Introducing SAP Jam: Secure, social collaboration where you work
Today SAP announces the introduction of SAP Jam, a secure, social collaboration solution that extends across SAP’s entire technology landscape to give you social capabilities where and when they’re needed in business processes.
When musicians play together, a jam session highlights just how important improvisation and harmony are. When your employees work together, harmony and teamwork can be just as important. SAP Jam is designed to facilitate creativity, energy, spontaneity, and teamwork for your enterprise by bringing together your people, information, applications, and processes.
SAP Jam provides intuitive and powerful tools for social collaboration to help you drive results wherever you work. With it, you can add structure to conversations and work to quickly drive action, make decisions, or solve business critical problems. It enables you to drive and track the offline work that occurs when exceptions arise or teamwork is required to attack business-critical issues. You can work with customers, partners, and employees directly in your social collaboration environment, in your business applications, or while mobile. SAP Jam does all of this while also enabling IT to protect key corporate data, avoid social silos, and deliver social collaboration across an entire technology landscape.
Read on to see how SAP Jam can help you:
- Bring everything together
- Streamline key business processes
Then, start using SAP Jam today!
Bring everything together
SAP Jam helps every business person bring everything together to help them get their work done. From across a company, you can use SAP Jam as an enterprise social networking tool that helps you improve communications. You can better connect employees across different geographies, and enable them to find subject matter experts quickly and share best practices. And, you can empower employees to drive decision making by helping teams tame project chaos, build consensus, and make informed decisions.
SAP Jam unites people, information, applications, and processes across your extended business network of customers, partners, and employees. Find experts quickly by being able to easily locate those who can help you solve problems or learn best practices. Learn from prior work by saving all conversations, documents, feedback, and decisions for later reference or re-use.
With SAP Jam, you can keep the team on the same page by leading or participating in discussions, posting or commenting on status updates (feeds), monitoring notifications, and chatting with others to ensure you’re up to date. Engage partners and customers easily and securely via an extranet with social collaboration features.
Sharing documents and information is simple with SAP Jam—you can post and annotate documents, add links, or share information on wikis or blogs. If it fits the way you work, you can also post and view content via email.
Want to quickly get complex concepts across? With SAP Jam you can bring key topics to life with video by recording video on your computer webcam or with a mobile device to share with the team. You can even capture video from your computer screen and record a voiceover to create tutorials, and give PowerPoint presentations without needing to download any additional software.
Drive work, action, and results with work tools
Organize and structure your work with business tools inside SAP Jam. You can align your team using a dynamic agenda, collect feedback on options and identify pros/cons, monitor key events and milestones, prioritize input via a group ranking, or build consensus and track approvals on decisions. You can even incorporate survey data from polls in SAP Jam to make data-driven decisions.
Organize and keep deliverables on track with task assignment and notifications in SAP Jam. You can also motivate and reward your colleagues for a job well done by acknowledging superior participation with badges and employee of the month surveys.
Be up and running quickly with the friendly SAP Jam interface that allows you to avoid lengthy training and be productive in minutes. For first time users, it’s effortless to learn how to start collaborating with their team by using the first-time login wizard.
Work from anywhere with SAP Jam clients for the iPhone, Blackberry, iPad, and Android—while you’re on the go you can get the latest updates and make just-in-time decisions to keep your business running smoothly.
Find what you need, when you need it. With SAP Jam, you can follow people or groups, or view related, most viewed, most liked, or featured content, and use filters, search, and tags to identify and find important information.
Discover information in SAP Jam with update tiles that provide you with recommendations on people, content, groups, data, or tasks. You can also monitor SAP Jam usage to see which groups and content are the most valuable with on demand reports.
Streamline business processes
Increase HR efficiency with improved onboarding, learning and goal alignment
If you’re an HR, learning, or knowledge management professional, you know how difficult it can be to get new employees onboarded, keep employees up-to-date on their training, and facilitate the performance and goal process. You can keep these work streams running smoothly when your company runs SuccessFactors BizX with SAP Jam.
You can use SAP Jam to decrease time to productivity for new employees through social onboarding. Automatically have new employees join an onboarding group that will help ensure their success by connecting them with the right information and people.
Using SAP Jam for social or blended learning allows you to reduce training costs. With SAP Jam’s integration with SuccessFactors Learning, collaborative groups can automatically be created to complement training courses. In SAP Jam groups, trainees can be connected with key course information, their peers and the course instructor so that they can learn the material more effectively. Subject matter experts can also create informal learning groups where they share content or video and lend their expertise to a group.
