Welcome to the new SAP Jam – release 1411. This release of SAP Jam is probably our biggest and most ambitious ever, encompassing many new features, a new user interface, and lots of customer-requested enhancements.

This posting will cover the highlights of the following topics:

• SAP Jam’s new user interface: fresh and modern, yet familiar
• New integration with Microsoft Lync for real-time presence, unified communications, and instant messaging
• New CMIS integrations for SAP Extended ECM by OpenText and OpenText Content Server
• New stand-alone SAP Jam mobile app
• Minor features

For more information about what’s in this release, be sure to visit the SAP Jam site: SAP Jam – SAP Help Portal Page  and review our release notes and user guides.

SAP Jam’s new user interface: fresh and modern, yet familiar

With this release, SAP Jam is getting a newly refreshed user interface that was designed with the following design goals:

• Visually more modern
• Easier to use
• Easier to complete common tasks and activities
• More accessible
• More content “above the fold”

The obvious changes

Some of the changes are more obvious: The top header is smaller and now persists as you scroll down the page, and the screen real estate that SAP Jam is designed for is now wider (39% wider), so we’ve made the viewport on overview pages wider, and we’ve also moved the recommendation tiles to the right sidebar. But don’t worry, overview page layouts won’t change – they are still made of up content blocks (widgets) that can be 1 to 3 blocks per row, the blocks themselves now being wider to take advantage of the additional screen size.  If the SAP Jam window is resized, things will automatically resize down and even hide the right sidebar so that the primary content area will have sufficient space available.

The subtle changes

Some user interface changes aren’t as obvious – fonts are larger, where possible: We’ve made things easier to read and we’ve made extensive accessibility improvements to accommodate screen readers. In other cases, we’ve moved functionality so that it’s easier to find. Help is now prominently displayed at the top right of the screen, along with the notifications, messages, and task count. The “your name” name menu is now a configuration icon.

A friendlier SAP Jam makes it easy to learn how to use

Even though SAP Jam is already easy to use, we’ve made it even better for new group admins by including a new “page designer tips” that appears the first time you edit an overview page. This kind of helpful information is just the beginning – there’s also tool tips on graphic elements (which helps accessibility).

If you’re a group admin and you haven’t yet discovered the power of the page designer for your overview pages, we’ve added a great way for you to give it try. Upgrade your wiki-based overview pages to a page-designer page with the upgrade converter, and SAP Jam will copy your content to a new page-designer page and will try its best to maintain the content. Look for more tips, hints, and useful instructions to come in future releases.

Prioritize how you read your feed

As far as feed functionality, we’re introducing new filtering capabilities directly within the feed to make it easier for you to prioritize what you see.  The first thing you typically do when you log into SAP Jam is see your feed, but what if you want to see the feed activity from specific people or specific group?  You can do that now with personal custom filters.

Share activities between groups

When looking at feed posts, you can now share that activity to another group. This has been a popular request, particularly for executive communications that need to be distributed beyond the initial group they were posted to.   Rest assured, content security is still maintained – if I were to share a feed post that was referring to a document in a private group, people would only be able to read the feed post itself, and would only be able to see the content of the document if they were a member of the private group.  If you’re not a member of the private group the document lives in, you still won’t be able to view it – maintaining the security and privacy of the content itself.

New integration with Microsoft Lync for real-time presence, unified communications and instant messaging – no IT involvement required

Over the past year, we’ve seen an increasing number of requests from customers about integrating with their unified communications and instant messaging system.  We’re happy to announce a great new integration with Microsoft® Lync®, which is easy for your IT departments to deploy – it requires no IT involvement or integration! As long as you have Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Lync, and Microsoft Office installed, you should be all set.

When you see a user mentioned in SAP Jam, in a group, in a feed post, or in their profile, you can mouse-over the person to display a hover card. The hover cards will now include real-time presence information from Lync. Then, if you click the presence icon (the green light in the picture), the Lync client’s quick action menu will appear, giving you one-click access to IM, calls, and email. Please refer to the release notes for compatibility and system requirements.

New CMIS integrations for SAP Extended ECM by OpenText and OpenText Content Server

In addition to our previous content management and CMIS integrations, we’re happy to announce two new content management integrations – SAP Extended ECM by OpenText and OpenText Content Server.  Identical in functionality to the prior integrations, once connected to a specific SAP Jam group, users can view, comment on, and download documents from within SAP Jam – without having to be on the company network or even VPN.

These integrations join the previously released integrations, bringing the total to five:  Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office 365 SharePoint Online, Alfresco One, SAP Extended ECM, and OpenText Content Server.

New SAP Jam-optimized mobile app

You can now use SAP Jam via the SuccessFactors mobile app, which includes SAP Jam in it, or our new stand-alone mobile app for iOS.

The new mobile app supports all the functionality of the existing SuccessFactors app and also adds:

• Interactive organization chart
• Search all content types
• Filtering by self @ mention and 5 most recent groups
• Full support for external (guest) users
• Expertise

Notable minor enhancements

As always, we’re always trying to think of ways to make things even easier in SAP Jam. Here’s what we’ve come up with for this release (be sure to review our release notes for a complete list; these are just the highlights).

• Work patterns
  • The Order to Cash work pattern can now include delivery object data from SAP ERP central component (ECC).
• Notifications
  • Email notifications. We’ve completely rewritten how email notifications work.  Non-urgent email notifications will now be content digests.  See the release notes for details. This will also be covered in the follow-up posting on usability.
  • In-SAP Jam “bell” notifications: @@notifications will no longer say “mentioned you” unless you are actually mentioned specifically.
• UI in general
  • Global search filter to specific content types (before you search)
  • Drag and drop content when posting status updates
  • Changes to various UI elements to better support screen readers
  • Inter-SAP Jam links to content. When making status posts about content within SAP Jam (i.e. posting a URL to content within SAP Jam), those links will now be recognized, and a correct page preview will be displayed.
• Overview pages
  • Save as draft, version control, and reversion to a prior version
  • Announce changes to overview pages in the same way as wiki pages
  • New widgets
    • The search widget allows you to add a search box to your overview page searching within your group.
    • The tag cloud widget displays the most popular tags used within your group, making it easy for people to discover relevant content.
    • The common actions widget is similar to the common actions on the feed, but is configurable by the group admin. The admin can specify the targets of certain actions – for example, “upload a document” can be configured to put documents in a specific folder; “ask a question” can put questions in a specific forum, etc.
• Group management
  • Demote a group to a sub-group, promote a sub-group to a “regular” group and move sub-groups between groups
  • Change group types – public, private (even if they have sub-groups)
  • Common actions box on the feed of groups. Not all SAP Jam groups have overview pages, so to help group members decide what to do, we’ve added a new common actions box to the right sidebar
• Forums
  • Save as draft and publish options
  • Edit posts
  • Change the topic type or name
  • Version control of posts
• Tasks
  • Assign tasks to all group members, including pending members
  • Only the task creator can edit their own tasks
  • Task assignees can only update their respective task status
  • All tasks for me view (click the task icon at the top of the screen)