SDN is for everybody

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Check this out..! I remember somebody poking fun at offshore guys that offshore works with SDN only. Take a look at this one.

As with any change the off shoring change is naturally seeing the initial symptoms of resistance and denial. We should accept the fact that the new millennium is all about the world getting flatter and flatter.

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Hi All,

Why the thread reads like a bigtime verbal attack on users of SDN with basic queries ,that according to some EXTREMELY PROFICIENT and SAP PUNDITS is a kinda of question of living upto SDN's standards.

Why is such a hue n cry made of answering basic queries.?What's wrong in asking basic questions? Nobody here wud hav started his/her career as a PRO in SAP....n what the harm in lendin' a helpin' hand.

And for all those who dnt agree...at the end..ITS ALL A MATTER OF PERSONAL CHOICE of whether to answer or not...U can simply IGNORE......!!!!!

Last but not the least, lets not draw conclusions about the ASIAN workforce...not forgetting their contribution to the major economies of the world.....If they seem to be so lackin..... why r bigtime corporates rushing to these ASIAN shores...I dnt think CHEAP LABOUR is the reason enough to justify the ASIAN WORKFORCE being present everywhere!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Hi Anju,

>>Why is such a hue n cry made of answering basic queries.?What's wrong in asking basic questions? Nobody here wud hav started his/her career as a PRO in SAP....n what the harm in lendin' a helpin' hand.

>>And for all those who dnt agree...at the end..ITS ALL A MATTER OF PERSONAL CHOICE of whether to answer or not...U can simply IGNORE......!!!!!

Sorry, but I completely disagree with you on this point.

Of course, every one has to start and to be a beginner at first. But that does not mean : I'm too lazzy to use the search button, please, stop all your current work to help me urgently because, of course, you don't have something more important to do.

The most basic questions should be asked to the work mates in the same office.

How do you think we learnt SAP before SDN simply existed ?

Of course, I don't answer to the lazzy questions but I can't IGNORE them because they are much too numerous and they disturb a lot the ease and the interest to read these forums.

Asking for detailed steps for applying them with no understanding is just wrong because each SAP customer is a specific case.

>>I dnt think CHEAP LABOUR is the reason enough to justify the ASIAN WORKFORCE being present everywhere!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Are you so sure of that ? When considering the time, linguistic and cultural difference ?

By the way, I'm sure they are plenty of very talented SAP professionals in Asia but it seems to me that they is also a ratio of beginners vs experimented much too high.

If course, this is just a feeling given by the reading of SDN forums.

We can agree, at least, that we disagree !

Best Regards,

Olivier

Oliver,

>>Of course, every one has to start and to be a beginner at first. But that does not mean : I'm too lazzy to use the search button, please, stop all your current work to help me urgently because, of course, you don't have something more important to do.

The most basic questions should be asked to the work mates in the same office.

How do you think we learnt SAP before SDN simply existed ?

I completely agree with you here. No second opinions. I started learning SAP XI 2 years back and SDN was one of my best resources interms of How to guides, articles, blogs, FAQs. It was a plethora of information. Last but not the least Forums to clarify when ever I was stuck and couldn't move ahead. If you see some of my earlier questions, I consider them to be very basic now. And I feel I should have done some more work before posting them. I once asked for certification material too ( I did a search for that in google and SDN and only got thhe topics covered in that). I really dint know they were copy right protected then. But once I posted the query, I got to know about the details and apologized to my SDN mates.

>>I'm sure they are plenty of very talented SAP professionals in Asia but it seems to me that they is also a ratio of beginners vs experimented much too high.

This according to me is not a correct statement. There are really are a huge number of very talented guys out here when compared to those who want to start their carrer in a SAP technology( I assume only the basic questions are from them). English not being the first language is also a reason for some question which seems to be very basic. Beleive me I have seen posts where the guy has worked for around 2 days in a problem and finally he posted a query in SDN which looked very basic.

My rant before the new year

Wish you all guys a very happy new year

Regards,

Jai Shankar

In my opinion SDN forum should be used as a last resort and as a tool for learning. People should spend some time in browsing the help.sap.com where most of the basic questions are answered. Persons ask such questions like definion of company code, plant sales org . May be this forum can devided into three categories like level 1, Level 2 and Level 3. There should also be strict moderation so that silly questions and solicitations are immediately removed. This was there in sapfans.com. But I rarely see any solicitation type of postings are deleted from this forum. No doubt everyone has to start somewhere and certainly SDN is not the starting point. There can not be any short cicuit for learning. SDN will lose its relevance if this is not curbed/ arrested/ filtered immediately.