SAP Jam can be used for collaborative performance and goal management as well. You can create and share goals collectively for better goal alignment and faster completion. By creating increased transparency in the work that people are doing, it’s easier to measure employee contributions and performance.
You can keep up with all the latest updates from SAP Jam directly from SuccessFactors Employee Central. See what’s happening with the Jam Today tile.
Align sales initiatives, find expertise and collaborate to close deals
For sales and service professionals, learning product pitches, getting the latest competitive information, finding the right people and collaborating effectively to close deals can be challenging, but with SAP Jam you can easily access the resources you need for success. SAP Jam is integrated with SAP Sales OnDemand and SAP CRM so that your sales people can seamlessly collaborate with the right resources to shorten sales cycles and win more deals.
Bring together all key participants to collaborate on the opportunity process (sales, product management, service, partners, etc.) to reduce analysis and proposal development time. With SAP Jam, you can keep key stakeholders updated in real time regarding opportunity progress.
Increase engagement with customers and partners with external groups in SAP Jam to build relationships and to keep deliverables on track while improving transparency and gaining customer loyalty. By bringing in customers to external groups, you can respond to their needs and give them top-notch quality service by providing sales teams the ability to respond to questions or issues as they arise.
Decrease the time to contribution for new sales hires by using SAP Jam to connect them with the people, processes, and content they need to start driving sales. It’s also easy to enable sales teams to find and connect with subject matter experts needed to close key opportunities. Get the right people from cross-functional teams in your company to help with the RFP process, product issues, or anything else that is necessary to ensure the success of your customers.
Accelerate financial processes by connecting people with resources
Updating, sharing, reviewing and tracking financial information is tedious and time-consuming when done through email and other disconnected systems. SAP Jam integrates with the SAP Financials OnDemand mobile application so you don’t spend as much time searching for and sharing information.
Quickly share budget information, processes, discussions, status, reports and documents with departmental teams across the globe with SAP Jam. Collaborate with stakeholders to manage expenses, cost controls, and headcount. Use groups in SAP Jam for project coordinating where you can plan and track corporate key performance indicators.
Enable key business organizations to stay up to date on financial, compliance, or regulatory policies via sharing and informal learning in SAP Jam. You can even communicate important policy changes via status updates and offer informal training with shared documents and videos.
SAP Jam is hosted in the cloud, giving you the ability to bypass lengthy implementations and enjoy streamlined management. It allows you to deliver social collaboration with a single foundation, which allows you to avoid multiple collaboration silos and deliver a unified experience to the business. Plus, you can deliver SAP Jam in multiple languages to suit a global workforce: Chinese (simplified), English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish are all supported.
Extend your existing applications with RESTful APIs, you can enable your applications to query and manipulate resources in SAP Jam. Create a seamless work experience by integrating with third party applications such as Microsoft SharePoint, Google Calendar, Twitter, YouTube, SlideShare, along with posting and viewing content via email applications.
SAP Jam administrative and content controls are provided including compliance filters, ability to enable/disable features, and user management. SAP Jam ensures protection of key corporate information with SSL technology, at rest disk level encryption, password protection and session timeouts safeguard information. SAP Jam gives your company’s employees quick access with single sign-on (SSO) with user provisioning and de-provisioning, integration with enterprise identity providers, and automatic synchronization of user profile data.
For more information on back-end integrations, please see our SAP Jam ABAP Integration Configuration Guide.
Start using SAP Jam today!
You can start using SAP Jam today for free! Deliver secure, social collaboration where you work—experience the difference of bringing together people, information, applications, and processes to solve business-critical problems.
Visit www.sap.com/jam to begin!
excellent post! I think the real value is that Jam is integrated into the business processes around SAP as a "social layer" - So it is not standalone "collaboration" "social" etc. - its part of daily business. (sounds old-school, but better than work 2.0 or social business).
Hi Keith,
This is a good overview, although slightly salesy for me.I'm a features and functions guy
I take it that SuccessFactors JAM will no longer exist alongside SAP JAM?
Best regards,
Luke
Hi Luke,
Correct, going forward it will be known as SAP Jam with all of the capabilities of SuccessFactors Jam, plus additional functionality coming from SAP StreamWork.
Also, if you prefer features and functions, here is a great overview of the key capabilities SAP Jam offers: http://www.successfactors.com/en_us/solutions/bizx-suite/jam/content.html
Thanks Keith, that certainly is interesting to read through.
Keith,
Not having much luck here ... that link gave me a 404.
