Personal Insights
A New Home in the New Year for the SAP Community
In 2016, the SAP Community moved from its old SCN home to its current platform. And in 2024, we’ll have moved once again — but to a new home that, actually, isn’t entirely new at all.
In late 2021, we launched our groups platform on Khoros. Starting with a few areas, this platform has since exploded to cover a wide variety of topics, providing discussion forums where participants can connect with peers in their locations, chat with like-minded members about common interests, search for new job opportunities, and join educational activities. And that was just the beginning, because by the end of this year, our Q&A and blogging content will become part of the same environment as groups.community.sap.com.
Fully migrating SAP Community
Why the need to migrate from community.sap.com? In short: We’ve outgrown our home.
More than 3 million unique visitors come to SAP Community every month looking to learn and network, and after 7 years of providing the prime location to satisfy these needs, the current platform can no longer evolve to meet the demands of this large (and demanding!) audience. After nearly a decade of customizing, we’ve simply reached the limit of what we can do with some of our most popular areas, such as Q&A.
With our groups platform, we have expanded our community with a solution from Khoros, a recognized leader in the online community space. And we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible.
What to expect from the platform
In addition to providing discussion forums and event areas, the Khoros platform can deliver out-of-the-box functionality for questions and answers, blogging, gamification, and more. That makes it the perfect single location for everything our community has to — and wants to! — offer, especially as we continue to grow our community and its services. Khoros is the perfect partner for us because we’ll benefit immediately from improvements that they develop and deliver for their platform.
We plan to migrate the Q&A and blogging content by the end of this year (although our topic pages will remain where they are), while we also look to build even further upon what Khoros can do — from new ways of rewarding members who earn positive reputations to better options for consuming the content members want the most.
We’ll have more to announce in the months ahead, as we help you prepare for your new home. But why wait? You can familiarize yourself with that new home now by participating in our groups. If you haven’t already, sign up and join the conversations. The Welcome Corner is a great place to start, and we even started an Ask and Comment About the Community Platform and Migration discussion over there where you can ask questions about the upcoming migration and share your thoughts about the experience.
The SAP Universal ID requirement
With the migration, the community will be SAP Universal ID native, and as mentioned in this post, SAP Universal ID is also required to register for SAP TechEd. In addition, on September 5, members not on SAP Universal ID will be prompted to sign up when they attempt to log into the SAP Community. You can avoid that inconvenience — and get ready for the new community and SAP TechEd today — by creating your SAP Universal ID now!
SAP Universal ID gives you complete control of your experience (so can manage your personal SAP identity through a single account that you can keep for life), and as previously mentioned, this ID will also become the only way to log into the new community after migration. So please make sure you don’t get left behind, as we want you to come with us to our new home!
Getting you ready for migration
Expect more posts and updates to help documentation soon, as we plan to give you as much time as possible to get ready for the migration. We’ll even schedule sessions where members can talk to experts to get additional details about the move.
We’ll also host monthly, live calls to ensure our community is ready for migration. We’ll come together to hear updates, ask questions, and share ideas. Please register for these 60-minute, live YouTube sessions:
September 19
- Let’s Talk – New Home for the SAP Community (option 1)
- Let’s Talk – New Home for the SAP Community (option 2)
October 17
- Let’s Do This – Introduction about the SAP Community Platform (option 1)
- Let’s Do This – Introduction about the SAP Community Platform (option 2)
November 14
- Learn from One Another — How SAP Community Empowers you (option 1)
- Learn from One Another – How SAP Community Empowers you (option 2)
December 12
- Come Together – Let’s Meet & Collaborate in the SAP Community (option 1)
- Come Together – Let’s Meet & Collaborate in the SAP Community (option 2)
January 16, 2024
- Let’s Celebrate – The New Year & Connect on the Migration (option 1)
- Let’s Celebrate – The New Year & Connect on the Migration (option 2)
February 13, 2024
- Love is in the Air – Champions & Mentors want to share (option 1)
- Love is in the Air – Champions & Mentors want to share (option 2)
The best is yet to come
From SDN to SCN to SAP Community…I’ve been there every step of the way — as a member, and as a manager. As the head of the Community & Influencers team, I feel confident that Khoros can give us the best community experience yet. I look forward to this next stage of a journey going back 20 years.
