Personal Insights
Community navigation for newbie – issues
Let’s discuss the following scenario:
I am a consultant for SAP BPC and I want to read discussions on this product in SAP Community. Later I will ask my questions, but first I need to read.
I am going to www.sap.com and look on the menu. Trying to find the subject of interest:
Looks like I have to press “All Content”
In the search I have to enter the part of official product name, not “BPC” or “BPC NW”…
Now I click on SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver
After some delay I will see general tag page with a combined list of questions and blogs:
I can select only questions using filter but the list is not really useful. It’s sorted by creation date/time and no info about answers.
I can open questions:
And if I go back using browser button I will see the again the tag list (for sure with the same delay).
The idea to click on this link:
is not obvious!
And a lot of users are not working with the Q&A tag list:
To my mind the general tag page has to be redesigned to provide direct links to Q&A Tag list and to Blog Tag list (may be instead of filter). Something like:
Excellent post! And very needed for me. The changes would be very welcome.
Thank you,
Michelle
It is very unfortunate that Helmut's browser is buried deep into the static pages which almost nobody uses and that it has not been updated recently.
In your case the result looks like this:
I find this representation easier to use compared to the official solution, because you have all links that you may need on one place - the blog links from which you can subscribe via RSS, the fast Q&A links (all vs unanswered) and for the members who may prefer the representation of items in the https://go.sap.com/community/tag.html?id=* pages - you have this one too (by clicking on the tag name).
Most of newbie users will newer read this blog 🙂 And the tags database is outdated now - a lot of tags were deleted.
Sad, but true.
And we do not have the updated xlsx file as before the team designed the search pages which you mentioned.
If the abbreviation BPC was part of the tag names it would be a tiny bit easier at least to select the right tags, but still the number is too big.
I can imagine you keep a lot of tabs open and press refresh (or have an auto-refresh add-on installed just to use the community).
When SAP finally decided to delete useless tags I am happy to have only the following Community tabs open:
Notifications
SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver
EPM Add-In for Excel
Using SAP.com
Coffee Corner
P.S. Deleted tags from this screenshot:
SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation, starter kit for IFRS on the Microsoft platform
SAP Business Planning and Consolidation for Banking
SAP Business Planning and Consolidation for Healthcare
SAP Business Planning and Consolidation for Public Sector
SAP Business Planning and Consolidation for Public Sector, option for SAP NetWeaver
SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, Edge edition, version for the Microsoft platform
SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP BW/4HANA
SAP Knowledge Acceleration for SAP Business Planning and Consolidation
SAP Knowledge Acceleration for SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, Edge edition
I see from where the confusion came - some links are accessible and have content but the tags are not selectable in the drop-down when you ask new questions.
It's the way how SAP performed "delete" 🙂
May be reserved for future use of useless things!
I'm surprised no one from the SCN team has stepped in so far to state that this will be solved by the "topic pages" (whenever they might arrive to SCN).
I'm not a newbie but had a very similar experience recently when trying to restore the bookmark for unanswered ABAP questions that I had in the old browser. It's not as simple and very frustrating. Actually if I didn't know already what I was looking for I might have just given up.
It is 100x easier to post a new question.
"“topic pages” (whenever they might arrive to SCN)" - not sure it will help 🙂 My proposal is very easy to implement and will provide a direct link to go to Q&A tag list.
Hi Vadim,
Could you please help me out to identify the BPC community.
I can find the Tag view with blog and question but community view with all the home page links like Wiki and oheruseful links is not available now.
Please find the view updated below.
With the new Community design (from 27.09.2018) my blog is obsolete.
BPC tag is here: https://answers.sap.com/tags/01200615320800001016
Full list of tags is here: https://answers.sap.com/tags.html
Thank you