Hi,

If we are enough to use the "Report Abuse" button, we have now the power to clean these forums from spam.

It could increase tremendously the interest of these forums and they could maybe deserve again their name "Expert Forums"...

Regards,

Olivier

Hi,

I'm sorry but I don't understand the link between your message and the hotlinked thread.

Regards,

Olivier

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Nah, I can't see it either.

I deliberately kept the message less obvious because people get a chance to think about it from "another perspective".

Anyway, the connection between my thread and the link in my thread is that huge amount of blasphemy has been smeared over consultants asking for basic questions (some like what is ERP, what is SAP) and these "askers" have been traditionally alluded to the professionals from the BRIC countries where outsourcing/offshoring is predominant. And it also has been arrived at that these professionals only survive through SDN.

But I said SDN is for anybody who is interested in leveraging it in this flat world. The link I pasted asked for tips about implementing an entire module. While he/she has the right to ask for that, we have the right to ignore if not palatable to us. Not more, not less.

Hope I simplified this time.

I got your point (i'm sure we are many who did) - and yes, there are people who ask for a free lunch everywhere. One reason we see a lot of people from India doing this is that there are a lot of people living in India and working with SAP. I spent five weeks at one of IBM's offices in Kolkata this spring as part of a knowledge transfer plan, and many of the people there were very knowledgeable. And many of them also had what I consider the only attitude that is acceptable: I will first try and solve this on my own, and if I can't I will ask for help. But I know there were also cases where these people didn't have a clue, and the customer's consultants had to provide the answers to the IBM people in India, who would then in turn reply to the customer's employee who had asked for help. Too many such cases and the talk will start about the "cost savings" one achieves. Outsourcing with offshore resources has probably been oversold in several countries with high wages, such as Norway where I live. The cost of cultural differences, language barriers, and not being co-located, has been either underestimated or completely ignored.

There is no doubt that using SAP resources in India is a lot cheaper than the same amount of people in Norway. The question is how to use them, and what to use them for, and most importantly what to not use them for, in order to make the offshoring as profitable as possible. Cultural differences such as our tradition of being expected to "test" the specification for correctness and completeness compared to the Asian tradition of not questioning a superior's work leads to higher error-correction costs when specification errors are not discovered until the customer's testing starts.

Back on topic: What annoys me is not so much people asking basic questions, it is people asking basic questions which they could have found the answer to by pressing F1 or looking at [help.sap.com|http://help.sap.com|Freely available online documentation and other resources for all SAP releases!].

Hello,

The main problem in SDN forums is that rules are not enforced (enough).

When I see some people telling that they are in charge of a production system but they have no clue about backups/restores or basic tuning, I'm quite afraid for the customer...

I am from India. As you have already said SAP resources in India is a lot cheap comapred to other countries. So there are many projects offshored and often there are not adequate number of SAP resources to complete the project. What happens is people with little/ nil SAP experience are pulled into SAP projects. As the popular saying here goes "You gotta deliver those objects yesterday", these guys search for an immediate solution and you see (a lot of) newbie questions in SDN. Also, more and more graduates fresh out of college wants to get into SAP world, but they dont have the proper trainings and I see (a lot of) questions from them too.

P.S: This is my personal opinion from my observation.

Regards,

Jai Shankar

In my opinion.... Companies that provide "cheap" support do not recruitment based on quality, they don't check that their new hires or experienced hires have enough exposure to SAP (or any other software), training programs for these people is very poor and pressure is very high!

Sadly theres a huge market for them and in my own experience its frustrating for both customers and contractors/consultants.

I think proper training should be provided to ensure customer receive a quality service.

It's very hard to believe that people is thrown in the business without any knowleadge. VERY OFTEN we see post saying " I am a new basis consultant, can you tell me whats ECC?" If people don't know even the very basics why are they been exposed to humiliation?

I simply can't understand.

Juan

Back on topic: What annoys me is not so much people asking basic questions, it is people asking basic questions which they could have found the answer to by pressing F1 or looking at help.sap.com.

Hi Kjetil,

We can search for help by just hitting F1 , but there can be many solutions to one problem,

No matter how much simple the problem is there can be many solutions,

SDN is to share those solutions from everyone and use the best solution from those..

