The power of the SCN wiki – real story

Normally when I want to find out about an area of SAP I do not know too much about I do a Google search. It is kind of random, I know but if you want a high level overview of a new topic it is a good place to start. However today was not one of those lucky days. There were a few articles from the sap.com website but not what I was after.

I was after knowing “if you were to implement Grants Management do you need to activate Funds Management?” Knowing SAP SCN I knew I could post a thread on the forum board and a number of highly skilled SAP Professionals would have posted an answer. The answer for those who are interested (probably a very small number out there, is you do use Funds Management with Grants Management). However I have been part of a Financials working group that was focusing on the SCN wiki so I thought I would see if there was any information on the SCN wiki.

OK, so the place to look is “Industries” and in “Public Sector” there is all the information I could ever want in a single source. The initial page is clearly labelled, with different sections, for blogs, BPX areas, links to the SCN forum page and a table of contents that branch off to the detailed information within the wiki.

So there it was, a few clicks and I had more information than I could have ever dreamed of from a Google search. In fact the kind of service I received was as if I was speaking with an expert and they were spending 30 minutes of their time to help me. It goes without saying that the quality of the data that you can find in the wiki is only as good as the data that is contributed. The community members of SCN who contribute to the wiki do an amazing job and I encourage them to continue. Further to that, if you feel that you can contribute to your area of expertise do so.

However the real reason for this blog is not just to big up the community that contributes to the wiki, the real message is for the users who use the SAP forums. Some of the questions I see on the forums (and please excuse me if this is not the same in your area of expertise) could be answered by reviewing the information on the wiki. I am sure that the number of duplicate questions being raised in the forums, or the number of basic questions in the forum board would be removed, if people searched the wiki to prior to posting a question on the forum board.  The forum boards still have a purpose, and there will be plenty of detailed questions that cannot be answered by reviewing a wiki no matter how thorough the wiki is.

So my message to you is clear, the next time you want to post a question to a forum board check out the wiki – you may be surprised what you find.