The SAP Jam team is pleased to announce the availability of the free SAP Jam developer edition.
The SAP Jam developer edition is accessible only through the SAP Cloud Platform free developer account. If you haven’t yet signed up for your SAP Cloud Platform free developer account, then you can do so here: https://account.hanatrial.ondemand.com/register. Once you have registered, and logged in, to your SAP Cloud Platform free developer account, click on the Services menu option and SAP Jam will be listed as one of the services available to developers. Click on the Enable link to create your SAP Jam developer edition.
The purpose of this blog post is to help you get started with your new environment. First, a brief introduction to SAP Jam.
SAP Jam is the combination of social networking, collaboration, and business tools integrated with data and your business processes to help you get work done.
There’s so much you can do with SAP Jam - here are just a few of the things you can do:
- Ask questions
- Share information
- Collaborate on data coming from other applications
- Provide status updates
- Track tasks in projects
- Share, review and comment on documents
- Discuss with peers
- Evaluate ideas
- Find an expert
- Make decisions
- Write a blog or wiki
The SAP Jam developer edition will allow you to explore the capabilities listed above, how you can extend, integrate and customize SAP Jam as well as incorporate SAP Jam’s collaboration capabilities into your own applications.
Let's get started...
Login to SAP Jam
Once you have enabled your SAP Jam developer edition, click on the Go To Service link within the SAP Jam Services section of the SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit to log in to your SAP Jam developer edition environment. You will be logged in as the SAP Jam administrator.
When you log into SAP Jam, you will be presented with the Home page. This page provides you with useful information about your environment as well as links to resources and documentation.
On this page you also have your own personal feed, showing you activities that you should be interested in from people you follow, groups you’re a member of and notifications sent directly to you. This is not to be mistaken with a group feed, which is visible when you’re viewing a specific group. When you log in for the first time your feed will be empty.
From this page you can post feed update updates, documents, videos and access other common actions such as your profile, your Account Settings and the Admin Console.
Administering SAP Jam
To access the SAP Jam Admin Console, click in the Cog icon at the top of the page and select the Admin menu option.
This will bring you to the Admin Console where all of the Administrator options that are available are accessible down the left hand side of the page.
Setting up new users
Collaboration is not possible, or much fun, with only one user so lets add another user.
The SAP Jam developer edition provides 3 user licenses. The first user to login is automatically assigned as the Company Administrator and consumes one of these licenses. The administrator will always login from the Go To Service link within the SAP Jam Services section of the SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit.
For additional users, they will need to login separately. To do this you first need to assign Roles in the SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit. Click on the Configure SAP Jam link and select Roles.
For the additional users that you require to login to the SAP Jam developer edition, it is necessary to assign each of them the SAP_JAM_USER role. To do this click the Assign button, enter their SAP ID Service User ID and click Assign. Once you have assigned the roles for additional users they will be displayed in the Individual Users list.
Unlike the Administrator, the additional users do not log into SAP Jam from within the SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit. To get the URL for the login page for your SAP Jam developer edition, right-click on the Go To Service link within the SAP Jam Services section of the SAP Cloud Platform Account Cockpit and select Copy Link Address.
Start a new browser window/Incognito window/private browsing session such that you don’t pick up any existing sessions and paste the URL. You will be presented with an SAP Jam developer edition login page.
As you will see from the Login page, the SAP Jam developer edition relies on the SAP ID Service as its Identity Provider (IDP) so any additional users must have an SAP Cloud Identity account. For this article, I used my SAP details as well as a personal email address.
Having assigned the SAP_JAM_USER role to your new user you can login using your SAP Cloud Identity account. A new user is created in your SAP Jam developer edition and you will consume another of the 3 available licenses.
You can view the users in your environment by navigating to the Users area of the Admin Console.
You can remove a user by editing the user and setting their Member Status to Alumni. This will then free up another license for use.
In addition to "internal users", the SAP Jam developer edition also supports "external users". The ability to create SAP Jam groups that support external users is not enabled by default but you can enable this capability by navigating to the Admin Console and selecting Features. Check the "Enable External Group Creation" option.Create a Group
Groups are a big part of SAP Jam – they’re the places where you bring together people, data, best practices and content to solve business problems and get stuff done. Groups are a membership of users who can upload, create, or reference material specific to a department, project, or team. Members can participate in a topic discussion with a select number or all members in a group.
Lets start by creating a new group. We are creating this group as the Administrator but end users can also create groups.
Go to the Groups drop-down menu and choose Create a Group.
When creating a group, there are a number of pre-built templates available to use. Click the drop-down menu and scroll to the bottom and select No Template as we want to build a new one. We can create a re-usable group template from our new group once we are happy with the design.
