„Can you please help me answer my question?” – The new era of Q&A on the new #1DXCOMMDEST
Hey All!
We all heard that question a billion times in the Community, right? This is what usually happens:
- Jack raises a question and asks for help.
- The Community experts provide an answer.
- Everyone is happy and the question gets closed and forgotten.
- Then Jill comes to the Community and asks the very same question again, because she failed to search or just got lost in the information jungle and didn’t find the answer.
This is soon to be over.
In an ideal world, Jill would have found the answer before raising the question again. Let’s see how the new SAP Q&A platform will help us reach that.
The new beginning
When we launch the new Community, the Q&A platform will have a fresh start, meaning that it’s up to you to populate it with content.
Wait, what? What happens to the answers and knowledge we gathered in the last years?
We’ll keep them in an archived read-only format that will surface in the Community in various ways.Where exactly?
First (and in my opinion the most important one) when someone wants to create a new question and starts typing, it will trigger a search in the archive for similar topics. Questioners will then have the ability to find the answer before posting the question. There are a lot of questions raised on SCN that get reported because the people who asked them did not perform a search in the existing knowledge base prior to posting. This creates duplicate posts and unnecessary abuse reports for Moderators. Our goal is to reduce these instances and provide a clean and up to date knowledge base at hand.
Also, still sticking to the topic of search, the Community discussions that get archived will appear in the global 1DX search as well. So these discussions can surface anywhere on SAP.com, including full text and the archived tags that were assigned to them.
And of course you will always have the possibility to check the archive if you need something or want to browse.
Since we want to provide a clean and useful database, some of the discussions/questions will be deleted:
- Questions that do not have any comments or answers.
- Questions that belong to spaces that have been deleted.
- Questions that have been hidden as a result of an abuse report.
So that’s all about the past, now let’s see what our future holds.
Answers… answers everywhere
Our team strives for providing a pleasant Q&A experience by following a similar concept like stackoverflow.
To make the given answers more transparent there will be only one that can be marked as accepted for the question. But if you realize that another answer is better, as the original poster you can change which one you want to highlight as the best one.
We’d also like to provide an opportunity for good answers climb to the top. As a general community member you can help decide whether an answer is useful or not and vote it up or down. Items having the most votes will appear on the top to help us to find information faster.
Trusted Members
Since we all love our Community and want to improve the way we engage, our new platform will enable users to gain additional privileges in respect to their level of participation. For instance, meeting a particular set of criteria will unlock another level of governance in SCN. This will allow members to play a leadership role in the Community while encouraging positive behavior and higher quality content.
What happens if the same question gets asked twice?
Ideally this shouldn’t happen, but if someone could not find an already existing answer, there is a possibility for moderators to redirect the duplicated question. This means that if a member wants to access the newly added (but repeat) question, they will be automatically redirected to the first one where they can find the answer. If the second asker is not happy with the first answer, they can decide to keep their question and specify or describe better why it hasn’t been answered or they can continue the conversation.
Hope You enjoyed the sneak-peek about SAP Q&A. More info to come, so stay tuned!
1DX rocks! 🙂
Gabi
Is there going to be the concept of "helpful answer" as there is now? I've seen more than a few questions answers in several parts by several people contributing a piece of the puzzle. It would be a shame if only the final piece can be given credit as the answer.
Hi Steve,
As I wrote a paragraph later, good "helpful" answers will climb to the top by being voted up, so you can read answers in the default order of relevance and helpfulness.
Best,
Gabi
I would love if the new SCN had a way to automatically block a person from posting more questions, if he hasn't closed his previous threads - many people just vanish after receiving answers and doesn't confirm if the solution worked for them or not.
Thanks,
Juwin
Hopefully "searching while typing" will be faster than it currently works (or rather doesn't) for tags. Otherwise it'll be useless. Although I'm happy that people posting questions in the SD forum with title 'Pricing' will get their payback. 😈
Jelena Perfiljeva of course it will be fast; it will run on SAP HANA, right?
"How fast" is a different story.
Jim, a subtle promo for your Fast is not a number blog, eh? 😉 Good times...
Metrics Я Us.
These are good news. I really hoped for a system like stackoverflow.com for the new SCN and now it seems we will get it. Great!
Is there any mobile app coming up for the new SCN? Or, is it already existing?
Thanks
Hoping to see a new look with the new SCN. Currently, after a few replies to a thread, it looks like this....
You can set in your profile preferences the Discussion View Style to 'FLAT'. But yes, the whole thing needs to be much more user friendly.
That just takes out the vertical lines from the view. But, currently, those lines is the only thing which connects answers & questions. Without that view, I don't think anyone would be able to understand the context of each of the replies.
Thanks,
Juwin
Hi Gabriella,
What is going to happen with questions/discussions from a space like SPED & NF-e and SAP Community in Portuguese? Are they going to be deleted or not?
regards,
Renan Correa
Hi Renan,
Others than the ones I listed above for deletion, everything will be put in the archive.
Best,
Gabi
Hi,
but some of them, they don't want to search, they want just ask and get an answer, what about this case?
Regards
Ibrahim
Hi Ibrahim
In my opinion that's bad practice really, just ask and not search. I've seen huge amounts of "easy" questions on SCN lately and that's a pity. Some are not even trying to do any research themselves and resort to what is seen as the easy way out, just ask and someone will give me the answer. That's not really adding value to the community in my opinion, it creates a lot of duplicate questions, irrelevant information / noise for those who are searching to solve more complex problems.