I then found my way here: http://www.successfactors.com/jam and then here: http://www.successfactors.com/en_us/solutions/bizx-suite/jam/hcm.html
But at the bottom of the page, each of the Learn More links below Content, Connect & Integrate didn't work either.
Did you mean to send people here: http://www.successfactors.com/en_us/solutions/bizx-suite/jam/content.html
On a more positive note, thanks for your blog!
Stephen
Hi Stephen,
A recent overhaul to our webpages has changed the hierarchy of the web URLs and seems to have broken some links. Thanks for pointing that out, the link that you posted on the bottom there is the one that was originally intended.
Thanks!
Keith
I'm confused. Doesn't StreamWork do most if not all of this today? Why another tool?
Hello Greg,
SAP Jam combines the power of enterprise social networking from SuccessFactors Jam with some of the social workflow, task management, and social business process support tools from SAP StreamWork to give a more robust offering in a single social platform.
Hi Keith,
Thanks for the clarification. It's good to know the positioning and that SAP have combined the best of both worlds. There was a cross-over in functionality so I'm glad they've been "consolidated" into one super-collaboration tool.
Best regards,
Luke
Hi Keith,
We are a long time power user of Streamworks and also used Jam when it was still Cubetree. Your posting indicates that a lot of the functionality of Streamwork has been incorporated into Jam. Can you confirm if 100% of the functionality is being incorporated? (i.e. is there still a reason to use a separate tool?). Along the same lines, does that mean that Streamwork will be discontinued and rolled into Jam?
Hi John,
Not all of the SAP StreamWork functionality will be incorporated in SAP Jam, but additional SAP StreamWork functionality will be added to SAP Jam in subsequent releases. There are no plans to discontinue SAP StreamWork.
John,
Just fyi, there will be no ByD integration with Jam.
Judson
I guess I take that back!
Keith,
There are currently multiple integration points between Streamwork and Business ByDesign. Are there plans to integrate JAM with ByD?
Hi John,
There are indeed plans to integrate SAP Jam with SAP Business ByDesign.
Really? When?
I don't have exact timing, but it is on the roadmap.
Hi Keith,
what does that mean for SAP Streamwork? It will be shut down somewhen in the future? What happens with the information stored in SAP streamwork?
Hi Tobias,
There are no plans to shut down SAP StreamWork.
I've just got notice from our SAP Inside Partner Account Manager that Streamwork will be replaced by SAP Jam and will be removed from price list soon. What's true now?
Regards
Raphael
Are you freaking kidding me?
I run all of my projects on Streamwork, and the comments and Instant Messaging features are all the 'Social Collaboration' I need.
Hi Raphael, Judson,
That information is inaccurate. We will continue to support SAP StreamWork. SAP Jam will be the go-forward social software solution of choice, but it will not replace SAP StreamWork.
Can you pls define more cloesly 'go-forward' ? What is Streamwork then? No new features but just keep it running?
Re SAP Jam: what about BOBJ integration e.g, into BI Launchpad, Mobile apps etc?
Going forward, SAP Jam will be used as the basis to enable and embed social capabilities across the SAP portfolio, such as integrating with SAP BusinessObjects. SAP StreamWork will keep running and future releases will address bug fixes.
Thanks for the clarification. This means that 'de facto' SAP JAM is replacing Streamwork. Not right now but in the mid term. It's like with BEx and BO Analysis or Deski and Webi: You can stay on the old end-of-life platform but if you want to benefit of new functionalities you'll have to move to the new one. No one to blame here for this, things like this just happens in the software world. But I highly recommend that SAP learns from the past and considers the following points:
1. Communicate clearly. Tell people the truth and what your intensions really are. E.g. Don't invest heavily now in SAP Streamwork, wait for Jam to provide the same integration level e.g. into BO as Streamwork has today.
2. Don't risk your trust: Provide an upgrade path from the old to the new platform. Cloud solutions are highly dependant of the trust into the provider. If you loose trust now it will cost you huge efforts to get it back!
3. Do it quickly: For me SAP Streamwork was one of the rare 'innovative' reasons to recommend BO to customers compared to other BI products (see also my blog http://rbranger.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/a-ray-of-hope-for-frustrated-bobj-folks/). I've just lost this reason for now. Please give it back to me by not waiting another year to be at the same place with Jam as we are today with Streamwork.
All pictures, except the first one are displayed as broken URL. Not sure if it is just me, or Chrome, or weather, or something else...
same for me, with regards to the missing pictures. I'm using IE8.
Pictures should be showing up now.
Pictures are all displaying correctly now. Thanks for getting them fixed.
