New in SAP Jam: Events and calendars

If you’re collaborating on date-driven work with a group of people, it’s imperative to assign dates and times for key activities and milestones to ensure your work gets done.

Without a deadline, people may assume a task can be done whenever it’s convenient. And without time set aside for an important activity – say, strategic brainstorming – people often prioritize other activities already in their schedule ahead of it.

If you and your team have a clear objective in mind, setting an equally clear timeline for what you need to achieve is paramount. That’s why in the latest release of SAP Jam, we’ve created a new Events interface that lets you schedule times for important things like:

• Brainstorming sessions
• Conferences
• Meetings
• Milestones
• Training sessions
• Webinars

Once an event has been scheduled, it will appear in a calendar that you can view as a list – or by month, week, or day. And so that you can see and work on all date-driven items in one place, we’ve also made Poll deadlines, Timelines, and Tasks visible in the calendar.

Events are designed to be easy to use and help you connect even better with the people you work with. With the new functionality, you can:

• Add events to a group calendar
• Promote events via a group’s feed
• Invite people to your event
• Track who’s attending
• Add an agenda to an event
• See all the events you’re interested in quickly
• Expose events on your overview and wiki pages via a new events widget

There are three ways you can use Events.

1. In an existing group. If you’re already in a group, click Events in the left menu of the group’s overview page. If you’re a group admin, you can add the new Event widget to your existing overview and wiki pages
2. In the Planning and Implementation work pattern. When you use this work pattern – specifically designed for groups working on programs with date-driven deliverables – you’ll be able to take advantage of Events widgets that we’ve already embedded within it.
3. From the top menu. To see all the events you’re interested in, click Events in the top menu of SAP Jam. You’ll see all the events you’ve registered for across all the SAP Jam groups you’re part of.

Here’s a scenario that shows how you might use Events if you’re on a human resources team.

Your company’s benefits open enrollment period is coming up soon and you want to train your employees on how to choose the most appropriate benefits. To do that, you’ve invited all employees to a webinar, which they’ll see both in their group feed as well as in their calendars.

When employees view the event, they’ll see more details and also be able to choose whether or not to join it.

If employees want to save a reminder for the event to their desktop, they can download its .ics file to their desktop and open it with a supported application such as Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar.

To help people search for specific types of events they’re interested in, you can add appropriate categories and tags to them.

Adding tags and categories also lets you use the new event widget to decide which ones to expose on group overview or wiki pages.