I've seen community members go pretty far in this as well, as far as just dropping requirements online and expecting others to do their job for them basically. That kind of behavior makes me a little bit sad to be honest.
The SCN Rules Of Engagement request nicely to search first:
The SCN Rules of Engagement
Best regards
Tom
Hi Tom,
I am with you on this, but I do wonder how much this problem is not so black-and-white.
In my experience there are not a few experts out there who will answer any and all questions, in the hope to score reputation points (hell, I have been guilty of this myself on occasion). No matter if they have answered the same question many times. In fact, currently this behavior is even rewarded. So the new system (as I understand it) would probably go a long way in solving this.
On the other hand, gaining reputation points is what makes helping out, and answering questions worth while. I know that I for one will be a whole lot less inclined to visit the Q/A fora (or indeed SCN at all), if there are so few questions for me to answer, that the amount of reputation points to be gained on any given day dwindles to near zero.
So my fear is, that although the new system will help in finding existing solutions (thus weeding out unnecessary questions and answers), it will hamper the creation of new ones, because experts may become proportionally less interested in providing help.
Regards,
Johan
Hey,
Yes, we've all seen cases like that. I hope that the automatic search results popping into the user's face when typing in their new questions will reduce these. So it's really just one click away, but of course there'll be people who'll always ignore them.
Best,
Gabi
This is exactly the reason why I never look in the discussion forums. Too many questions, without the slightest effort of own research and very often have nothing to do with the Space Topic at all. I really think there is a need for a system like Stackoverflow. This will improve the quality tremendously.
Best regards, Tapio
What is this very special thing what Stackoverflow does?
Is it the machine that automatically does something?
Is it the negative evaluation that demotivates users to post questions?
We have here the option for every user to alert the moderators for various reasons, failed to search is among them. We have as well the option to rate content. Both is not really used by our users.
And if Stackoverflow also depends on users then with the platform change I still have the same users. I curious if that will change something.
Hi Jurgen
There are systems where contribution matters in terms of how many question you can ask in a given time-span depends on how much you contribute yourself / quality of those contributions.
What effects that would have is another question but it's interesting to see these different types of approaches.
StackOverflow has some specifics to it. Time will tell how much SAP will try to reproduce:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Overflow
Best regards
Tom
Thanks, I had only read the German version of wikipedia and that information was not so detailed as the English.
I have been at stack_overflow this morning and even before to get some impressions, but I am not yet convinced. I saw poor questions with a couple negative votes and I saw that they got their answers too. No difference so far to SCN. The negative votes have to come from users, like the positive votes too.
How much moderator alerts do we have on a FAQ compared to answers? I often see already 10 answers to such questions but have just a single alert. Similar to super technical answers, maybe 2 or 3 likes over a couple years.
I am not sure if our users here will change attitude with change of the platform.
Maybe we moderators can then hide more behind technical settings instead of standing behind a human decision. We will see it soon, the jigsaw pieces are not put together yet, hard to imagine to full picture.
Great news!
We have a similar tool to stackoverflow, a tool for an interactive Q&A community with gamified elements like badges, reputations. It is called hybris Experts and it runs on AnswerHub software.
It is a great solution for reducing barriers between people, departments and companies. The hybris Experts community is mainly technical people ( hybris/SAP employees, partners, customers) who have unique questions about hybris/SAP products, that weren`t covered by the documentation.
Great news!!!
Hello Gabriella György,
I must say that this is a wonder initiative take by you/your team and thank you very much for doing it for the betterment of members and newcomers to get the solution before they post.
I know I am replying very late on this post but still I am having few suggestion in respect to this initiative allow me to put my thoughts across.
Many times when I am searching for the solution of some issue I got lost in the information jungle. Very few times I get the proper or exact document which I was actually looking for. And then today when I read this I have understood that there are many people like me who face such problem.
The First thought comes into my mind is “I wish I could get the result as per the section of topic“By stating section or Topic I am trying to say that SAP-SD covers so many topics like ie:
Enterprise Structures
Customer Master
CMIR Master
Material Master for SD
Automatic Data Determination and Shipment Scheduling
Collective Processing
Availability Check
Complaints Processing
Lists and Analytics for Sales and Distribution Processes
Sales Order Processing
Agreements
Third Party Sales
Contracts
Inter Company
Consignments
Sales Document Customizing
Data Flow
Special Business Processes
Incomplete Documents
Business Partners
Outline Agreements
Material Determination
Material Listing and Exclusion
Free Goods
Delivery Document Process
Transportation and Shipment
Routes and Legs
Controlling Deliveries
The Goods Issue Process Based on the Delivery
Pricing
Rebate
Tax
Excise
Credit Control
LIS Reports
Customized reports
Text determination
Account Determination
Interface between S&D and Financial Accounting
Copying Control
Output
Enhancements and Modifications
LSMW
BDC
Mass Upload Process
BAPI
BADI
BTC
SAP SD Quires
Transaction and Screen Variants
I have tried to cover all the SD related topic.
So when a user tries to search he/she can get the section specific result and that will be very easy to search.
Along with that I will suggest that SCN should have mobile application where we can search directly from Android/iOS/BlackBerry platform mobile.
I hope I have given some light on the topic.
Warm Regards
Parag Pandya
Hi Parag,
Thank you so much for your kind words!
I forwarded your explanation to the responsible teams 🙂
Best,
Gabi
Will then be a boxing glove coming out of the screen for inclusion of the word 'URGENT' in the topic title ?? 😡
while typing "it will trigger a search in the archive for similar topics".
So the poster will immediately see how many other urgent questions are already in the line in front of him. 😆