Personal Insights
How to ask a good B1 or ByD question
I started writing an answer for a newcomer, but the text got so big that I decided to share with everyone as a blog post.
*Most of you do an amazing job, but recently we run a bit off track. So for the veterans, this is a kind reminder.
First, welcome to the SMB Community! 🙂
We have all been there, you hit a roadblock (or 20 of them) and have a lot of questions.
But in order to keep a nice and tidy community, that helps everyone that runs into trouble, there are some ground rules and good practices we need to follow.
Search before post
B1/ByD have been here for ages and Google has been extremely helpful in indexing community posts, partner’s content and official SAP documentation. Add the terms “sap b1” or “sap bydesign” to your searches and the magic happens.
A lot of the issues you encounter were already faced by someone else in the past and there is a high chance is has already been discussed.
In the community, use the search bar. I know in the past it wasn’t trivial to find something here in the SAP Community. That’s isn’t the case anymore. To go further, here are two links to have on your bookmarks:
Use the correct SAP Managed tags
SAP Managed Tags are the way questions and blogs are grouped in communities. When you assign them randomly your topic end up being displayed on communities not related to your question. This generates spam and is kind of annoying for people that try to follow a topic.
I understand the eagerness to have your question seen by as much people as possible and the (false) sense that it will be answered faster this way. It won’t.
Rule of the thumb:
Is code involved?
- Use the SAP Business One Extensibility or SAP Cloud Application Studios tags;
Configuration, Business Logic, Administration topics:
- SAP Business One Tag (or specific Cloud, HANA, Intercompany Integration);
- SAP Business ByDesign
There is another field called User Tags, and this is your chance to go wild and add everything you want (related to your question). But for SAP Managed ones, stick with the basics.
If you have to ask a question. Do it right.
I really like the Stack Overflow – How to Ask a good Question hints, which this blog is heavily based. To summarize:
Pretend you’re talking to a busy colleague and have to sum up your entire question in one sentence: what details can you include that will help someone identify and solve your problem? Include any error messages, key APIs, or unusual circumstances that make your question different from similar questions already on the site.
Adding to that, what have you tried so far and didn’t work?
Most active members (including SAP personnel) do not work full time answering community questions. We do it in between meetings, when we got a break from a project and the likes.
We try to answer as many questions as we can, so well written ones will surely got our attention more the one-liners-here-is-this-error-please-fix-it ones.
Did you solve it? Provide feedback.
Sometimes you find the solution on your own (in most cases after you create a topic). Help out the community by providing the solution and explaining what you did.
If someone else gave you an answer that was right, flag it as “Best Answer”. Again, this will help the people that will face the same issue in the future 🙂
In short:
