I kept needing to leave SAP Jam to find other content, and thought, there must be an app that will bring this content into SAP Jam. I looked to the SAP App Center and discovered the “
Zapier App for SAP Jam”. This app provides a quick way to pull blogs, events and feeds into an SAP Jam group from many other applications. I found that Zapier is a neat, cloud middleware app that allows me to pull in data from over 750 web apps into SAP Jam. Pretty much every web app I use during my working day appears to be available. This means I can continue to spend most of my day in SAP Jam without having to move between multiple apps, saving me time and helping me focus.
The first thing I looked at was how I could bring my events planned in Google to a group in SAP Jam. This would allow me to share my calendar with a larger group of people that would be maintained in one place, rather than having to manage who could see my Google calendar. To do this, I went into Zapier and clicked “MAKE A ZAP” at the top of the page. It prompts me to choose a “Trigger App”. For this, I do a quick search and find the “Google Calendar” app. From here, I get to choose which action in my Google calendar will cause this to be triggered. In this case, I chose “New Event”. The next step was to log into my Google account so that I could provide access for Zapier to be able to access my account. From there, I could pick which of my calendars I wanted to be checked. It then wants to test out its access to make sure it can find a new event, so I go to my Google calendar and create a new test event for later today for it to find. After it is successful, I now get to move on to setting up which application I want to cause an action in when this trigger occurs. As I want to pull this into my SAP Jam, I do a quick search and find the “SAP Jam Collaboration” app and choose it. I pick the “Create Group Event”. The next step is to setup the SAP Jam account to use to create the event. From reading the documentation, I decided to use an Alias Account and get the token for that. This required some additional work of setting up an OAuth Client (
http://help.sap.com/download/documentation/sapjam/administrator/5eec65a0e0264ef693e8af8732926b60.htm...)
and creating the Alias Account (
http://help.sap.com/download/documentation/sapjam/administrator/fa3a05c304684435919b2d81fb1f590d.htm...). I put the token into the “OAuth2 Token” field and then choose my “Domain” from the list (This is the beginning of the URL that I use to access my SAP Jam system). The next step in Zapier is to fill in the parameters that will create the event. The first field is the Group ID that I want this event to be created in. To get this ID, I go to the group I want to use and get the ID from the URL as is shown in the description of this field. The “Event Title” I populate by choosing the “Summary” field that will come from the Google calendar event. For the “Event Start Time” and “Event End Time” I pick the “Event Begins” and “Event Ends” fields from the Google calendar dynamic fields. I click continue. This allows me to optionally test out my setup to make sure that the event gets created as I expect. I name the Zap so that I can remember what it does and then I enable it. Now, anytime I create a new event in my Google calendar it will replicate into my SAP Jam group.
Having created my first Zap, I decided it made sense to setup another one. This time, I chose Evernote. This is where I could create a draft of a blog, and once ready, I could save it and have it replicate into my SAP Jam group. The steps for setting this up are almost identical to my previous Zap, I search for Evernote, find the app. I choose the “New Note” option and setup my account and which notebook to check for the new note. This allows me to create the note in one notebook, and once I am ready to share it, I can move it to a different one and have it pushed out to the larger audience in SAP Jam. The action setup to use SAP Jam is even easier this time as I choose the “Create Group Blog” option and it already knows my account information so I can just choose to use the existing account. Again, I go into SAP Jam and grab the Group ID that I want to post into and put this into the “Group ID” field. The “Blog Title” field I set using the “Title” field from Evernote. The “Content” field I set using the “Content HTML” field from Evernote as this will bring over all the formatting I did in Evernote. I tested out the Zap and my blog looks great in the SAP Jam group.
For me, this Zapier integration for SAP Jam will help me gain efficiencies for anything that I create outside of SAP Jam that also needs to be posted there to reach a larger audience. I look forward to seeing what other applications I can bring in and any future enhancements to the “SAP Jam Collaboration” app to provide even more options for me.
