Personal Insights
Information Overload – SAP the Search for Answers – Vote for Change
I had a thought, I wanted to suggest change. I didn’t remember how, so I found it this morning. There are influence opportunities to write your improvement. It’s called the Continuous Influence Session – SAP Community. I know I’ve been told about it. It just slipped my mind. So you can add your suggestions about community changes here. Pretty cool.
If you’ve had the same issues I have, finding too many outdated blogs, please add commands and/or vote on my suggestion.
So here is the proposal:
Highlight blogs that are outdated. They are misleading and clutter up the search when using google or another search. There are several SAP tools that are newer than the blogs that were written 2 years ago. It makes it hard to figure out which ones will still work.
Problem:
Bad Experience with the community
Benefits:
- Easier search.
- Less Questions
- In general less frustration
- Less sap support incidents on something that could have been resolved with a search.
After reading the comments – how about if it was required to add the version you are working on? While it’s not required, you could tag it with the version.
<Stop here if you don’t want to hear my rant.>
My Frustration:
I can’t always find that blog. That blog that steps me through a project. That blog that helps me with migration. That blog that helps me develop with WEB IDE. Wait – no not true. I find them, but they are outdated. I look at the date before I start. Tutorials? Very nice, but I’m not on the test system. I’m on my system. Frustrated? Me too.
So you ask a question – one that you’ve researched and have just gotten tired of looking at all those Old links. Then someone nicely points you to a link and asks you if you search. (That might be me that has done that) Have you searched? Yes, you have. But you just didn’t find the latest answer.
So you ask yourself – am I crazy? Does anyone else have that problem? The answer is – YES, we ALL have that problem. What can you do? Suggest change. It may never happen, but at least you suggested it. Perhaps it will help generate different ideas.
And yes, I know some if it is archived. Some of the archived blogs/questions are what I need. I’m sure you all aren’t on the latest and greatest. I’m not either.
After all the frustration:
- Keep blogging
- Keep asking those questions
- If you remember – please add the tag for the version you are currently on.
Why bother?
Even if it is hard to find the answer, I usually eventually find it. If we stop contributing out of frustration – no one wins. It may be that the next person gets too much information on a topic. However, too much is better than no information.
Michelle, I agree and I have voted on your suggestion. You should include the first 3 paragraphs of this blog in the Detail for the suggestion. Current Detail is too generic.
I love the suggestions and switched my paragraphs around.
Thank you!
Michelle
I read your blog twice and I am still not sure that I understand what is the exact problem and what solution you propose without navigating via the link to the improvement request. Maybe it will be a good idea to explain it in greater detail in the blog.
Considering that there was some controversy about the privacy and the usability of the Customer Influence site one needs to have a very good reason to use it.
If memory serves, a significant part of the highest voted, valid and reasonable suggestions for improving SAP Community never happened, so why would this time be different?
OK - I rewrote parts of it. Hopefully better this time. It's been one of those days. I couldn't find what I wanted and I kept finding older outdated answers. Then I wrote this blog.
I don't remember the privacy and customer influence site. So that could be a problem. I'll have to "search" for it. 😉
Why this time is different? It may (probably) won't be different. However, if no one asks for a change - the change will never happen either. Some days I'm more optimistic than others. Yes, I do know others have asked for change and it didn't happen. But sometimes it makes sense to try yet again.
I know one of the ways to prove insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over and thinking it will produce a different result. I read that somewhere, I honestly don't know where. But when you think about people those variables are not the same.
Sorry, but who will decide that the blog is outdated? And what if the person searching for some blog is using an old version of SAP product?
I have no idea how to define "outdated" status.
Who will decide? That's an excellent question. Most of those blogs do not have a version in them. Perhaps a better idea is when you are writing a technical type blog, you have to specify the version. Yes, I know that wouldn't catch all of them, but it would be a start. Then instead of looking at dates, I could exclude versions - If I wanted to. There are times when I don't want to exclude versions.
Does that sound like a better idea? Questions I can live with those being outdated. Although we could add the version there as well. A lot of questions, we can easily skip. I think blogs are harder to skip. You don't really know if they are valid, unless you go in and read them. Even then, if it is a new topic to me. I can't always tell if it is the newest information.
Anyway, providing the product version data is required in many cases (blogs, questions). But there is no formal rule... Many features are added / bug fixed starting from some Service Pack.
I must be going crazy. I don't see a version field on the blog post.
Not present! And no idea, how to implement.
In general: there is no simple solutions for complex issues...
Hi Michelle. Until last Friday I knew nothing about the influence.sap.com site. Somehow I managed to miss the info 🙂 I will definitely look at it.
I have already thought about the topic "information overload". At the moment I see the same problem as Vadim.
As a counter reaction to "information overload" one could see isolated initiatives like ABAP Weekly (thanks Damir Majer). Unfortunately, such initiatives take a lot of time and commitment, but I think they produce excellent results.
By the way, Frederik Hudak recently started a similar call, if I remember correctly.
So.... It's a Monday for me. Are you trying to drive me slowly crazy? I could not find ABAP Weekly. At least not quickly. I looked on Damir Majer - at blogs. I didn't see it. Please put a link if you still have it. Frederk Hudak - a link as well.
Looked under Frederk - this may be a Monday thing. I didn't see it. SO I googled Frederk SAP data. Nothing found but Liked in showed up a lot.
SAP ABAP Weekly. Without moving from one page.
Here's what I got:
Some "Mondays" should be really forbidden and the week should start with Tuesday 😉
The address is https://abapweekly.info/. If you search with "ABAP weekly", Google will not find it. Just "ABAPweekly" worked for me.
This is the link to the blog.