SCN is a great place for SAP professionals to share ideas, thoughts, tips and help, through forums, Blogs, whitepapers, Wiki, Idea Place, Code Exchange, and various other assets.
It has always represented a great place to hang-in, where the community could discuss in a pleasant way, sharing (virtual) drinks. It is also one of the major professional communities around. And many vendors are secretly jealous of its success.
Although all the great things and content it provides, it may be time to offer SCN a facelift. And certainly many of you will agree.
SCN is currently lacking several features that would make it a true platform for collaboration, enhancing real-time interaction between the users.
Social Networking
- User profiles: Currently the users on SCN have at least three profiles. A Blogger profile, a Business Card and a Wiki profile. This needs to be harmonized, providing a single page giving an overview on all the information regarding a user.
- User information
- Blogs
- Contributions (Forums, Whitepapers)
- Rewards
- User interaction: Allow users to network, create connections, share and recommend content. Allow users to subscribe to specific user content channel.
- Communities: Allow user to subscribe to communities. The TechEd badge banners are a good example of how people love to identify themselves as part of communities, and this is true on SCN as well.This would facilitate the networking between professionals with the same interests.
- Product channels: allow users to subscribe to a specific product channel and get close interaction with professionals and product management.Content would be a mix of contributions from the communiy and PM, and real time information provided through micro-blogs (Twitter).
Content
- Content Rating: Allow the users to rate content and promote it. A specific forum or blog that draws particular attention should be able to be promoted to gain more visibility as it is more likely to be looked up, to call for further contribution
- Content organization: Current content organization and architecture might gain into being reviewed. Although areas look clear from a high level perspective, I witnessed several people having issues, navigating into SCN, to find the content they were looking for.
Content is spread across several areas and type of content. The person does not necessarily now in the first place the format in which format the information might be available (whether it would a paper or a blog post).
- Media: Lots of information goes through sharing media, audio and video podcasts. It would be a great enhancement to be able to create media/podcast channels and be able to publish them easily. This does not necessarily require the hosting of the physical files.
- Real-time interaction: the integration of micro blogging in SCN will be a great asset. We see here and there a few Twitter lists being displayed in the front page of communities. But a proper integration will bring more value. Not to forget the awesome ESME project built on NetWeaver CE.
Contribution
Contributions are currently rewarded with SCN points.Great. Top contributors will be awarded badges (from bronze to platinium). That is a great way to recognize the effort. But my feeling is that this should be pushed further. Top contributors might gain further involvement within the community, and could be offered chances to make things better.
Events
Setup an event engine allowing people to RSVP to the event. The event page would have a proper description of the event, its content. It would also display guest lists and provide the venue information and organization details.
These are just a few ideas, and I am pretty sure, you have lots of them. Feel free to contribute with your own. A collaborative brainstorming would definitely help provide the right ideas on how to make SCN a better place for us all.
