The New #SCN Homepage – Power to the Community!

From the early days of SAP Community Network, we’ve had a vision of SCN as a community “of the community and by the community”.   Today we’ve launched a new homepage that takes us another step in that direction!

You probably noticed today we launched a new SCN homepage with a more dynamic, content-rich set of widgets where now the best content from some of our most interesting and active topic areas comes up right on the homepage!   That’s pretty great – but even better… YOU are in control of what stories show up on the home page.   It’s true – we’ve put “Top Liked” widgets right on the homepage – so when you and the rest of the community show your appreciation for the best content by using SCN “like” buttons, you are not only giving kudos (and points) to the author, you are also adding your vote to the story for it to show up on the homepage.  Wow, that is really “the power of the community”!

And There are More Updates to the Homepage

So that’s not all we did with this new homepage update.  We made a number of changes to bring more fun, interesting, valuable content right up front in the community.  Here’s a list of the improvements we just made (images at bottom for reference):

A.   Find Top SCN Resources – here are some of our most popular links for where to see what’s happening and getting the pulse of the community.  

a.  Discussions (Forums) by Space – See the latest discussions happening in the community across all topics – new questions, new answers, all in one place showing the topic space with the most current threads right at the top. 

b.   Recent Blog Posts – A list of all most recent blog posts across all SCN.  It’s like a giant blogroll across the entire SCN site.  Want to see the most current blogs being published right now?  Click here.

c.   All Topics and Spaces – here’s a full list of all topic spaces with the most currently active spaces showing at the top.  

d.   Wiki Homepage – Looking for great reference material on SAP and SAP solution topics?  Here’s the place to go!

B.  Member of the Month – We love our Member of the Month program.  Our members are the life blood of the community and every month it’s great to read Laure Cetin’s interview blogs of our “Member of the Month” to see the amazing and interesting ways that members have come to SCN and the value members get from their engagement and contributions.   We’ve been featuring our Members of the Month for a while now, but we wanted to continue to feature our “MoM”s beyond just the current month.  So you see our current Member of the Month – and now our last 5 Member of the Months as well!

C.  Community News –  Check here for the latest happening in the community.   Whether it’s the SCN 10 year anniversary celebration, new social sign-on abilities, updates to the homepage, or whatever… You’ll find the latest news about SCN right here in the Community News area.

D.  SCN Twitter Discussion – So many of our SCN Community members are also very active on Twitter, we wanted to give some visibility to those discussions – and to encourage other members to join the Twitter conversation as well!   People talking about SAP Community Network use the hashtag #SCN to bring the conversation together.  So this new widget shows the twitter discussion on the #SCN hashtag.  Watch the conversation here – and if you feel inclined, jump in and join right from the widget!  

You’ll also notice that all new blogs are automatically posted on Twitter from the @SCNBlogs account and they always include the #SCN hashtag, so they’ll show up here as well.

E.  Top Liked Content on SCN – This is an amazing new area of the SCN homepage.  A couple of months ago we added the “Top Liked Content” widget with content from across SCN.  You’ll still find that widget in the top left corner of the area, but now we’ve added five more Top Liked Content widgets from some of our most interesting and active topic areas in the community.  To start, we have top liked content from our Business Intelligence, Cloud, HANA, Mobile, and Business Trends areas in the community.  This is truly “Community Curated Content” – you own what shows up here.   When you and other members use the SCN like button to “give some love” to blogs and document, the most liked content will automatically start to appear in these widgets on the homepage. 

F.  Best of the SCN Newsletters – If you’re a subscriber to one of our SCN newsletters, you know that our SCN Editorial team finds and publishes the best content from the community in our regular subscription newsletters.    Our newsletters have a huge following with over a million opt-in inboxes getting regular updates.  Our editorial team watches which are the most popular stories and in this spot you’ll find stories that have gotten the most “click love” on our recent newsletters.  Once again – the community is driving the content, so I’m sure it will be interesting and valuable!

G.  SAP Mentor Blog Posts – Our SAP Mentors always have something interesting, exciting, and valuable to talk about.   Whenever SAP Mentors post blogs, you know it’s worth checking out – so we’re pulling all Mentor blogs into this widget right on the homepage too.

So that’s it!   We are confident the new homepage will continue the tradition of bringing the best SCN community content to you – and make the SCN homepage a great place to always come back and check out “what’s hot” in the community.  Of course you’ll also want to check out your personalized Communications and Activity Streams to see what’s happening for topics and people you follow too!

A huge THANK YOU to the outstanding work and creativity on the part of the SCN Content Strategy team – with special thanks to Jodi Fleischman, Patrick Flanders, Audrey Stevenson, Talila Baron, and Catherin LaCroix.  Great job team!

We want your feedback, so please leave your thoughts and comments below!

Thanks and all the best,

Chip