With 2011 coming to a close, the SAP Community Network team has had a chance to reflect on our accomplishments of the past year. Our primary goal was, and will always be, delivering to our users a highly valuable and usable online community that encourages learning and collaboration to help you develop, deploy, customize, and operate world-class SAP solutions. To that end, we've been planning over the past year to deliver a New SCN, and have been busy migrating our current site to a new platform. We communicated plans to go live with the new site in December, but today I have decided to postpone the launch to early 2012.
It's an understatement to say that the decision to delay the launch was not taken lightly... it was really difficult, nearly excruciating after so much time and work has gone into design, build, migration, testing. But, despite extraordinary efforts by our core SCN team, our partners in SAP IT, vendors/consultants, and key stakeholders, we don't feel that the new platform is of high enough overall quality to launch to our community members. With a project of this size, there are literally thousands of moving parts, and we need to feel absolutely convinced that every aspect of the site meets our high standards. It is making progress but doesn't meet those standards now, so we've identified what is needed to get it there, and we're actively engaged around the clock in fixing those issues so we can deliver the new site to you in early 2012.
We recognize that many of you have been eagerly anticipating this change, and some have made plans based on the new platform. But ultimately we have to do what's right for our customer community -- that, more than anything else, drives our decision making -- and we aren't willing to deliver a new site until it's reliable and stable, with all the features and functionality we require, and with checks and double-checks completed. Quality is what's expected and deserved by our SCN members, and we won't compromise by launching the new site until it meets our highest standards.
We will continue to fix bugs, migrate content, run QA, test scenarios, verify usability, and ensure that full implementation of functionality is delivered and ready for launch in early 2012. We're constantly in communication with members of the community, and we've been humbled by the supportive, enthusiastic and encouraging feedback from so many of you since we first announced plans to construct and launch a New SCN.
The team, too, is excited to be able to provide you with this new platform - it will help you stay informed on the topics that interest you most, and it will help you to connect and interact with topic leaders. I've seen the detail to which our extended team has focused to ensure we're delivering the highest quality online community, and we're excited to keep our plans moving forward and to ultimately launch a New SCN in early 2012.
Stay tuned! ... and thank you for your support.
Mark Yolton