Provide a group name and a group description that describes the purpose of the group. Click on Public to set the permissions of the group. Ensure that the "Activate this group now" checkbox is enabled. Click Create. For this example, the group I created is focused on Innovation such that a product team can share product updates, facilitate discussion and drive suggestions and ideas for product improvement.
We can now customize our group to meet our requirements. Click on the Overview option in the menu on the left-hand side of the page. The Overview page for the group is now displayed. The Overview page is used to present various types of information to the group including content, people and business data. Let’s customize the Overview page to meet our requirements. Click the Customize the Overview page link at the top of the page. This will take you to the Page Designer.
The Page Designer enables you to create a page layout using SAP Jam widgets. There are a number of page layouts provided as a starting point. I used the default layout for this example.
Provide a Title for your Overview Page. Using the Page Designer, we can very easily add widgets to the Overview Page.
There are widgets available for adding feeds, content, video, photos, forums, people and business data. Using these tools you can quickly build a structured, fully featured group for collaboration.
For the Innovation group, you can use the Forum widget, along with the provided filters, to create areas for Submitted, Accepted and Delivered Ideas. This will allow group members to post their ideas and track how the ideas are being managed and hopefully delivered.
Using the Page Designer, it is possible to very quickly create an engaging group using the provided widgets. By clicking the + icons you can start to add columns and rows to your page. For the Innovation group, I used the Text, Photo, Forum, Feed and People widgets.
Invite users to the Group
Now that we have created our group we can invite additional users to drive collaboration.
Using the Invite button you can invite other users to the group.
Let’s invite one of the users that we setup earlier.
As you start entering the users name their details will appear. Once selected, their name will appear in the Invitation List. Click the Send button to invite them to the group.
The invited user will receive their invitation as a Notification inside SAP Jam – note the red numbered notification at the top of the page.
Clicking on the Notification icon will display all of the users notifications – in this case the group invitation.
Add content
Now that we have our group, and users, we now need content to drive collaboration and discussion!
Content items are blog posts, decision tools, links, planning tools, videos, wiki pages, images, documents (PowerPoint, Word, Excel), polls, and any other file that you upload to SAP Jam. Group members can provide feedback on the information that content items contain, and use this information to collaborate and make decisions.
Let’s add a document. Click on the Feed Updates menu option within the group and in the Feed Widget at the top of the page - click the Add a Document icon. For this example, I uploaded a PowerPoint document.
Once uploaded, the document will be displayed inline inside SAP Jam and can be navigated by using the arrow buttons.
The uploaded document will appear in the Group feed. Group members can then add general comments or select areas of the document to comment upon.
Let’s now create a poll asking for product input and feedback. Click on the Content menu option. Click the Create menu to see the different content and tools available. Select Decision-Making Tools and then Poll from the menu.
The Poll decision-making tool allows you to ask a multiple-choice question. The Poll appears on the group feed and as people vote, the results are displayed graphically.
Finally, let’s add some product suggestions as Ideas. If you have added Forum widgets to your Overview page then you can click the Go To Forums link at the bottom of the widget and then click on Ideas. Alternatively, you can click on the Feed Updates menu option within the group and in the Feed Widget at the top of the page click the Add an Idea icon.
Once published, the Idea will appear in the Group feed and should also appear in the Forum widgets. Experiment with the widget filters to display Submitted, Accepted and Completed Ideas.
Users can now vote on the idea and the product team can review the ideas and decide whether to consider the idea or reject the idea. Filters on the Forum widgets allow us to see the Ideas as they flow through the product development process.
Testing your changes
Now that we have added users, created a group and added content we can now test out our changes. Log in as each of the users to test out the collaboration capabilities, comment on documents, vote ideas etc.
As you go through and submit, and comment, on content, vote in polls and post ideas you will see notifications appear in the top of the screen. Click on the Notification icon to view them.
You should now have an SAP Jam group containing content, decision-making tools as well as comments and discussion.
Summary
In this article, we have walked through the basics of setting up SAP Jam and getting to know your SAP Jam developer edition environment. We have only scratched the surface of SAP Jam’s capabilities but you now have a base from which to develop using SAP Jam.
With subsequent articles, we will explore the developer-focused capabilities of SAP Jam and how you can incorporate the collaboration capabilities and content you’ve created in your SAP Jam developer edition into your own applications or bring data from other applications such as those running on SAP Cloud Platform into SAP Jam to solve specific business challenges.
Please ask any questions via the comment section below or visit the SAP Jam Developer Community: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-55050.
You can find more information in the SAP Jam Developer Guide, Administrator Guide and User Guide available here: http://help.sap.com/sapjam.
Enjoy your new SAP Jam developer edition!
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