IMHO "Social Collaboration" (solution) is a semantic pleonasm.
just sayin' ...
anton
Accordingly to the same Wikipedia "collaboration" can be between people or organizations. I believe "social" is the one between people. 😉
Hi, I just tested JAM, but for me it seems unchanged. I do not have the possibility to add tools as in streamwork (or on your screenshot http://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-74463-151837/image004.png).
Do I activly change something in JAM?
Hi Tobias,
Only the paid for enterprise edition has all that functionality currently. It's not there in the free version.
I am noting the same behavior as Tobias. We are a long time user of Jam from the time that it was known as Cubetree. We do not see any of the new functionality noted in this post.
Hi Tobias, John,
There are three reasons why you may not be seeing some of the additional functionality noted here:
I am actively following the enterprise social network market. Jam seems a promising solution.
If SAP wants to attract prospect, two thing are required in my opinion:
The decision to publish a function-limited free edition carries one risk: as this is a new kind of software, and many potential adopters are approaching at with a "prototype" mindset, and therefore will probably use a free edition for evaluation, a limited edition can lead to a limited valuation of the platform, hence driving prospect to competition.
Dimensional limitation (is the policy followed with StreamWork) is much more effective in attracting potential customers.
Hi Massimo,
can't agree more about their being a risk with the function limited solution and the dimensional limitation of StreamWork being a better option.
I'd suggest perhaps that alternately a non-productive (limited number of users) but fully functional solution should be made available. Like the SAP NW Cloud developer option.
Do you have any sort of idea (numbers or just through individual observation) on how this limited solution release might slow adoption? As those are the sorts of details that will really get people on-board to making a developer version available sooner.
The question is: how should an evaluation/developer free version should differ from an Enterprise version?
First point: developer/evaluation.
I think that these are two separate profiles:
Second point: free/paid versions difference.
I am not a marketing specialist, but I think that some points can be shared-
This market segment is new, and in evolution. Most of the interested business don't have anything similar in place. They are not sure if it will be useful at all. A free version enable a pilot project without committing all of the resources (people+money) of a standard project. This could be a damage, because lack of resource/commitment could lead to a poor implementation. At the same time it helps in lowering the "refusal barrier" for the new technology.
There is competition, in the marketplace. A vibrant competition. A product will be compared with others (as I am doing). If the free version is functionally limited, it will be compared with its limits to the others. As an example, the current limited version of Jam doesn't stand up against competitors; maybe this is not correct, but is what an independent person can document and prove and test.
So, allowing a free version, with limited functionality, leads to the paradox that the investments in product development are appreciated by the customers (who have already joined the product) and not by the prospects.
I can't translate these point in numbers, but in my specific case, the functional evaluation of the available version counts for 70% of the final judgment. Limited is better that non having anything at all (many vendors doesn't provide any kind of free version), of course.
Great points and well put.
Hear that folks!
Being someone who has just purchased a bunch of full SAP Jam licenses, I can attest to the value, but other may be missing out!
BTW - if you haven't already seen it - Keith blogged about and there is now available on-line a replay of a good session on SAP Jam
Webcast Recording: Leverage SAP Jam to Increase Enterprise Social Collaboration
Hi Keith,
great article!
For backend integrations now also the first version of the "SAP Jam ABAP Integration - Configuration Guide" is available on SCN under https://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-33328.
Maybe you can refer to it in your article.
Best regards,
Christoph
Hi Christoph,
Thanks for pointing that out. I've added it to the "Extend, customize, and manage" section of the article.
Cheers!
Hi Christoph, does SAP Jam ABAP Integration work with free version of SAP Jam. Thanks!
Hi Vasiliy,
to my knowledge the pricing is not yet finalized and my assumption would be that the free license is not sufficient for backend integration.
Best regards,
Christoph
I would love to see a fully enabled enterprise SAP Jam enabled for free developer/non-productive use as per the SAP NWCloud options. Surely it would not cost too much and would be a huge boon for developer engagement. Just think how many SAP DemoJam entries have been built around streamwork. The position eposure would have to be good. I certainly will be lobbying for this!
Cheers,
Chris.
Guys, are there any online demonstrations or independent user reviews of this product? Screenshots are OK but an actual simulation would be better....I found one on YouTube but the metal soundtrack doesn't really make it suitable for sharing with clients
Thanks
Lynton Howes
http://adapt2consulting.com.au/
Lynton, some demo you can see at this webinar: Leverage SAP Jam to Increase Enterprise Social Collaboration
The list of Jam Live Webcasts is at this page.
