Release Highlights
As reported elsewhere (and now promoted throughout the community), we are publishing release notes every two weeks in the SAP Community wiki. You can check that page regularly or if you log in to the wiki, you can choose to watch the page and get notifications whenever we share the latest information about bug fixes and new features.
On the other hand, you may not want to go through each and every bullet — as the biweekly list is very comprehensive. That’s why we’ll also publish complementary blog posts here twice a month — to highlight some of the fixes and features that might be of most interest to you.
This is the first of many you can expect as we continue to improve and refine the community platform based on your input:
- Members can change their visibility settings for profile attributes — opting whether to display their location and company name (unless they are SAP employees, who are always identified as part of SAP).
- Redirect links for migrated documents and personal blogs have been corrected.
- Active SCN members no longer need to go through pre-moderation when asking questions in the SAP Community.
- The activity stream now displays blog and Q&A content accurately — meaning blog content doesn’t show up when filtering by Q&A…and vice versa.
- Members can switch between the Activity Stream and Notification tabs without experiencing problems.
- A new error page provides guidance for users attempting to access SCN content that wasn’t migrated.
- Pagination has been put into place to limit scrolling for blog posts — with each page limited to 50 comments (not counting the replies to comments).
- Uploading avatar images should no longer crash the browser.
- Logout issues have been fixed (so members don’t receive error “HTTP Status 400”).
- The full names of people followed should now show up correctly.
- Avatar images for members appear accurately when they comment.
That’s just a small sampling of what’s new. Again, you can find the full list in the Release Notes section of the wiki. And if you’d like to report bugs and request features for future releases of the platform, please continue to follow the instructions on the Reporting Bugs and Providing Feedback After Go Live page.
Hello,
First of all thank you very much for keeping us all informed of the multitude of fixes you are making every couple of weeks. I have no doubt that within a few months most of the gripes people have about the new "SCN" will be resolved.
I just wonder if somehow the "elephants in the room" are getting ignored. One fine example would be the failure to understand what "responsive design" actually means. What this was supposed to be all about was that an application can run on many "form factors" - a desktop, a tablet or a mobile phone. Each has a different sized screen, and so the application should adapt itself to cope with the fact that the screen is smaller e.g. hide non vital fields when there is not room to display them,
This whole concept was never intended to do the reverse i.e. when displaying on a desktop / laptop have vast expanses of blank space on the sides / top / bottom. On the screen I am looking at right now - on a laptop - I would say that about 15%-20% of the screen is being used, the rest is all white space.
An application may not always be running on a device with lots of space available, but when it is, it should make use of that space. Virtually every other website in the world, apart from the new SAP Community seems to have grasped that concept.
I would suggest that however is in charge of how the new SAP community looks like, takes a look at Facebook, or Linked In, or even the BBC world news, or even a printed newspaper, just to get an idea of what a user-friendly website should actually look like.
As an example, on Facebook, as you page down older entries appear automatically. On SCN you have to keep pressing the "display older entries" button. And the huge stupid pictures on SCN. Do you ever get people writing in saying "I love the fact you replace meaningful information with huge stupid pictures of people laughing and having a good time!" Maybe you do. You must do, that must be why they are there.
You might say that Facbeook has a big picture at the top. Indeed it does, but it uses 100% of the screen, and scrolling down works properly .... if SCN could do the latter then maybe the huge stupid pictures would not be so annoying any more....
Cheersy Cheers
Paul
Hi, Paul:
Thank you for this reply.
To address your primary point: I'd like to think that we aren't ignoring the elephants in the room. As outlined in a recent blog, we are prioritizing development based on community feedback. UI/UX is no exception.
But that doesn't really address your specific concerns above. I'm going to look a bit more more into the overall design plans to see if I can give you a better response.
Best regards,
--Jerry
I second this. Better "community forum" web design would be a huge step forward.
Hi Jerry,
Tremendous first step in improving Communications with the members!!!!
Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you!!!
Please do something similar for the Moderator related improvements in the Moderator Jam Group.
Next big improvement will be to show the longer term priorities of the work being done by the developers, preferably far enough in advance so feedback from members could be considered when assigning the actual tasks to Developers.
Very happy and grateful for this step!
Cheers, Mike (Moderator)
SAP Technology RIG
Hi Mike,
Are you talking about something similar to the ”Important moderation updates” page or the table in the moderators’ improvement task force? Please ping me if you have additional ideas. Will you be able to attend the meeting next week that will discuss moderation improvements and planning goin forward?
Regards,
Moshe
You’re welcome, Mike — and apologies as this type of communications was long overdue.
Moshe is the moderator expert, and I see he already responded. So I’ll skip that request and focus on the second half of your comment…
If I understand your longer-term priorities, I believe your needs might be addressed via the soon-to-come road map (which should lay out what’s coming and when — and provide updates). I expect that that will give members the necessary reaction time. Admittedly my recent post about priority features doesn’t give the details you’re asking for here, but those details should be in the road map.
Thanks for the reply.
Best regards,
–Jerry
Hi Jerry,
What you posted addresses the very real near term need to provide hope that improvements are coming. Items on a list of needs as well as extraordinarily bland and indefinite communications members have seen before provided no particular insight. Most important is what is going to be fixed next and some rough idea of when. You have covered the items in the next sprint/release. So the next question is going to be what happens after that and in what order. Not sure I would post anything more until people see that what you showed for the near term actually comes into being. That kind of credibility will go a long way to improving the reputation of the community.
Hi Moshe,
I would not miss the next Moderator meeting unless it were extraordinary circumstances. But much of what I just said to Jerry still applies to information presented to the Moderators in the Jam Group. Enough said here, we can speak there on the subject.
Hi Paul,
I believe the main issue behind your list of deficiencies, is the same template used by the Marketing folks in charge of ONE Digital Experience is being forced on our members inappropriately. There is one rather huge glaring disparity between the rest of 1DX land and the community. Our members generally already own the software products and/or are already familiar with the topics under discussion. Looking pretty with big happy people pictures, large fonts, and inefficient layouts is not addressing the needs of most community visitors.
Our members are mostly looking for solutions/technical challenges in a clean efficient manner. That need is not being addressed. Most of your points derive from that basic misunderstanding of what our members desire. Clear navigation, efficient presentation of content whether sourced from the Archives, Q&A, Blogs, Search results, Wiki, Activity Stream, Notifications, or AEM (which seems to have been missed to some degree).
What Jerry presented was coming progress, but what is really needed is hope. Hope that it will get better in obvious steps, hope that the progress will continue, hope that what is being worked is considered the most important flaws/missing pieces, and just general hope that we can get back to a comfort level we had with the old SCN. We don't have to do things the same way, but we do need to get the same value or better from our community. Right now we are in a transition which many people recognize and cut us some slack, but we do need that hope and sooner than later since so much of what was identified as problems during the Open Beta was not fixed between then and now.
Keep on keeping our hopes alive!
Thanks, Mike (Moderator)
SAP Technology RIG
Thanks Michael, for this comment. You made it very clear, what is missing and what should be changed.
I doubt, however, that there is much 'slack' left and actually think that many former SCN users already turned away. My personal drive to do something in the new Community surely has dropped to a long-time-low 🙁