SAP Jam Collaboration release 1811 highlights – group experience, knowledge management and messaging enhancements

Welcome to the SAP Jam Collaboration release 1811 highlights.  This release features many significant user interface improvements to improve the user’s experience.

Group overview experience (for group administrators)

Fourth column for overview and home pages brings more content above the fold

Group overview pages can now take advantage of a fourth column to show more content “above the fold” within the group overview experience.  To utilize the fourth column, the group administrator would need to change the group’s visibility to the sidebar menu, changing the location of the menu to the top of the group view (which is now the default for new groups).

Widget picker makes editing layout easier

When designing a group or company home page, widgets are how you add content. In this release, the widget picker has been redesigned to make it not only easier to choose what you want but explains what each widget does and has the widgets in categories.

Company-wide administration

Reports on search term usage; improve relevancy ranking

Company administrators can now export a weekly or monthly report that lists the mostly frequently entered search terms (from the API search, global menu bar, and search results keyword field) over a date range. For each date range, you see the number of times the search term was used.

Knowledge management (knowledge base articles)

Copy and move knowledge base articles between groups

As the usage of knowledge base articles is often beyond the confines of one group, customers have requested the ability to copy and move knowledge base articles between groups.  As knowledge base articles can include images and attachments, these additional items will copy or migrate as well, making the process as easy as choosing a destination without worrying about any of the content within the article.

Customization of knowledge base articles look and feel

Group and company administrators can now apply custom styling to the fonts, style and color to knowledge base articles for field titles and label text.

Display of knowledge base article within content widgets

The knowledge base content widget now includes the same visual layout options as other content items: list, carousel, gallery and thumbnail views so the group administrator can tailor the visual display of exposed KB articles to suit the need of the group.  To support the thumbnail view, the knowledge article content owner can now specify a custom thumbnail image for articles as well, which will be displayed at the top of the KB article and within content widgets.

Employee experience, user interface and usability

There are several visual experience enhancements in this release that will greatly enhance the employee experience and usability of SAP Jam.

New guided tour for feature help

This release includes an exciting and helpful new usability experience addition.  SAP Jam has integrated with the SAP Enable Now product to deliver in-product help in the form of pop-up guided tours.  This helpful new capability is being first deployed for group administrators and will appear immediately after creating a group or going into edit mode of the group overview, showing tips and call outs on how to modify the group overview page.  This capability will also be used in the future to expose new capabilities to users making it much easier to show employees how to use the service, without having to rely on help guides.

Multi-language support expands

Content owners can now provide language variations for additional content in this release, specifically wiki pages, blog posts, and videos.  The content author can provide pre-translated titles and body text for wikis and blogs and recorded content for videos. When supported languages are bundled for these items, users can experience content in their preferred language.  You can set a primary or default language for each of these content items. If a user’s preferred language is not provided within the bundle, the primary language is presented.

Forums: Predictive auto-suggestion of relevant forum posts when creating new forum posts from feed

While a user is creating a new forum post from a feed widget or feed updates section, SAP Jam will immediately start doing predictive recommendations based on existing forum posts for questions, ideas, and discussions. This helps to prevent duplicate creation and effort when a similar or identical post already exists. You can click on each suggestion and view them in a separate tab.

Forums: Ability to subscribe to a forum post

Users of SAP Jam can now “subscribe” to a forum post to receive notifications for all important updates on that post.

Forums: Ability to mark a forum post as read-only to prevent further comments

Group administrators or content moderators can now close a forum post to further comments or edits by setting it to read-only. When a forum post is to read only, you can provide an optional reason to help members understand why they can no longer comment or edit that post.  Comments provided prior to the change will remain available for viewing. The administrator or content moderator can re-open the post so that members can comment and edit again.

Discovery and recommendations of content

Discovery of content and people are some of the primary ways to utilize SAP Jam, making it easier for people to find what they look for is an area of continuous research and improvement.  Related content is derived while viewing other content displays content from throughout SAP Jam based on what you have commented on, follow, bookmark or where the employee was at-mentioned.  The related content viewer displays at the bottom of the page while viewing content and is dynamic and unique to the person viewing the page. The viewer will display up to 9 recommendations exposing the employee to more content related to what they are currently viewing.

Messaging

Share messages

From within the messages section, users can now share a message to the company feed or a group feed for broad distribution similar to how sharing a feed post works.  This allows people to distribute messages to specific audiences quickly and easily without having to retype messages.

Copy media and links from a message to a group.

Users can now use the new Copy function to copy media and links from a message and paste them within group or home page content. When you access media and links from the content item, the message thread opens to the exact location of the media and links from where it was shared.

As always, there is far more information in this release than we can cover here, be sure to see the updated guides and release notes at help.sap.com/sapjam