Release Highlights, as of January 23, 2017
Welcome to the very first set of release notes for 2017. This post highlights some of the key new features and bug fixes, as listed in the wiki page for SAP Community release notes.
With this post, we have, wherever possible, connected the updates back to ideas and bug reports from SAP Community members. We plan to continue this practice in future updates as well, to show how we are using members’ input to help drive platform development. So please continue to report bugs and share feedback, as this helps us prioritize features and fixes, such as…
- The content in the activity stream has been reduced, so that more information can appear. Summaries are now two lines, with a “show more” link that will take you to the relevant content.
- When creating a question, you’ll have the option to choose your favorite tags as the primary and additional tags. Below the input fields, you can pick from a list of tags that you follow. In addition, we have updated the available tags. The revised list is in the Excel spreadsheet on the All About Tags page.
- In response to ideas such as this one (“Adding filter to QA”), you can now filter answers by the tags that you follow — so you can find the information that interests you more quickly.
- Archive pages now include links that will allow you to find more content (or directly ask questions) about the primary tags associated with the pages. Previously, people might arrive to a read-only page in the archive via search, essentially hitting a dead end if the page didn’t provide the information that they required. The new “view more on this topic” and “ask a question” links on the archive pages eliminate this problem by giving visitors additional actions to find content within the community.
- We received several requests to change the notifications page, so that a notification is automatically marked as “read.” (For example: “Automatically mark a notification as read when notification is clicked upon?” and “Why do I have to explicitly mark notifications I have read?”) This functionality now exists. This is in addition to options for marking all notifications as read, and manually marking and unmarking notifications individually.
- We had received bug reports describing the issue shown below — in which users received error messages when logging in and attempting to access the activity stream via an iOS device. (For example: “SAP.com mobile access doesn’t work.”) This bug has been fixed.
- In an answers search, the list of results now offers a “show more” button so you can see more than the initial 15 hits.
- Searches for user tags are no longer limited to 10 results. You’ll be able to view older and newer posts as well.
- Several bug fixes have been made to improve interaction during moderation. The issue with editing and deleting editorial comments has been resolved — so that authors don’t receive the wrong message in their activity streams. Also, authors of discussions and moderators will now receive notifications when editorial comments are made.
- Members had reported that their blog content in the editor looked different from what was published. Specifically, the posts would sometimes include extra lines not shown in the editor. This bug has been addressed.
We plan to have more updates very soon — including the availability (finally!) of e-mail notifications. More to come.
Thanks for summarizing the changes so neatly Jerry! This should help our users understand the Release Notes better.
I think it is a great idea if the release notes are always (at least monthly) explained in a blog like this one!
Keep them coming!
Will do, Ervin!
Thanks for the update, Jerry!
You're welcome, Joachim! And thank you for your contributions here and in Idea Place.
Thanks a lot Jerry. The email notification would indeed be a very great help and look forward to the same,
Regards
Sanil Bhandari
It is wonderful that you keep us up to date with what is occurring each month.
The new site is getting better, very slowly, but surely. I jumped for joy when i saw that the landing page had reduced the size of the silly picture in order to display more useful things.
It would be very easy for me to harp on and on about the lack of email notifications like a broken record. So I will.
Since they went away the amount of views and interactions with any given blog post has decreased dramatically. In the ABAP development space it seems like there are only three of four people actively contributing now, when there used to be dozens.
I also laugh when this editor, the editor in which I am typing, shows "ABAP" as a spelling error. And HANA. I suspect SAP only gets through because of what lives inside trees.
Lastly the performance of the site is still woeful compared to before.
Still to end on a positive, as I said, the improvements are noticeable, which cannot be a bad thing. I have no doubt by the middle of the year you will have achieved parity with the situation before the migration, and from that point the only way will be up.
Cheersy Cheers
Paul
Hi Paul,
I'm curious about your comment on site performance. Beside the functional issue we still have, the site performance should have improved overall. Also SAP Community consists now of a couple of separate applications, so would be good to better understand where you see the performance issue, on which domain exactly.
I am logging on from Australia. It matters not if I log on from work, or from home, in both cases the little whirly blue circle in the top left hand goes round for a while, before turning into the word "SAP".
When does this spinning occur? When moving from the overview, to the "blogs" section, when opening a blog, and when I opened up my notification just now to read your comment it took 23 seconds, I had my stopwatch going.
It should actually be faster from home, as there I am on what in Australia is called the "National Broadband Network" which has not reached the work office as yet.
As a benchmark, when I open almost any other site - and the bulk of what I look at are UK based sites - then there is no perceptible performance problem at all. I know that the BBC news site might not actually be hosted in the UK, but wherever it is hosted, it is lightning fast.
The irony is the slowest bit of the new SAP community site, or whatever you call it, is the "search powered by HANA".....
And while I am moaning, the other day i did a search for "Tobias Trapp" as I wanted to fins his blogs about package structures. A list of results came back, including one of the four blogs he wrote on the subject.
I then expanded the search to be "Tobias Trapp Package" and I got a list of the other three blogs, but not the first one. In every case the blog title was "Package Hierarchy in SAP : Part XX" although to be fair that is probably not what the search is targeting, it is probably those silly tag things which are a big list of SAP products, 99.9% of which no-one has ever heard of, and will all get renamed by the middle of next week.
However I found what I was looking for, which is all that matters. And then got to have a whinge about it as well, which is even better.
Cheersy Cheers
Paul
Hi Paul
Thanks for the feedback, it is always important for us to hear back from the community. We are always looking to improve and I can promise you we are taking performance seriously.
The problem you've mentioned in regards to moving between the different areas in the community - is that something permanent which still occurs or was only visible at a specific period?
March 3rd was really bad with the performance, ok the blogs worked well, but answers, activities, profile, messages was bad to not functioning at all. (not to mention the Launchpad, which is more off than on)
I completely avoid navigating via the Content Topic Pages (menu: Community > browse the community ) as their performance is stable poor. ( example https://www.sap.com/community/tag.html?id=477297786799213261950044802925335 )
In my opinion are much too much authority checks and when I look into the Chrome development tools I see quite a lot red messages
Hi Jerry,
Well written synopsis of the changes which have already occurred. Some of these are rather good improvements. Where are the upcoming changes that are currently being worked on going to be posted? I would dearly love to see some proactive communications with regard to the next set of changes. Still feeling a bit like a mushroom on upcoming fixes and priorities.
Regards, Mike (Moderator)
SAP Technology RIG
Thank you, Mike. We definitely need to do a better job of reporting what’s coming. This blog post was one of our first attempts to do so (https://blogs.sap.com/2016/12/12/2016-wrap-up-looking-forward-to-the-new-year/). We are currently working on communications to share both prioritized features and bugs.
Best regards,
–Jerry