SAP Jam seems to gather and aggregate all (or most of) the social collaboration tools that we have at SAP (Streamworks, community, groups , ..) + the new features comming from success factor tool. It looks to be very powerful !
I hope that SAP Jam become the unique sociale collaboration platform at SAP in order to avoid to have our collaboration tool scattred in several platforms as it is now !
Hi Slim,
The strategic go-forward social collaboration platform for SAP will be SAP Jam in order to avoid the problem that you mentioned, as well as to avoid issues of having scattered silos of documents and social interactions.
Hi Keith,
thank you for this great article!
I have a question regarding the connection between SAP Streamwork and SLC. There is a possibilty to connect them by standard. Is the same connection going to be established between SLC and SAP Jam?
Thank you,
Cheers,
Ismet
Hi Ismet,
yes you can establish connectivity using the same approach. An updated configuration guide for SAP Jam can be found under
SAP Jam ABAP Integration Configuration Guide.
Best regards,
Christoph
Hi Christoph,
thank you for your quick reply!
Cheers,
Ismet
Hi Keith,
excellent blog, thank you.
All the best,
Andy.
Hi Keith,
I like to make you aware, that an updated version of our configuration guide, which is dedicated to SAP_BASIS 7.31 SP 6, is now available. It can be found under https://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-36272.
Best regards,
Christoph
Hi Christoph,
Thanks for pointing this out. I've updated the link in the blog post.
Cheers,
Keith
Hi Keith!
Very interesting! Thank you!
If SAP Jam is going to be what it is called then why is it *still* being hosted at Cubetree.com ?
Why is there no migration path from streamworks to SAPJam? It would seem that even if it is being supported it is now the poor cousin of Jam.
Is Jam being run on NW Cloud ?
Thanks and regards,
Nigel
Remember the king is dead, long live the queen - SAP HANA Cloud...
There are some major differences between how SAP Jam and StreamWork work. Until SAP Jam starts allowing OpenSocial widgets, I can't see how there could be a migration option.
Thanks for that Chris. How are you finding it as I know you jumped in boots and all for paid accounts. Got a blog in you for that? I would love to know.
Cheers,
Nigel
It seems SAP Jam is not available any more when I go www.sap.com/jam as it was recommended. Has it moved or what ?
I think you will find jam at https://jam4.sapjam.com/ .
https://www.cubetree.com/ is also redirecting here now.
I think a fun url would have been https://money4.sapjam.com and I guess that is what SAP are hoping for.
Kind regards,
Nigel
Excellent blog
Hi Keith and others
It is indeed a very informative blog, thanks for compiling. I recently completed an article on Enterprise Social Networking, with a focus on SAP Jam, which was published in Inside SAP magazine. Would love to hear any feedback - feel free to comment directly on the web page.
http://adapt2consulting.com.au/enterprise-social-networking/
Thank you
Lynton
Wow this seems to be cool...
nice post Keith
Hi Keith,
thanks for this article.
Looking into it as well as more current info, JAM is a great tool, but can't replace a full wiki for knowledge sharing in the long run. Is this a fair assessment?
If so, is there any integration for Wiki products (such as Confluence) planned?
kind regards
Sven
Hi Keith,
I have a few questions I'd like to ask about this post-if you could email me I would really appreciate it!
Thanks,
Morgan
morgan.sharif@sap.com
Hi kieth,
nice info ....I hope so ..this jam may bring some new innovations organization side and to managers also ...as I read some key points , really appreciates JAM
Hi Keith,
This SAP Jam introduction is very good overview.
I'm really interested in integration between SAP HCM on-premise and SAP Jam.
Is there any direct integration between HCM Processes and SAP Jam? is it possible update SAP data from SAP Jam?
Can SAP Jam retrieve data from SAP HCM? For example using Single Sign On is possible taking from SAP HCM any relevant employee information like Job Title?
Normally a professional user during its operative job can perform some actions like "creation of new position" (HCM Form and Processes), is it able to create group of discussion or add feeds during the execution of this activity? And eventually are these feeds/groups sorted for general subject matter like "creation of position" or for object ID created (Position object ID)? Are these feeds available for any other colleague will perform in the next future the same action?
In the documentation in my hands, I can see Streamwork collaboration links available in several abap webdynpro applications. Is there anything similar provided by SAP Jam?
Best Regards
Mauro
Does anybody have answers to Sven's question above on integration of JAM with Wiki Products?
Hi,
As a Company Account Administrator on SAP Jam how do you activate or enable SAML and OAuth client options so that they are available in the navigation bar under Admin?
Thanks.