SAP Jam release 1808 is here! If you were fortunate to attend this year’s SAP SuccessConnect in Las Vegas, you had a chance to see first-hand the recent changes. If not, here’s a summary of the highlights and most notable enhancements in this quarter’s release.
Continued Customer Interest in Self-Service Knowledge Base articles
For the fourth quarter in a row, we’ve enhanced the popular knowledge base article functionality based on continued customer interest. Knowledge base articles now have the same multi-language “bundle” capability as uploaded documents. For those not familiar with the capability, if you have a document that comes in multiple languages (but is otherwise the same), you can upload all the language variations and associate them with the core document. SAP Jam will then present the user with their preferred language version if it is available. Otherwise, the primary document language will be shown, or the user can select another variant.
Secondly, a customer request to be able to print and export knowledge base articles as PDF documents so they can be shared and exported to other systems has been added. This will come in useful in those situations where a field-based service representative needs access to information but they know the location will have poor internet connectivity, so they can download the KB or FAQ in advance.
Third, a hierarchical categorization of KB articles enables up to three levels of organization for articles which then permits filtering of articles in the SAP Jam search engine and group overview widgets. For example, on a group overview page, you can include a KB article widget and show only those articles related to “benefits”.
Document-Centric Collaboration
Documents
When uploading new documents, content owners can now indicate if the version is a “major” update (which will trigger a feed notification) or a “minor” update which will not trigger any notification, reducing the amount of noise in a group’s feed and making it easier for group members to know what to pay attention to.
Additionally, if the document being uploaded is a PDF, the content owner can specify if the document should be viewed by the web browser’s built-in mechanism of handling PDF viewing. This is an important and popular request as it would then enable the PDF to be viewed directly within SAP Jam with all the abilities of PDF such as filling out forms without having the document being downloaded first.
Multimedia
For video-based content, a new capability to upload a custom thumbnail allows the content owner to decide how to best represent the contents of the video instead of SAP Jam’s provided options.
For photos and multimedia content, the user experience for attaching these content types to comments and replies on mobile devices has been improved as well.
User experience
Questions, Ideas and Discussion Forums
Questions, ideas and discussion forums have been enhanced with a new ability allowing copying and pasting of images from the user’s operating system to SAP Jam similar to the functionality currently available in blogs and wikis. SAP Jam will then upload the pasted image as a new file into the SAP Jam group. This will make it easier for users to post items without having to manually upload an image while creating their post.
Group Look and Feel
With the popularity of the ability to hide the left panel and moving all group navigation to the top of the page, this option is becoming the default layout for new groups with an option to change to the left-panel-based navigation. The company admin also has a company-wide option to force this layout across all groups for a consistent group experience as well.
Messaging
This release includes four enhancements to the messaging capability:
The first is a unification of the experience for private messages and group-based messages. When you click the messages icon, the UI now displays a private messages option at the top of the list, followed by your group-based messages.
Second, an enhancement to group-based messages allowing deleted message threads to be restored in case of accidental deletion.
Third, the at-at-notify (@@notify) ability which causes a notification to be sent to all group members is now enabled in any message as well as the at-at-member list (@@member list) ability to target a specific group of people.
The fourth is a new developer-specific capability, a new embeddable messages widget to incorporate SAP Jam messages within third party applications. If your organization has an in-house/custom/legacy application that you think would benefit from having messaging capabilities, you can now leverage SAP Jam as your messaging engine saving you time, expense and infrastructure from creating and maintaining your own private messaging platform solely for your application – SAP Jam can do it for you.
