Welcome to the SAP Jam Collaboration release 1611 highlights. In this release, we focused on items our customers have asked for that would help them streamline processes by removing manual actions or making it easier for people to find the information they need by creating new ways to view and find the information.
Time based events
Recurring events to mirror what’s possible for real-world training and business meetings
In real-world training and meetings, it is not uncommon to have an event that occurs repeatedly on a specific fixed interval such as every Friday at 2PM. To facilitate this kind of collaboration and training, a new recurring events capability has been added.
This greatly facilitates the usage of events as recurrence is handled automatically by SAP Jam without the need for the event creator to manually create occurrences. To accommodate the most common frequencies of events, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly series are now supported with up to 100 occurrences per series and are able to be downloaded to any iCal® compatible application such as Microsoft® Outlook®.
Attach standalone agendas to events to simplify and bring consistency
To simplify the use of agendas in events, agendas can now be re-used in one or multiple events. This will be consistency and familiarity to agendas to focus on meeting outcomes while saving time to recreate agendas from scratch for each event.
Mobile device group calendar sync to give quick access to group events within your mobile device’s calendar
As the growth of mobile devices and the SAP Jam mobile app continues to grow, we have added an exciting new mobile-only capability to view your SAP Jam group calendars from your mobile device. When you accept the RSVP to an event in SAP Jam (indicate you are attending), the group event will be added to your device calendar and synchronized via push-notifications.
Additionally, the SAP Jam mobile app will also add reminders and due-dates for group tasks to your device task application.
Information searching and discovery
Auto-suggest topics when adding a new forum post
To facilitate the discovery of information within groups and to prevent the creation of new questions when answers exist, a new predictive, type-ahead suggestion will appear beneath the question box for questions, ideas and discussions. SAP Jam will display the top five posts similar to what you have typed to guide you to a possible suggestion and allows you to view the suggestion in a new tab.
This also helps IT and support organizations by preventing unnecessary repetitive questions for a topic that has already been answered authoritatively.
View comments specific to a page
To also make it easier for people to find the information they are looking for, a new capability to view comments about a specific page within a document will make it easier for content creators such as support organizations as well as learning and development to address content updates on a page-by-page basis without having to search through comments.
Structured collaboration and decision-making
Comparison table
A new comparison table structured collaboration and decision-making tool has been created to accommodate the situations other than what the pro-con table can handle. The comparison table supports up to three choices (columns) and allows stakeholders to add as many options (rows) as needed. An example on how to use the new comparison table would be for deciding what type of mobile device to purchase through your company’s hardware store. The text within the comparison table is completely freeform and can be suited to nearly any scenario; some additional examples include: choosing an event location, comparing medical benefit plans, comparing different products to offer a customer in a deal.
Application extensibility & integrations
Zapier content importing automation
To facilitate the rapid growth of information across a wide degree of applications, networks and information silos, it’s become necessary to accommodate the automation of importing content into SAP Jam without having to utilize a web developer to build an application to handle the automation. In order to achieve this, SAP Jam now has an integration to Zapier. Zapier currently supports over 700 third-party applications that can potentially be used to feed content into SAP Jam in an automated fashion. The “zaps” included with this initial integration support importing blogs, events and feeds into SAP Jam. The setup of this integration is restricted to SAP Jam company administrators.
Smartsheet.com documents
Finally, a new SmartSheet.com integration enables viewing (or optionally editing) of a cloud-based SmartSheet project plans directly within SAP Jam. The Smartsheet document is viewed and accessed directly within SAP Jam just like a document uploaded into the group. If the content owner chose to add the document with the public read/write access, group members will also be able to edit the document live, within SAP Jam. The Smartsheet document does not live within SAP Jam – it is accessible via SAP Jam, so all changes actually happen within Smartsheet without the need for any synchronization.
That concludes the major topics for release 1611 for SAP Jam. As always, be sure to review the SAP Jam release notes for an extensive list of additional enhancements at
http://help.sap.com/sapjam
