How to make a lot of friends on the SCN in just one hour as a fresher

Are you relatively new in SAP and asking a lot of questions on the SCN?

Excellent! That’s what I believe the SCN is for.

Now, many of you will be missing an easy opportunity to make friends here (and therefore being more likely to get good answers fast).

Just follow these steps:

1) Click on your oen name at the top of the screen to get to your profile, click “comtent”, click “Authored”, click “discussions”

2) Have a quick glance at your discussion posts. The more of them have a blue rather than a green icon to the left, the better the chances for you to make new friends quickly.

3) Now check your authored discussion posts:

  3a) Have those still on the blue icon (“not answered”) really not been resolved yet? If they are resolved, mark the correct answer as such, so others will also know, what the correct solution was. If none of the answers was correct, but it’s still solved (or become obsolete) click “mark as assumed answered” and elaborate. Closing questions helps others to pick the right (unanswered) questions to contribute to. Thanks to Steffi Warnecke  for pointing out to me that I missed the “mark as correct” option in the firts version of this post.

  3b) If they are not yet answered: has another user offered a solution you haven’t tried yet or asked for some further clarification of the problem, so he can help you? Well, you should follow up on this! Leaving it “unanswered” indicates you are still looking for a solution. Not picking up on another user’s suggestion (if serious), is basically saying: “I’m still desparate for a solution, but as you are asking me to contribute to the solution of my own problem, I can’t be bothered and anyway: I don’t trust your solution, because I think you don’t know your stuff.”. How do you think this impacts your chances of getting help next time round.

  3c) This, which have been resolved: give feedback to contributors and let everybody know, what did the trick in the end. It’s nice for those, who contributed, and others can learn from it as well. If you decide not to use a certain solution, say why (“Thanks for this suggestion. Unfortunately I’m not good enough at schema config to implement that, but we found this workaround XYZ and users are happy enough with it.”)

4) Now, hopefully most of your discussions should have the green “answered” status, those unanswered are followed up on with any further information required, so the respective experts are probably figuring out your solution already and all contributors feel they have been dealing with a polite, respectful human being they would happily work with again.

Note: most people here help, because they like helping others. But to get a positive feeling out of the process, they need some kind of feedback. Even, if it’s “This solution didn’t work – it just brought this new error…”, it still doesn’t feel like they talk into a black hole.

Hence, if you are collaborative and polite, you’ll be liked, even, if you are mostly asking questions and not yet answering many due to your level of experience. You’ll still be respected as someone easy to work with and make friends along the way.

❗ still here? go to step one from above now 😉