Launch of New Mission Set on Hold

As announced in my Points No More blog post and Caroleigh Deneen‘s Reputation Reloaded post, the Community Experience team planned to roll out the new missions and badges for the new SAP Community this month. After further (and careful) consideration, however, we have decided to postpone the launch a bit longer.

Although the gamification functionality was ready to go with the launch of the new community platform in October, we wanted to wait until members got a little more comfortable with the new features before we rolled out missions and badges. Since members have had roughly a month now to familiarize themselves with the new community experience, we thought we should do that roll-out now — but we wanted input on the timing. So we met with the Reputation Advisory Group (a body of trusted community members who have been collaborating with us for the last year on the new Reputation Program), as well as with the community moderators.

After discussions with both groups, we concluded that although the missions are ready to go, and they were developed independently from any of the other functionality in the community, by different development teams, now is not the right time to release them to the community. Instead, we need to focus all of our team’s energy on resolving pressing issues and providing the missing features that you are waiting for, before we introduce non-core functionality such as new gamification elements.

Our new plan is to roll out the new missions and badges early in the new year (pending more discussions with community members and experts). In the meantime, we will concentrate on bringing you the updates and fixes to core functionality that you need.

We invite you to share your opinions about the proper timing of the mission go-live, and we will continue to work with our advisory groups in order to figure out when exactly we should say, “Let’s go, roll the missions out!”