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rnoia
Advisor
Advisor
SAP Jam Collaboration release 1902 is here and it contains many exciting user experience enhancements as well as great new functionality particularly for editing and managing documents. As always, for more information about SAP Jam Collaboration, visit the help area at help.sap.com/sapjam .

 

Knowledge management kb articles


There are three enhancements for knowledge management and knowledge base articles in this release.

Headers, footers and static content


The first will be for handling and display of headers and footers that need to be included in the display of all knowledge base articles. This provides a new way to include mandatory information in KB articles to conform to company standards, for example: guidelines and disclaimers.

Filtering


The second will be for filtering of articles so that when a knowledge base article listing page is shown, only categories used in that specific group will be displayed in the categories filter this will make it easier to find the knowledge base articles the employees looking for.

Knowledge base home page


The third enhancement in this release relates to the Knowledge Base home page. The KB home page is visible at the top of SAP Jam by clicking the “knowledge base’ button.  This page showcases KB articles from across the entire company.  This release’s enhancement brings a search-centric experience to the page, improving discoverability of relevant articles. Additionally, the page now features a KB article recommendation capability which will show the user recommended items similar in function to the other recommendation widgets within SAP Jam (people, content, groups).

 

Microsoft Office® document editing and repository integration


Click-to-edit and automatic upload of Microsoft Office documents


The first enhancement is an update to the previous click-to-edit functionality of Microsoft Office documents which was only available for the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. In this release, the capability has been expanded across all supported browsers with SAP Jam (i.e. Google Chrome and Firefox), without requiring any additional software to be installed. When the user clicks the edit button, it will then launch the operating systems registered editing application automatically.  Then when the user has either saved or closed the document Sep jam will then automatically and transparently upload the document back to the respective SAP Jam group.

Office 365 content repository integration enhancements


The second enhancement is regarding the integration with Microsoft Office 365 document repositories. The new enhancement permits document repositories from Office 365 to be mounted directly with in the SAP Jam group by the group administration without first having to go through the company administrator. This will make it much easier for users to have access to their Office 365 documents and relieve company administrators from having to be involved.

 

Visual experience


For group and company overview pages content there are many enhancements to widgets and layout.

General


Widgets are being enhanced so that they align better and are more visually appealing.  The widgets and have less whitespace and padding, allowing for more content to appear on the page without scrolling, widget titles will be more impactful and the widgets themselves will have better metadata about the content presented. Additionally, a text label identifying what kind of document is being presented.

Across SAP Jam font choices


Company administrators can now specify a default font, upload a custom font or choose from the 30 built-in fonts to be applied to the SAP Jam system. The font is applied to overview tabs, group widget titles and home page widgets.

Slideshow widget now supports PDFs


The slideshow widget, which is used to show an interactive preview of a document now supports PDF documents in addition to PPT.  This widget makes it easy for a person to quickly browse a document directly on the home page instead of having to click through to the document.

New Poll Widget


A new poll widget has been added that enables the showcasing of important polls and surveys on a company or group home page, further enhancing employee engagement and the crowdsourcing of ideas across the company. The widget allows an employee to quickly and easily vote directly from the widget, then see a quick glance of the results.

People Widget


The people widget has been enhanced to make it easier to use by permitting the display of selected people in a specific order via drag and drop. Additionally, the “featured members” option which dynamically displays those people that have been ‘featured’ to the group to have new sorting options such as by name, date-featured or date-joined.

Tag cloud widget


The tag cloud widget shows what is trending across the company or group. This release’s enhancements include being able to specifically exclude certain tags as well as specifying what tags to show. Additionally, the number of tags able to be shown has increased from 25 to 200.

 

Messaging Experience


Message preview from message notification icon


The messages icon (in the header of SAP Jam, next to the notifications bell) indicates new messages received within SAP Jam’s real-time messaging capability. This release’s enhancements include a drop-down two-line preview of message text

Attachments to messages


Also related to messages, this release features a new ability to attach documents and videos to messages to add context to a message.

Sharing messages


Similar to how feed posts can be shared to groups, feed posts can now be shared to message threads (to group messages or specific topic-based threads).

Messages as a feedback channel for content approval


When reviewing content awaiting approval, this enhancement provides an easy entry point to start a private chat with the content author instead of having to send email.

 

Search experience


There are three important search experience enhancements in this release.

Faceted and categorized search results


The first is faceted search with “best bets” which will aide users in finding the information they are looking for by showing the top items of each category at the top. For example, the top few documents, people and groups will be displayed prominently and immediately.  The user can then drill down further into each category as they wish.

Language support


The second is for language support within search. As various languages have diacritics, the search engine will permit searching for these characters in their original and expanded form.  For example, in German there is the character ß which can also be expanded as SS for searching.

Word delimiters


The third search enhancement in this release is a change to how the built-in search engine can handle multi-word concatenations, acronyms and word delimiters (logical breaks between words). It is not uncommon to see common words such as “Wi-fi” in content, and with the new change, the search engine will be able to break-apart the hyphenated phrase into two separate components for indexing, “wi” and ‘fi”.  Another example would be for SAP’s annual “SapphireNow” event.  The search engine will now also index this for the keywords “Sapphire” (which is how it is commonly referred to) and “now”. And the final example would for product/models such as “SD500”.  The search engine will now break this up to “SD” and “500” as separate keywords.

 

Reporting


New in this release is a question report which allows for exporting of questions (from the question forums).


Integration to SAP SuccessFactors Learning (LMS)


The integration to SAP SuccessFactors Learning has been enhanced to provide a notification mechanism to the SAP Jam company administrator to contact SAP support for assistance in the configuration.