Hi,

>No matter how much simple the problem is there can be many solutions,

>SDN is to share those solutions from everyone and use the best solution from those..

True, but people asking for help must have done first their own research and explain it.

Telling : "I don't know anything about the work I have to do, I don't even understand a word about it but give me detailed steps urgently" is rude and should be moderated (deleted).

Hi,

An SDN KID might not know what to do for the first time he logins to SDN,

for the first time he may ask for basic questions (which may look silly to you),

through experience he understands what to ask for help and what to search for....

There are many SDN KIDS every year ...and we have to be patient in guiding and helping them and not just slap at them...

Hope you got that !!!!!!!!!!!!

this discussion could go on forever.

I was an "SDN KID" in 2004, I have asked one question since then (which I answered myself later on in lack of responses), because I was able to find answers for every problem I was facing through searching existing SDN material, SAP online documentation and googling in general.

Too many people - obviously - just want it the easy way and not put in any hard work of their own (through which you'd learn best!)

Mahlzeit

Thomas Z.

> this discussion could go on forever.

> > Too many people - obviously - just want it the easy way and not put in any hard work of their own (through which you'd learn best!)

They not only want it the easy way, they SHOUT for it in a very URGENT way !!

> >

> > Back on topic: What annoys me is not so much people asking basic questions, it is people asking basic questions which they could have found the answer to by pressing F1 or looking at help.sap.com.

> We can search for help by just hitting F1 , but there can be many solutions to one problem,

> No matter how much simple the problem is there can be many solutions,

> SDN is to share those solutions from everyone and use the best solution from those..

This is all very fine, but when people ask e.g. what is the purpose of this and that field, and the purpose of the same field is documented in the field help, you don't need to search. All you need to do is press F1 while the field has focus. There can not be many solutions to such a question. If the bastards would at least have explained what they are trying to achieve then perhaps a lot of people could have learnt something or gotten an idea which they later could use - but in most cases the people who ask don't bother to explain which relase they are using, or what their functional requirement is.

If you have never seen such a basic question I wish to congratulate you (and ask if you could please e-mail me your solution for automatically blocking basic questions...).

Edited by: Kjetil Kilhavn on Jan 9, 2008 8:45 PM:

With respect to your answer to Olivier, no we don't have to be patient. If SAP can not accept this they can of course chuck us from SDN - but in many cases that will be SAP's loss more than ours. Surely I have received very valuable assistance some times, but I am not sure if the total time spent on SDN can justify the amount of time saved in those cases.

Edited by: Kjetil Kilhavn on Jan 9, 2008 9:03 PM:

Actually - I believe that fine print at the bottom of the terms of usage really does say that SDN is not for everybody - it is mostly for grumpy old men.

Hi Kjetil,

>Actually - I believe that fine print at the bottom of the terms of usage really does say that >SDN is not for everybody - it is mostly for grumpy old men.

Yes, that's exactly what I am : a grumpy old man.

That's the effect of 10 years of SAP administration : you die from it or you turn as a grumpy old man !

That said, I still don't understand the evident lack of will from SAP to really moderate these forums.

Of course there are lots of beginners but if you don't educate them by moderation the forums will turn only to full spam mode and all the grumpy old men will be out of there...

Think about all the subjects "Hi, gurus". How informative about the subject !

Regards,

Olivier

Think about all the subjects "Hi, gurus". How informative about the subject !

At least it shows some respect

> I still don't understand the evident lack of will from SAP to really moderate these forums.

> Of course there are lots of beginners but if you don't educate them by moderation the forums will turn only to full spam mode and all the grumpy old men will be out of there...

I agree completely. In particular I don't understand why they can not force a search before allowing a new thread to be created. They do this on service.sap.com - which is support for paying customers - but here on SDN there is no such restriction. Probably because here they rely on unpaid people to answer (the bulk of) the questions, so SAP doesn't care how many thousand hours are wasted reading F1/help.sap.com questions on a daily basis.

Ahh..thats the problem..

May be a person of my age , 25 have the same idea as mine..being patient and answering the questions and guiding them:))) A big generation gap....

We should have 2 sides in SDN...for Grumpy old men and dynamic young guns..:))))))))

anyways lets stop it here............

