Plethora of content
SAP's efforts to provide community platforms like SDN and SAP Community have been reinforced in the last months. That is, more and more SAP users and SAP interested people joined these communities. Reasons are complex: Increased visibility of the SAP NetWeaver platform due to the ramp-up completion, nicer giveaways (nahhh), and higher user awareness of the advantages of using such platforms...
As a participant in both SAP Community and SDN, I noticed several distinctions between them. This at first seems natural, being that the sites have different structures and are related to different topics. But there are some points that make me think combining the two sites makes sense. Content Consolidation, e.g., is an idea used in and enforced by EP, KM & MDM. Why not have just one platform under one hood? Under this centralized platform SAP could promote the two of its communities. I don't want to take service marketplace into account as it seems to be not that much justified being called a community like the other two. That topic will probably be a new one in my future weblog activity.
Main question
To come back to the main question: What are the differences between SAP Community and SDN? And: Why not consolidate them?
Well, SDN in reality already IS a consolidation of several "units." There is the SDN content, the forums, the weblogs, a specialized download area and so on. The orientation of the SDN topics, as the acronym SDN says, is development centric, whereas the SAP Community more or less holds the claim on delivering information about general concerns and partly specialized subjects. At least in the latter lies an intersection between SDN and SAP Community. Look at the SAP Community discussion forum "SAP NetWeaver Best Practices." This one goes in a similar, if not the same direction as some SDN topics. People are unsure where to search or post information. As I must admit this holds true for myself, too.
"Vision"
Being a bit of a visionary, combining the contents of the two communities without mixing them up too much, would create a kinda knowledge network with interlinks, cross references etc. I assume that consolidation of the content on two web sites (with several more areas of interest and the same look-and-feel) would be too simplistic.
Without dipping into further details about this "pre-visionary abstract conception," I would like to read your opinion. This question, not being easy to answer, should be explored by SAP with help of a community discussion.
