Introducing the Next Generation Tag Picker

Have you ever created content on the SAP Community – no matter if you’ve asked a question or created a blog post? If yes, then you most certainly know the pain: After you’ve carefully chosen your words and sentences you are asked to choose at lease a primary tag from the SAP Tags portfolio. You now face the challenge of selecting an appropriate term for your blog post or question from a plethora of elements. But which one is the correct one?

Relevant tags for your Blog Post or Question

Since the introduction of the new SAP Blogs and Answers systems we’ve been using a search-as-you-type input field to help the user finding the correct tag. However, the results were in many cases not as you as a user might expect. Especially for very frequently used search queries such as ‘ABAP’, ‘CRM’ or other acronyms, the search either returned nothing or completely irrelevant results at the top:

Of course, this behavior didn’t only result in a completely wrong relevance ranking, but in many cases also in completely wrong results. Such wrong results could in the end lead to incorrect tagging for your content. That could have other negative consequences because your blog post reached the wrong audience or your question couldn’t be answered.

Moreover, the tag picker also failed completely when you wanted to discover tags using multiple search terms or even had a slight typo in your search query which didn’t exactly match the label of the respective term. So in the end, you needed to know upfront how the term is called before using the search-as-you-type feature. Consequently, all these glitches made the task to choose the correct tag often a very cumbersome experience.

Content Creation with the new Tag Picker

Ideally, choosing the correct tag for your content should be so easy and natural that you don’t even need to think about it. You already spent enough time to create your content, you don’t want to spend much more time in administrative tasks. Therefore, we completely redesigned the tag picker to simplify your life as a content owner.

We included the following features:

• Rank the most relevant tags on top
• Support for synonyms, so you’ll find e.g. ‘OData’ if you enter ‘Open Data’
• Support for acronyms – as you use many acronyms in the SAP world…
• Support for former or rejected product names – you most certainly still remember ‘HCP’ for the SAP Cloud Platform…
• Search for all terms in your query
• Tolerance towards typos in your query
• Context is displayed as breadcrumb, no longer as hierarchy

Getting back to the examples where the old tag picker completely failed, you can expect a much better result right now.

Search for ‘abap’:

Search for ‘erp’:

Search for ‘enh crm’:

Behind the Curtain

The new Tag Picker was developed as a SAP Cloud Platform-based micro-service using an SAP HANA database. SAP HANA is not only a powerful in-memory database for traditional business processes or business intelligence. It also comes with very sophisticated search capabilities which you can use to search tables and views much like to searching for information on the Internet.

If you want to know more about it, be sure to check out the openSAP course and the respective documentation on help.sap.com.

Looking forward to your Feedback

The new tag picker is automatically enabled for all users, you don’t need to do anything else but try it out when you create your next blog post or question. This is just one step towards a much better SAP Community user experience and we are looking forward to your feedback! We will continuously improve it, so don’t hesitate to contact us in case you found issues or want to suggest enhancements to it.