The SCN Blog Digest – November 2016

Folks,

With the homepage that had the same content for weeks and a hot mess for the activity stream I guess the SCNers are left to their own devices when it comes to the content discovery. And today I got an extra hour and had nothing better to do than compile a short SCN blog review. What a coincidence! 🙂  Feel free to add your own recommendations in the comments.

Some news from SAP that are not about HANA

• Esther Blankenship posted the UX community highlights for the past month, seems like a nice summary: https://blogs.sap.com/2016/11/03/monthly-highlights-from-the-sap-user-experience-community-november-3rd/
• The official post on the “new and improved” SAP Support Portal preview (spoiler alert! white space and large pictures are taking over the portal too): https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/31/time-preview-new-sap-support-portal-experience/
• OpenSAP new topics (Enterprise Machine Learning in a Nutshell starts on November 14^th): https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/26/new-topics-opensap-enterprise-machine-learning-extending-sap-s4hana-extended-supply-chain/

Mentor posts

• Paul Kurchina’s summary of the ASUG webcasts on the Support subjects, includes replay links and all: https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/21/getting-sap-support-investment-missed-12-episodes-12-weeks/
• Graham Robinson quietly snuck in a blog on SAP UI5. It had me at “SAP – you are a PITA sometimes.” https://blogs.sap.com/2016/11/01/hey-sap-download-sapui5-sdk/
• And, of course, Veselina Peykova’s blog about SCN navigation for nerds is not to be missed: https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/21/sap-community-navigation-nerdy-people-part-sap-search/

More techie stuff

• Paul Hardy brightened the grim New SCN landscape with not just one but two of his trademark blogs. Even if you don’t know or care about ABAP I very much recommend checking them out:
  https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/28/frankenstein-must-destroyed/
  https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/29/harlem-function-module-shuffle/
• And while we moan and groan about the New SCN, Craig Cmehil has been typing away about HANA Express. This is the 3^rd blog in the series already but it has links to the previous two: https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/24/hana-express-hana-studio/
• Not sure how to introduce this blog – it’s like IoT meets 1984 meets The Saw. Interesting but kind of weird: https://blogs.sap.com/2016/11/04/smart-learning-room-an-iot-approach/
• Are you looking for some Fiori implementation tutorials? Vivek Sharma got you covered with these series: https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/12/implementing-fiori-simplified-part-1/
• The City Data forums have a forum called “The Great Debates”. If we had such space… err, tag on SCN I guess this blog would’ve been posted there. Is SAP moving in the right direction with the DB portability? (I guess they are. Or are they?) https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/19/database-portability-sap-moving-right-direction/

Random stuff

Even though the “blog roll” is even more unmanageable now than before, at least one useful feature was added: now we can see not just the title but the first few sentences of the blog too. Naturally, after reading the intro I had to open the blog:

From the second paragraph it dove into the hardcore tax system subjects, which I found strangely fascinating: https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/31/crack-transformations-outdated-tax-systems-cots-commercial-off-shelf-systems/

A little gem about building the super user network with some practical suggestions. Recommended to anyone interested in the subject: https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/26/stories-field-5-steps-building-super-user-network/

Is there a recipe to become a technical writer? A delightful blog (with pictures!) by possibly a rising SCN star: https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/25/recipe-become-technical-writer/