What’s new in SAP Jam: New work patterns, expert finding, and events

We want SAP Jam to help you get your work done faster and more effectively – by giving you the full picture, a repeatable approach that saves you time, and the flexibility to adapt to your needs.

To do that, you need a way to collaborate within the business processes and applications you already use – rather than in separate, disconnected silos of collaboration that make information hard to share.

In the November 2013 release of SAP Jam, we announced a concept called work patterns that delivers on that objective. A work pattern is a pre-built collaborative process that combines expertise, content, and best practices with real-time business data and applications. It lets you connect the dots so that everyone can stay on the same page, make rapid, informed decisions, and act on them to deliver results.

Now, in the February 2014 release of SAP Jam, we’re continuing to build on that objective. We’ve introduced:

• New work patterns that help even more teams get work done
• Faster ways to find the experts you need to connect with
• Better ways to work together using events and subgroups

New work patterns

Service Request Resolution: If you’re a customer service professional – or anyone that works with one – you’ll know how important it is to resolve customer issues as fast as possible. Often the best way to do that is to include people from a wide variety of teams – not just customer service – that have the expertise to answer tough questions. With the Service Request Resolution work pattern, you’ll be able to create a strike team within SAP Jam to do exactly that. Even if those experts from outside customer service don’t have access to your CRM system, they’ll still be able to see – within the SAP Jam group – key customer data that’s being pulled live from the CRM to keep everyone on the same page.

Planning and Implementation: Have you ever had to plan an event or implement a program with key deliverables on certain dates? The Planning and Implementation work pattern takes advantage of SAP Jam’s new events and calendars functionality so that you can bring together a team to organize date-driven activities. It’s great for planning customer projects if you’re in professional services; training and company events if you’re in HR; tradeshows and conferences if you’re in marketing; or even sales training if you’re on the sales team.

Expert finding and endorsement

Experts are the lifeblood of any organization – and connecting with the right ones is key to getting the right information so you can get your job done. To help you find the right people to help you, we’ve added the following to SAP Jam.

• Self-identification of expertise. In SAP Jam, you can now identify yourself as an expert on a topic by adding an expertise tag to your profile.
• Peer endorsement. Once you’ve added an expertise tag to your profile, others can then visit your profile to endorse you on that expertise.
• Social expertise endorsement. If you answer a question within a forum and someone else marks your answer as the best answer, the tags on the question are automatically added to your expertise – and you can choose whether or not to make them visible to others.

To find an expert, use the search feature in SAP Jam to search for the topic you’re looking for. The search results will uncover experts related to that topic – in addition to any relevant groups or content.

On top of that, SAP Jam will now also recommend relevant experts to follow on your home page feed and within the new-user onboarding wizard.

Events and calendars

We’re very happy to deliver on a popular customer request that goes hand-in-hand with the new Planning and Implementation work pattern – a way to work with events and calendars. All groups will include a new Events menu item, and groups created using the Planning and Implementation work pattern will feature a widget that shows a list of events.

In the Events view, you’ll be able to invite and track attendees, view the calendar in month, week, or day format, and even filter the kinds of events by category. To save an event to your desktop calendar, download its .ics file and open it with a supported application such as Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar.

To streamline your experience with events and calendars, we’ve updated the functionality of Agendas, Polls, Timelines, and Tasks. Agendas have been absorbed into the new Events feature, and Poll deadlines, Timelines, and Tasks now appear in the group calendar.

Sub-groups

If you often work with the same people, you’ve probably created SAP Jam groups that have grown quite large as more and more members have been invited. It’s useful to have everyone involved so they stay up to date, but sometimes you need to pull aside a smaller group of people to work on projects when you aren’t quite ready to involve everyone.

With this new functionality, you’ll be able to invite a subset of members from a larger group to a sub-group. A sub-group works just like a regular group and includes the same collaborative tools – like wikis, blogs, folders, and events – that the parent group includes. When there’s activity within a sub-group, notifications will be posted within the parent group’s feed – but they’ll be visible only to members of the sub-group.

For even more details on what’s new, please refer to the SAP Jam What’s New documentation for February 2014 available at http://help.sap.com/sapjam.