What’s new in SAP Jam: more ways to infuse social in your work

This release of SAP Jam focuses on expanding your ability to add social to the way you work by using social interaction for the success of your company. Take a look to see how new capabilities can help you do the following:

Encourage expert mentoring and group collaboration with private folders

• Facilitate expert mentoring using one-on-one spaces
• Work with a smaller group to create content by using shared private folders

Capture collective wisdom and turn ideas into results with forums

• Gain insights from experts with question & answer capabilities
• Foster innovation and continual improvement through idea boards

Streamline your work with document and feed enhancements

• Easily collaborate on creating documents with built-in editing and save time with improvements to file uploads and navigation
• Understand conversations at a glance with feed improvements

For those of you who are developers and power users, we’ve created a way for you to bring social into any application with the new SAP Jam embeddable widget, and quickly add and collaborate around your content with Box Embed in your SAP Jam wiki pages.

If you are an SAP Jam administrator, we’ve added a way for you to quickly resolve administrative issues with super user mode.

Read on to see how you and your company can benefit from the latest release of SAP Jam.

Encourage expert mentoring and group collaboration with private folders

Facilitate expert mentoring using one-on-one spaces

There is tremendous value in mentorship activities—you can learn and improve skills while subject matter experts get to sharpen and polish their own knowledge. Everyone wins.

With new private folders, you can break off into a private area to participate in individual expert mentoring. You can share mentoring-related content, including timelines, goals, documents, and whatever else that is needed for success. For example, in a team group, you can create a private folder for each of your employees to do one-on-one mentoring, and content sharing.

Work with a smaller group to create content by using shared private folders

Create content with a smaller group before it is released to a broader group audience by using shared private folders.  You can work in small teams to edit documents and collaborate on analyses prior to seeking feedback from the larger group.

Ensure that content is ready for release by gathering your team’s feedback before putting it in front of your customers or partners. Using private folders this way helps you deliver high caliber content that will impress your partners and customers so that you can win their trust and loyalty. For example, private folders can be used in external groups in situations where you are interacting with external participants. This means you can work collaboratively on RFP’s, customizing presentations for customer needs, drafting contracts, and numerous other possibilities.

Capture collective wisdom and turn ideas into results

Easily organize the discussions that are happening within an SAP Jam group, and use them to contribute to the success of your business with the new discussion forums. We have modified the discussion feature with this release of SAP Jam, and we are introducing discussion forums and topic boards to improve organization. There are three types of topic content that can be posted in the forums—discussions, questions, and ideas. You can create topic boards, and you have the ability to add discussions, questions, and ideas to them.

For fast access, you’ll be able to go to the discussion forums by using the left-hand group navigation.

Gain insights from experts in your company with question & answer capabilities

Engage the collective knowledge of employees from within and beyond your organization to answer questions that are crucial to your job and the overall health of your company. Let’s say a customer asks a question that your sales team can’t answer—the new question topic introduces discussion posts tailored for submitting questions to a group. Once your sales team has the right answer, they can easily relay it back to the customer and feel confident about its validity.

You and your group administrator can mark questions as answered to indicate that you have found a correct response.

Foster innovation and continual improvement through idea boards

Capture moments of enlightenment that occur in people from around your company by using the new idea forums. Then use those ideas to solve workplace challenges, improve your services, augment products, enhance business processes, and so on—the possibilities are endless! The idea forums make soliciting ideas from a group simple, and getting feedback on submitted ideas from other group members is just as easy. You and other group members can vote ideas up or down, and provide comments to help sort and refine ideas.

After reviewing an idea, group administrators can change its status to give feedback to the idea submitter. Ideas have status indicators to show if they have been reviewed or accepted.

Streamline your work with document and feed enhancements

Easily collaborate on creating documents with built-in editing and save time with new file uploading and navigation

Save time, quickly start the document editing process, and save yourself from desktop clutter by initiating document editing in SAP Jam with the single click of a button.  For those of you who use Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office, there is a new ‘Edit Document’ option which opens the document in Microsoft Office. Once you open the document, saving the document in Microsoft Office uploads a new version to SAP Jam.

Your time is important, so we’ve found ways of allowing you to save time and effectively take action by adding multiple file upload to SAP Jam. You can now also select the destination folder where you want to upload documents, and you’re taken directly to the selected folder after the upload completes.

To allow for others to access the content you provide more easily, we’ve also introduced several navigation enhancements. Static URLs for folders make it easier to view folder content. Sharing folder locations is now as easy as forwarding the URL, and the interface now highlights which folder you are viewing in the group.

It is now significantly easier to find content by using filters in groups to see content by type. The new featured column shows which content is most important. Featuring folders makes them available to the group recommendation tiles.

Understand conversations at a glance with feed improvements

Now you can quickly understand what is happening around your company using SAP Jam without having to hunt for additional information. Conversations, content, and comments are displayed in context of the original update they are associated with when you’re browsing through your SAP Jam feed. When your coworkers add comments or content to a conversation, instead of just adding that update to one’s activity feed, the entire thread of that update is added to your feed. This makes it easier to understand updates at a glance.

For developers and power users…

Bring social into any application with the SAP Jam embeddable widget

Enrich your work experience and remove friction from the way that things get done in your company by adding the new SAP Jam embeddable widget to your work applications. This widget allows you to embed feed updates and group recommendation tiles in the user interfaces of any external application. With this widget, you can add social collaboration to your HCM, CRM, EMA, ERP, or any other application so that you can bind together workflows and business processes by seamlessly interacting between the boundaries of applications and organizations.

Quickly add and collaborate around your content with Box Embed in your SAP Jam wiki pages

With Box Embed, you can now illustrate your point and add depth to interactions by easily bringing in important content for collaboration in SAP Jam.  For those of you who use Box to manage and access your content, you can now embed content folders from Box in your SAP Jam wikis and blogs. Whether you work in human resources, sales, service or marketing, this will help you gain access your content without ever leaving SAP Jam, thereby reducing any friction and having all your content at your fingertips.

Add in Box now to SAP Jam with just one click: Insert the widget in SAP Jam and from there, have all your content available  through Box with the entire Box experience – including commenting, Box Edit, drag-and-drop uploading and more features you love – all within SAP Jam. By helping you find and share content from Box without having to leave SAP Jam, Box will  keep your business aligned and productive.

For SAP Jam administrators…

Ensure content compliance and fix technical issues

For those of you that are SAP Jam administrators, now you can feel confident that you are in control of the content posted within SAP Jam. The new content administration feature allows organization administrators to temporarily go into a ‘super user’ mode that allows them to administer all the private content within their company. Content administrators can search for or browse all the private groups and content. This permits you to address compliance issues, fix technical problems, and work with orphaned data.

We hope you enjoy this release of SAP Jam, and we would like to hear your thoughts. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to let us know by posting in the comments section below.