SAP Community – the Best Place to Be
As a member of SAP’s marketing leadership team, I was honored to welcome the community group into my organization recently. With hundreds of thousands of members learning and sharing information regularly, the community’s value is undeniable. And that’s because of the value you bring.
Value in a community comes from education and collaboration. My team is dedicated to creating and maintaining these types of environments. We want to provide compelling and consistent experiences for audiences across our very diverse SAP ecosystem. Officially, I lead the Experiential Marketing and Strategic Programs team. OK, I know that’s a mouthful. Let me put it another way: My team’s primary goal is to provide customers with world-class experiences, both online and offline.
How does that relate to the SAP community?
If you’ve been following the news around the SAP community, you’re likely familiar with the role that the community platform plays within SAP’s ONE Digital Experience (1DX) program. 1DX is all about giving online visitors an easy and rewarding experience when connecting with SAP.
People join the SAP community to share ideas, gather information, get answers, make connections, and have fun. The community is a platform for interaction with SAP, our customers, partners, experts, and peers. It provides the network necessary to help developers, consultants, and many others be more successful.
In short, whatever your line of work, the community exists to help you succeed. But even more, it creates an environment where we succeed together.
The new community platform will continue to drive this mutual success. If you’ve been participating in open beta, you’re getting a taste of what the new community promises. Based on your input, best-of-breed solutions deliver a platform that offers even more compelling reasons to visit and participate. We’re adding more features, simplifying and improving existing ones, and partnering with you to give you the community you want.
This partnership is key and that’s my pledge to you — to work with you as a partner. The community team now has a home within my organization, but the community itself is the home that we share with you.
I’d like to thank Maggie Fox — the 1DX leader whose organization included the community team until now — for getting us to this point. With the launch of the new SAP community (and beyond), I’ll remain dedicated to making this the best place to be, a place that you’ll always want to return to.
Together we are creating a world-class community experience. I can’t wait to see where the journey takes us!
Sian, thank you for sharing.
But I might be not the only one scratching head about what do these news really mean for SCN. Especially this part:
What exactly is happening? Will SCN be managed by a different group of people now? Is it being taken over (completely?) by marketing?
Sorry if my "corporate radar" is off but from my experience when you get an email from CEO that everything is fine it's exactly when something is about to go terribly wrong. 🙂
Hi Jelena
Thank you for taking the time to reach out for a clarification and no need to worry, the same great team will continue to drive community. There was a leadership change when Maggie Fox decided to leave the company. These things happen but it does not change our commitment to the SAP community. Leading a team focused on delivering world-class experiences, I know what an important role this community plays for SAP, customers, partners and the entire ecosystem. We will continue working very closely with this group, investing in the relationships and keeping our big, immediate goal front and center: Launching the new SAP community. We look forward to the collaboration on this next part of our journey together and it´s good to know that you´ll give us feedback and ask the important questions along the way. That´s what a great partnership is all about (with no intention of anything about to go terribly wrong!)
Sian
Jelena Perfiljeva - thanks for reminding us about this thread in the ongoing discussions in the Building the Future of the Community Together (Feedback Survey) blog.
Perhaps 'Launching the new SAP community' is the immediate goal from the 1DX marketing team, but we should/must consider what this really means for the community members who devote so much time and energy into paying it forward on SCN. I would offer that in order to move from the current day community platform to the new best of breed community, we cannot settle for anything less than what we have today, and in some areas we deserve better. The participation in the SCN Open Beta feedback rounds for both bug and requirements has been an example of how passionate people are for the next evolution of the community. The teams working on the new beta updates, bug fixes (Known Bugs List), and backlog of feedback (SCN Beta Feedback List) features and needs have been doing a great job, but to be fair, they need time, a proper settling period so the changes can be verified and retested, and therefore we need another round of beta testing...
Thanks for your comments, Jeremy, and for your continued participation in beta testing!
You wrote that the aim of the community is to give the best experience for all our members, and we certainly agree. To that end we are moving to our new home and continually listening to the feedback provided by caring members, such as yourself. Through this feedback, we learn which elements to focus on as we work toward the transition. Today is the last day of the survey, which we are running because feedback is indeed important to us. I'm sure it too will provide us with information regarding improvements that should – and will – be made. The new community platform is not the goal. It's the start of a journey that we hope members will take with us, and help guide us through. For now, I encourage members to take the survey (if they haven't already) and continue to share feedback. We are listening, and we truly want to give you the tools to continue to pay it forward.
Sian, thanks for info.
Robert