> I agree completely. In particular I don't understand why they can not force a search before allowing a new thread to be created. They do this on service.sap.com - which is support for paying customers - but here on SDN there is no such restriction. Probably because here they rely on unpaid people to answer (the bulk of) the questions, so SAP doesn't care how many thousand hours are wasted reading F1/help.sap.com questions on a daily basis.

Hello,

Thinking about it, it makes a lot of sense. I think you found out the only logical explication of the lack of moderation will from SAP. The spam in now here on SDN and less on service.sap.com...

Let see if someone from SAP tell that we are completely paranoid ?

Regards,

Olivier

Just follow these simple guidelines

1) NEVER EVER reply to a post that says PLS HELP VERY URGENT

2) never reply to any post that even has the word URGENT in it anywhere -- these posts are usually made by people who probably got their ABAP job by being able to answer a few "canned interview" questions and find they actually can't do the job they are being paid to do.

3) If the subject is totally off topic for that forum such as "What does transaction MIGO do" in the OO forum either reply with one word

OFF TOPIC or don't answer.

4) Totally "imbecilic questions" such as WHAT IS ABAP FOR -- just ignore. I can't believe that ANYBODY who has even the slightest experience of working with SAP doesn't know what ABAP is -- this doesn't of course mean to say that the person needs to be an "abapper" but IMO everybody in SAP from top management down to the most junior knows what "ABAP" is.

Of course we all had to start from somewhere but a little bit of ELEMENTARY research should always be done before posting questions on the Forums.

Stricter moderation would also help -- however moderating forums is quite costly in time and usually in most SAP shops time is often one commodity you are short of.

Cheers

jimbo

James,

Your guidelines are excellent but they will stay good wishes if they are not enforced by strict moderation.

One only way is that all people thinking that these forums need serious cleaning should use the "report abuse" button.

When there are 5 reports for a post it is automaticalley deleted.

We could begin by tring to report ALL posts with "URGENT" in the subject.

What do you all think about it ?

Regards,

Olivier

> When there are 5 reports for a post it is automaticalley deleted.
> 
> We could begin by tring to report >ALL posts with "URGENT" in the >subject.

Actually the Report button should be use in case of "copyright material" posts or bad behaviour or not civile...Not every post should be reported -;)

Greetings,

Blag.

> >

> > I still don't understand the evident lack of will from SAP to really moderate these forums.

> I agree completely. In particular I don't understand why they can not force a search before allowing a new thread to be created. They do this on service.sap.com

Hi Kjetil and Oliver,

We actually are a bit envious of the search before post feature of the service marketplace. We have it high on our wish list for forum improvements. To keep up with the growth it was more important for us to upgrade our forum software and with that upgrade we got the Report Abuse feature that will help us get rid of the send me copyrighted materials, answers to certification questions, solicitations, ... in a more timely fashion.

I have a shortcut to the moderation screen and am actively rejecting these violations. Now I don't think that there is a consensus yet regarding rejecting basic questions of members that have not searched before. It is a tough one. How do you know that the person didn't try before, but didn't understand the solution he got? I guess new members should write: I have this problem, the search and help.sap.com got me the following results, I still don't understand why ... ?

Now how do we educate the 3000+ new members that join us every week?

That is the tough one, Mark.

Hello Mark,

>Now how do we educate the 3000+ new members that join us every week?

There is only one good answer : by strict moderation.

On all the internet forums I know, only the stricly moderated ones are kept in order and interesting to read and give help.

By not moderating, you are just preventing the will of people to answer questions.

Schools get thousands of new pupils each year. They don't know the school rules when they arrive but these rules are enforced by teachers to teach the rules.

No community can live outside of chaos without rules enforcement. Anarchy has been tried but not with much success !

Regards,

Olivier

Actually, I also follow a couple of minimally moderated professional forums which retain high quality through 'community moderation'.

If someone doesn't follow the rules they get ignored or told off - usually politely.

The reason this doesn't work on SDN is the points system. Bad posts aren't ignored, someone will ALWAYS attempt an answer to the question.

I think you could post "Why do fish not drown? Points assured for good answers" in the ABAP forum and you will get 5 answers in triplicate. Maybe maybe someone may mention it's off topic....

> I think you could post "Why do fish not drown? Points assured for good answers" in the ABAP forum and you will get 5 answers in triplicate. Maybe maybe someone may mention it's off topic....

I tried it out, look at the thread.

Crazy Belgians

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