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rnoia
Advisor
Advisor
Release 1805 of SAP Collaboration brings an extensive list of enhancements on many topics such as user experience, managing content, company-wide announcements and mobile.

Starting with this release, we will now provide supplemental postings around specific topics that we feel require a more detailed explanation beyond the amount of space typically allocated in this release summary. These are indicated on each topic. As the supplementary topics will occur over a period of a few weeks after this initial posting, we’ll update this with links to the new postings.

As usual, there are far more enhancements in this release of SAP Jam than we can cover in this summary, so be sure to refer to the SAP Jam release notes found at help.sap.com/sapjam.

Additionally, make sure to review the various user guides published, based on your role in SAP Jam: administrator, group administrator, user and mobile user.

Business processes with external participants – viewing business data



  • This new capability provides external parties (such as partners and contractors) the ability to access business records (from a third party and SAP business applications) in external groups. For example, a business partner can view opportunity data from SAP Hybris Sales Cloud and engage with your sales team group members to make business decisions about how to proceed with a particular deal. There are certain provisioning and access requirements for this that will be discussed in detail in a subsequent posting about external collaboration.
    Enhancements to knowledge base articles to help with content migration from legacy systems

  • As customers are discovering the knowledge base article capabilities introduced last year, they asked for the ability to create tools to migrate knowledge base articles and information from legacy systems. In this release, we are providing new APIs (application programming interfaces) so that customers can create tools to migrate the data to knowledge base articles within SAP Jam. Additionally, knowledge base articles now have versioning to track changes in the information and drafts so the subject matter expert can work on the content over time.


 

For content owners: images bound to wikis and blogs help keep you manage your content repository; hard-check out/locking of wikis



  • This new capability affects the most popular-in-SAP Jam types of documents: images, wikis and blogs. As the usage of wikis and blogs have grown, customers have asked for a way to make the management of content related to blogs and wikis easier to manage for the following reasons:

    • Images added to blogs, wikis and overviews appear within the group’s content folder and may not be organized properly (or at all). This makes managing old content difficult as you don’t know what image goes to what document. Customers have asked for a way to embed images in wikis, blogs and overview pages be only accessible and visible in those documents.This is an option when inserting the image, the current functionality of uploading an image and displaying it from the group’s content repository continues to be an available option. This new capability, as well as the usage of images to communicate and drive collaboration, will be explained in detail in a later posting.

    • When copying a wiki, blog or overview, all the images in that document also get copied in one action. To achieve this, the new embedding capability is required. The existing “add image from the group” capability cannot be used.



  • Hard check-out and locking of wikis and documents. This enhancement has been in private beta testing since the 1802 release and is now being released to all customers as the new check-out behavior, replacing the existing “soft check-out” capability. The legacy soft-check-out approach displayed a message on the document’s single-item-view saying it was checked out but did not prevent anyone from editing/uploading, potentially causing revision collision. The new default behavior causes checked-out wikis and documents to behave like many content management systems – another user cannot check-out, edit or upload a new version until the check-out lock is released.


For company administrators: company-wide announcements



  • New company-wide announcements capability. As SAP Jam is gaining adoption as customer’s intranet, and in many-cases becoming the default mechanism to communicate, we have received requests to facilitate broadcast-like communications. This new capability enables company administrators to maintain a set of public announcements which can be included into any home page within the intranet. An announcement is seamlessly displayed above regular content home page. Employees, contractors, and partners will never miss important events and news when they sign onto SAP Jam. This new capability, as well as the usage of images to communicate and drive collaboration, will be explained in detail in a later posting.


Discussion/Q&A forums: The best answer isn’t always the first one



  • This enhancement addresses a unique effect on people wanting to help… the first person then answers a question may not have the best answer. Prior to this release, only the top-level answers/comment to the question could be marked as the “best answer”. This enhancement allows any subsequent comment below the first response to be marked as the best answer.For example: If Tom asks a question, then Harry responds with an answer, but then Sam replies to (comments on) Harry’s response…

    • Pre-1805: only Harry’s response could be best because it was a top-line response.

    • Post-1805: Sam’s answer can now be the best one, or anyone else that responds to Harry.




Accessibility


In this release, there are four enhancements related to accessibility, so we’re spinning those out as a stand-alone accessibility enhancement list for release 1805 as well as posting an accessibility summary for all the changes to SAP Jam in the last four years related to accessibility.

User experience in groups



  • Real-time, threaded messaging is now available within groups, bringing everything you need into one place for collaborating and communicating around a specific topic or project. Messaging is now connected to the other activities and group-based collaboration that occurs within SAP Jam. In-group messages provides a quick and effortless way to engage with group members beyond the normal commenting on feed activity and documents. Additionally, by connecting messaging to groups, external participants can now be included in discussions.

  • The second enhancement in this group is a significant new user interface option – the ability to collapse and hide the left-hand panel in groups, allowing the group overview page to be wider and focusing attention on the overview content.

  • Speaking of drawing attention to group overview pages, groups can now utilize rotating banners, like those that have been possible on company home pages. This new capability, as well as the usage of images to communicate and drive collaboration will be explained in detail in a later posting.


User experience, SAP Jam integrated within the IT landscape



  • This new capability enables SAP Jam to seamlessly integrate into your company’s landscape – visually. The existing custom header capability has been enhanced with new multi-language options. The company administrator can provide the pre-translated text of the header content, which, when the employee logs into SAP Jam, displays the appropriate header for the employee’s preferred language, which is selected in their employee profile. This new capability will be discussed further in a subsequent posting regarding how language affects adoption of collaboration.


User experience, mobile



  • Mobile updates now happen monthly. Beginning April 2018, the release cadence for the SAP Jam Collaboration mobile applications changed from quarterly to monthly. This new monthly release schedule allows us to improve the mobile experience faster based on your feedback. Going forward, we will include mobile enhancements from all/any updates between the SAP Jam quarterly releases as a summary.

  • Actionable phone numbers. This new capability makes all phone numbers within SAP Jam (which are shown in your employee profile), tab-able, allowing users to call numbers easily.

  • Group homepage layout in mobile (from the March release of mobile). Responding to customer feedback, we will adjust the mobile group home layout to make joining and leaving groups more intuitive.

  • Status update post experience enhancement. Mobile users will be able to post textual status updates that also includes photos, videos and documents

  • iOS background upload. This enhancement allows iOS mobile app users to continue to interact with the app during file upload. This will be of particular benefit to those users where Wi-Fi or cellular bandwidth/speed is low.

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