Finding What You Need
You want helpful content? We have helpful content.
You want to talk to the experts? We have no shortage of those.
You want to have some fun? Yep, you’ve come to the right place.
No matter what you need to do your job better or to network (or to maintain your sanity), the new SAP community will likely have it.
Although…none of that means anything if you can’t find what you’re looking for.
Good thing we have that covered as well.
The new community platform will include several new solutions — and several options for finding the content that you want. You’ll have easier access to helpful information, new ways to interact with peers, and great guidance for getting the most out of the community.
We’re even throwing in an area where you can unwind.
Here are the main methods for searching for, going to, and keeping track of what the new community platform has to offer.
- Navigation: The community will be part of SAP.com (not a separate site) — so it will be part of universal and consistent navigation. You can learn more about navigation on this beta resource page and in this Tip in a Minute video.
- Community topic pages: Selecting Browse the Community from the navigation will take you to a page listing the rich repository of community content — all tied to primary tags. You can easily sort and select the topic pages that interest you most. You can learn more on this resource page.
- Followed activities/notifications: As explained in some of the bullets below, you can follow content (e.g., blogs and questions), tags, and people. When you do, you’ll find updates via your profile. You can learn more on this resource page.
- Tags: Content within the community (such as blogs and questions) requires a primary tag — tied to an important topic, product, industry, or event. When you click a primary tag, you have the option to follow it — so you’ll know when new content has been added with this tag. You can learn more on this resource page.
- Members: When you search for a user (or click on the corresponding link for his name), you’ll be able to go to his profile page, follow him, and get updates whenever he posts something. You can learn more on this resource page.
- Community landing page (overview page): This page will feature all of the latest and greatest content, such as new blogs, questions and answers, and a profile of the Member of the Month.
- Blogs: All new blogs will appear on this page, and searching and filter functions will allow you to pinpoint the posts that interest you.
- Q&A: The page for questions and answers will give you the option to sort in a variety of ways — such as by latest or most popular questions. Search functionality on the page can help you find specific questions and answers quickly.
- Archive: If you can’t find what you need in the areas above, you might want to check the archive page. The archive will include some of the more popular content from the SAP Community Network (SCN).
- Search: As part of SAP.com, the community will now be part of the site search — so this search will return all relevant community content (along with content from the rest of the SAP.com site).
- Coffee Corner: In this section of the community, you’ll be able to search for (plus participate in and start) discussions that aren’t tied to specific tags — making it the perfect place for fun conversations about work and other topics (within reason!).
- About the Community: This page contains all of the information you need to know about the community experience — including etiquette, tips for building your reputation and connecting to experts, and details about publishing and finding content.
To test out all of these options yourself, please visit the community’s open beta site. And let us know what you think! As you may have picked up, we want the community to give you what you need. If we aren’t doing that, we aren’t doing something right.
Questions can't be sorted or filtered by tag? Are you serious? There won't be many experts left, I'm afraid, if it goes like that.
In case anyone plans to answer that we can "follow" tags - it's not the same. I'm not following any spaces on SCN because it creates a lot of noise in the notifications. When I have time, I prefer to visit a space myself and see if there are any recent unanswered questions. If I don't have time then no reason to bother me with any notifications. There are no spaces on SCN 3.0, so I guess the equivalent would be to view unanswered questions by tag. How would "the experts" do that exactly?
Also on SDN we had "questions with no replies" filter. It was requested for SCN but nothing happened. Why was it not considered this time? It was quite helpful IMHO.
You should be able to sort questions by tags. Here's an example of what I mean. On the left, you can sort the tag by either blogs or questions.
Additional options for Q&A and tags are on the road map. To quote from the beta feedback page: "The pages that lists all related content to a tag when you click on it, should: show what is a question vs. blog and to show what questions were answered"
And speaking of the beta feedback page...
I see that your feedback about "questions with no replies" appears there. I think it would be best to continue that discussion on that page.
Does that address your concerns? Or did I misunderstand anything? Please let me know.
Thanks!
How exactly?
Maybe I'm stupid but I went to the "page for questions and answers" referenced in the blog above and these are all the options I see there:
There is nothing tag related on this page.
Ah. I'm the stupid one. I didn't follow what you meant, so I was describing a process on a different page.
The link I shared goes to a tag page, and on that page, you can sort by blogs and questions.
But you were referring to the Q&A page itself -- as shown above.
Given the sheer number of tags, they couldn't be put into a single filter or dropdown menu (such as what you're showing in "sort by"). On this page, if you want to sort by the tag, you would search for the tag and that would give you all the relevant Q&As.
Again, I may be misunderstanding the experience you're expecting or proposing. Please let me know if I'm still missing the point.
Thanks again!
searching for a tag from Q&A is not efficient.
When in SAP Answers - SAP Answers you can see a few questions and their tags
But you have to scroll until you find the tag in one of the discussions, which would be some hours work to find content in some exotic tags (lets compare it to a space where you just have 1 question per week and you would have to scroll through all activities)
If you make use of the search field, then you get actually discussions back, not tags, but those discussions do then not even show the tags in the overview and you would need to open one after the other to see if it belongs to the tag you are looking for.
I think Jelena is asking for an easy way to lookup questions by tags without following the tags since this would result in a flooded Activities stream which could be used for other collaboration.
A tag index like the todays site index could eventually be a first step.
Understood. Thanks for the clarification. I'll take this recommendation back to the team and see if we can't shift it to a discussion in the beta feedback area.
In short.... can we get spaces back? Or, some sort of hierarchical organization of primary tags that can be drilled down, similar to the way the top menu in SCN works today?
I think these grouped tags are the topics, see this Browse Community and navigate on the left
Juergen pretty much nailed it. If you'd like a bit more info about the issues with spaces and the decision to move to tags, I recommend this blog.
Or...
tl;dr
Spaces were an artificial construct within the Jive infrastructure -- inflexible and difficult to manage.
Tags give us the opportunity to group content around topics in a much more dynamic fashion. Juergen's link above goes to examples of main topics page -- some of which correspond with spaces.
I hope that helps!
Juergen got it right. Sort dropdown could simply have "Tag" option with additional field where one would enter a tag. We already have this on SCN, I believe, it's just no one uses it. Or, even better, instead of typing it could just remember my favorite tags. An average SCN Member probably actively follows only 1-10 spaces.
Without this, I actually have hard time imagining what would be the use case for the Q&A page. It gives you the whole SCN and kitchen sink, this would be enormous amount of information.
Yep, I see your point. Let me dig into this a little bit more. Thanks for the feedback!
Hello Jelena,
Thanks a lot for raising this. I actually also sensed something similar was missing and we have a meeting in mid-august to discuss this with the relevant IT/topic experts.
Thanks a lot,
Moshe
Hi,
I think this thread resonates pretty well with my thoughts : Listing Unanswered questions per tag
Cheers,
Ervin
You're absolutely right, Ervin. The issue that you raised (the inability to sort unanswered questions by tag) is a bug -- and a high priority to fix. And as Moshe noted above, the team is meeting this month to address the search issue as well.
Thank you very much.
Many interresting stuff for a new members... 😉