Personal Insights
The SAP Community Rocks!!!
For those that follow me on Twitter they would already know from my post of last week that described a problem I found while helping one of my clients on an LSMW they had written to update Purchase pricing records. In the last number of years my focus has been on architecting applications built on SAP Cloud Platform as well as mobile applications. While I have provided the solution design to a lot of the applications we have built where SAP ERP is the backend it has not been diagnosing issues with LSMW. This I did in a past life! ? But occasionally I do get involved in diagnosing issues within the SAP ERP system. This was one such time.
My twitter post looked like this and I was blown away by the response.I think this emanated with a lot of people – the feeling that posts in the SAP Community have a longevity to them. Posts within the SAP Community keep giving back – time after time. I did think hard about the title of this blog post but the responses I received from my twitter response were the same – that the SAP Community rocks so I had to use it! Thanks Nabheet Madan for the idea.
The focus of my post was that even 5 years after the question had been posted the answers and comments provided in the post helped me out and eventually resolved the issue. The other thought I had at the time was – “How could I identify this somewhere on the question?” Sure, I could upvote the Best Answer plus any other comments I found helpful but the impact of this I thought would be minimal. Why? Well, because this is a seriously old post from 5 years ago so there is no activity really going on with it. My further thought was that there is something missing here – once there is a Best Answer provided for a question the motivation to again keep upvoting it was pretty low – even though it may solve a problem of another 100 people that view the question. Additionally, further comments on this question really would be a bit weird – even if it was to say – “Hey, thanks – this helped me out 5 years later”. My last thought was – wouldn’t it be great to identify that this particular question helped another 100 people over the course of the last 5 years! That would be awesome!
So, the challenge is – how can people provide an update to a question to say – Thanks – this solved my problem.
IMO – I believe there would be thousands of people that benefit from questions posted from years ago however there is no real way of identifying this or a button for them to press to say “This Solved my Problem!”, especially once a Best Answer exists.
The number of views may go someway in identifying how many people may have been assisted however it is a pretty rough number. The other challenge is that most people googling for questions are not logged in so any recording of a button press they would need to login for. Hmmmm…
At the moment the following exists for a Question:
- As a SAP Community member you can Upvote the question.You can also downvote.
- As a SAP Community member you can Upvote any answers that are provided. You can also downvote on any answer that is provided.
- As a SAP Community member you can Like any comments provided to answers and any comments to the question itself.
- As a SAP Community member I can [Follow] a question. I have not really understood this option but it is there.
- As a SAP Community member publishing a question, the person can select the [Best Answer].
To push for my idea even further I visited the Customer influence site – specifically checking out all of the improvements for the SAP Community tag. You can check it out yourself.
https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/campaign/896/ideas
There were a lot of great ideas and a lot of them have been put into play and exist in the SAP Community today…but I did not find my idea. Awesome! I created a new improvement request here https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/idea/233743. Feel free to vote for it – no pressure.
Here is a little mock up I created for the improvement idea. UX designers – no judging please!
Now for the clincher. On a day to day basis I believe there are hundreds of thousands of questions and answers (also blog posts of course) that assist people all around the globe. So, a question a SAP Community member posts today may help hundreds of people over a 2 year period, possibly thousands over a 5-10 year period. Posts from 10 years ago are still in the SAP Community and can be referenced, looked up via Google depending on the question being asked. This is simply AMAZING! and seriously POWERFUL! I still receive some questions on some of the blog posts I have written years after and I really dig this, I would love more SAP Community members to do this.
So, if you have a question to ask – Ask It! If you also know answers to some of the questions posted in topics of your choice then you are contributing to an overall vibrant and super helpful SAP Community that helps people for the long term. It helps others, it helps your colleagues and it helps YOU! Who knows, a question you ask today may help someone tomorrow and what a great feeling that would be.
Get Involved!!! Post a question, check out other questions and see if you can answer them. If you think of improvements, then log them in the Customer influence site.
You never know what positive impact you can have on the SAP Community but it can only happen if you involve yourself.
Lastly, I do keep hearing people complain about having to login to do anything on the SAP Community but any Community I know of requires a login so not sure why people keep on about it. To me, any contributions that are valued by the members within it are happy to be identified and are happy to know their contributions are making an impact. So, SAP Community members let’s get over this login issue and provide positive impacts within the SAP Community.
As I often quote, the SAP Community is only as good as the people and members within it – their effort, their involvement, their positive attitude, their powerful impacts! SAP Community rocks because of all of the contributors within it!
Thanks for reading and if you are interested here are links to my other SAP Community related blog posts. Enjoy!
https://blogs.sap.com/2019/03/30/housekeeping-in-the-sap-community/
https://blogs.sap.com/2019/05/12/like…follow…comment…repeat…like…follow…comment/
https://blogs.sap.com/2019/02/24/influence-sap-now-how-to-submit-a-new-improvement-request/
Do you have any ideas on how to make the SAP Community better? If so, would be great to hear your feedback. Add a comment below or navigate to the customer influence site included above and vote for topics, OR create a new improvement request.
Don’t forget to Like or Follow this blog post to meet your #LikeSAPBlogChallenge #FollowSAPBlogChallenge challenges!
Great blog Phil! The community posts are like Trees with leaves, they keep helping people without asking anything for return(leave aside some basic posts they also help the beginners). It is the duty of every community member to provide a token of thanks in any way they like, as these solutions helped them in times of trouble. The token of thanks can be via upvote, helped button or a small message or something to the person etc.
Having said that all communities whether real or virtual, there always exist a scope for improvement or bugs. No one can be perfect, we can only strive to be. So I feel this is okay if people request for features or improvement without giving up on the community, as it is each one of them which make this community great!
We have come a long way and we will always have a long path to travel that is how the life is! Lets enjoy this journey, keep contributing and keep rocking.
PS: The other day two of the posts one from Stackoverflow and another from our SAP community helped in one of the Fiori issue:)
Thanks
Nabheet
Thanks Nabheet Madan - I am sure you have heaps of blog posts and questions that are referenced on a daily basis by hundreds of people! Like your trees with leaves analogy + the token. Nice!
Yes, agree - communities are not perfect and definitely always room for improvements. I do see alot of new activity of late especially in the SAP Analytics Cloud space - alot of posts coming in which is great to see. Let's hope this moves throughout the other topics.
Thanks again for the feedback and thanks for reading mate!
Phil,
Perfectly captured sentiments, and I really like your "This helped me!" idea. I think that could be a great improvement. Gonna go find it in the influence area and vote for it. 🙂
Cheers,
Matt
+1
Thanks!
Thanks Matt Fraser appreciate the feedback and glad you liked the idea. Would be great to score another vote, so thanks!
Thanks for reading and providing a comment as well.
cheers
Phil
Good idea with the "Helped" button, Phil (already voted for it).
How about taking it one step further and give people the option to briefly state how/when/where it helped them?
Cheers
Bärbel
Thanks Bärbel Winkler - great! Yeah, I like that. Definitely would provide more context about the scenario and even that may help others so basically paying it even more forward!
Feel free to add this as a comment on the Improvement request. You can not only vote here but can also add comments to the overall idea.
Thanks again!
cheers
Phil
Wouldn't that just be a comment on the answer in the thread of the question?
Not sure if "Helped me and here is how/why" should bring old threads to the top if sorted by last activity. In addition, many old threads are also closed which prevents further responses in them.
Good points, though if an old solution continues to help people, I wonder if that's an argument to re-open the discussion and update it for current times.