants, Joule for Developers or AI Foundation.
- SAP CAP: Everything on SAP Cloud Application Programming Model.
- Data and Analytics:
- SAP Business Data Cloud, including Databricks, Datasphere, Analytics Cloud and Business Warehouse.
- SAP HANA and SAP HANA Cloud.
- SAP Master Data Governance.
- Frontend / UI5 / SAP Fiori: All frontend-related topics, including SAPUI5, OpenUI5 and SAP Fiori.
- Integration: For all SAP Integration related topics. (not limited to SAP Integration Suite)
- Tooling, including SAP Build: For all topics related to any SAP development tool, like SAP Build Code and ABAP Development Tools for Eclipse.
But more than just launching a home for our developer/technical audience, we are also bringing back forums as a content type, including a more compact forum feed, threaded replies and not least a filter that many of you have requested for questions with no answers. We will get into the details of the new forums below 🙂
All developer forums consist of a hub with options both for asking questions (forum) and for publishing blog posts:
To be able to publish content in the forums, you first need to join the group/forum, therefore please make sure you hit the "Join Group" button:
Joining the forum also automatically triggers a subscription to new content published in the group.
You can check or change your subscriptions and notifications in your account settings here.
Forums
As mentioned above, we are bringing back forums as a content type.
This first iteration of the new forum feed does not contain any preview of content, thus making it easier/faster for everyone to scroll down the list to identify the questions they might have an answer to.
The feed gives you an overview over who asked the question, when it was published, and you can also see who replied to it last (and when), if there are replies.
We also included a filter that many of you have requested, "No answers", which shows you all questions with no interaction. This is different to "No Solutions", as the no solutions filter will give you an overview over questions with an answer, but where the author has not yet accepted one of the answers as the right solution.
Questions with a solution can easily be identified in the feed with the green checkmark to the left of the question. The second iteration of the forum feed will make it even easier to quickly identify questions with accepted solutions in the feed.
We also kept the icons for views, answers/replies and kudos/views in the feed.
Another change with forums, compared to the Q&As, is that we are bringing back threaded replies to questions. For forums there is no difference if it is a comment asking for clarification, or if you know the answer to the question. The correct answer can be found anywhere in the threaded conversation, and the author has the option to accept any answer as the correct solution to the question.
As you can see in the screenshot below, it is not possible to accept any reply, anywhere in the conversation as the solution:
When a question has an accepted solution, it will behave the same way as the Q&As. The question will have an "Go to solution" marker on top, and the accepted answer will be displayed directly below the question with a green checkmark and a green box to identify as the correct solution:
Other than joining the group, no special permissions is needed to ask your question in the forums. Even if you are new to the SAP Community, and come here to find help, you can do so immediately after creating a new account.
As everywhere else in the Community, please do not answer questions with AI-generated content. If you don't know the answer, please move on to the next question where you know the answer, instead of trying to build a reputation by publishing AI-generated answers that do not add any value, and in many cases also are misleading or false.
Blog posts
Blog posts in the developer forums will not have a separation between SAP employees and external community users.
Although the forums will not be curated, we will keep a close eye on what gets published to ensure the quality of the content is according to our guidelines. Blog posts in the SAP Community should be used to share value and your personal knowledge and expertise.
The permissions to publish blog posts will follow the rank ladder system, so if you are new to community, your blog posts will be subject to moderation review. Community users who already have permissions to publish blog posts in the "Product and Technology" categories, will be able to publish blog posts directly in the new forums, without moderation.
You can find more information on moderation in the SAP Community in this article in our Welcome Corner group.
The "Featured Topics" section is curated by the SAP Community team for now, and will focus on highlighting important product updates that should not be missed.
Pilot-phase
The launch today is a pilot, as we want to first see how you all respond before we make a final decision on whether or not forums are here to stay. The pilot will run for 3 months, until the end of the year.
All forums start empty, with no published content.
The exception is the three groups which we have moved over from the Interest groups, namely "Artificial Intelligence", "Data and Analytics", and "Integration" - these three groups were moved to the new Developers area with their content.
We will over the next months continuously improve the user experience in the forums and forum feeds, and are as always open to feedback and suggestions.
And one last thing. We have set the "Application Development and Automation" group to read only for now, to encourage everyone to participate here instead. We will decide what to do with the group and its content once this pilot has ended.
The SAP Developer News posts from the SAP Developer Advocate team will be published here in the meantime.
Happy foruming everyone! 🙂
Known bugs
On the main forum page, the button still says "Start a Discussion", this will be changed to "Ask a question" as soon as possible:
In the mobile portrait view of the forum feed, the last filter tab may break to another line in some cases. We are aware of this, and it will be fixed in one of our upcoming releases:
Bluesky