SAP Community Monthly Migration Series
Craig,
This is another chapter to update for your book: https://www.amazon.com/rough-grayscale-look-back-Recognition/dp/149293979X/
Good luck
Tammy
Woohoo! Let’s do this 🤪
I like the idea of the YouTube sessions. Good luck with the project!
Is SCN >> GROUPS migration on going? I have my universal email id and primary P user id already set & merged. However when I access https://groups.community.sap.com/ , it is asking for the new user id setup. When I setup a new user id, all my previous SCN stuffs are not carried forward. Is it normal? Is groups. Community.sap.com is a blank slate ?
If I access https://groups.community.sap.com/ in incognito browser and when i log in via Universal ID & my P user, I get 401 error like below;
Vivek Hegde
Hi Vivek,
this looks eerily like an issue I've been running into a while ago where my access to groups suddenly went to different userIDs depending on which computer I log-in from. I also vaguely remember this pop-up showing up asking for a user-name which was unexpected as I had already signed-up for groups earlier and had been accessing it regularly. The Community and UID teams are already looking into my issue. Yours might be related.
Cheers
Bärbel
Yes, it is a strange behavior. Ideally, my take on this is, If a user has a Universal Email ID & and a primary P User ID available in https://community.sap.com , should have a username already available in https://groups.community.sap.com . There seems to be some issue in the user mapping. I will wait for someone from community team to investigate it. Thanks for your inputs, much appreciated.
Cheers,
Vivek
Vivek Hegde I will get back to you here as well, in case anyone else with the same question as you is looking for an answer.
Until the migration to Khoros groups has taken place later this year, everyone needs to register with a new username first time they log on to Groups. The username you need to enter here is a display name. Which means the underlying Universal ID will stay the same, and I can assure you that no content will be lost, your account on community.sap.com stays the same.
I hope this helps 🙂
Will it carry over our kudos / missions? I'm at 71% of Grand Master Solver and don't want to start from zero again. Also, when I access it on the new site my profile says "since 04-21-2022" - where did it get that from? Because on the 'old' community it says "Member since March 22, 2018"...
Hopefully you'll be able to join one of our live sessions where we can also address the topic there. In short yes we will carry over all earned badges and reputation. However, many of the current badges will no longer be available going forward. The Platform has a whole new (and enhanced) system so some things simply don't translate 1:1 for us.
All old content (mainly Q&As + Blogs) will be migrated to Khoros Group platform?
Do you know how it will affect Google indexing?
I suspect that lot of traffic to current Q&A comes from Google search.
Tomas,
Thanks for your question!
We are working on bringing over content from the current community to the new community and to continue to optimize SEO from browsers such as Google.
Thanks!
Dani
Hi,
quick question: Will "old" links, e.g. to existing blog posts, continue to work after the migration?
Thanks!
Oliver
Hi, Oliver Mueller:
Yes, those links will continue to work.
Kind regards,
--Jerry
Would love to see a dark theme 🙂 Success for the migration!
Considering the initial version of SCN, below post really teleports me to that era 🙂
https://answers.sap.com/questions/9749017/hows-your-experience-with-the-new-scn-.html
SDN-SCN-SAP Community has undergone many changes from 2003 to present. Always pros and cons of all the changes we have underwent.
I still cannot forgive SAP that decision. SCN was simply good! We lost years of work there from terms of building the community. As I predicted people went to Twitter, Stackoverflow, Github, Medium, Linkeding and other resources because even being non-SAP communities within time questions/blogs/posts became more discoverable than being published on community. Whenever I posted anything here - yes it was monitored by some moderators and SAP people replied, but i didn't really see that much contribution as it was before..
I honestly hope that SAP will analyse all the available data they have now and we will have trully better platform. So far I;'d dare to suggest my expectations:
What would you expect more from nextGen SCN?
I totally agree with you.
SCN was way better organized when you were looking for questions and answers about your topic.
This tagging just does not work, and SAP should more stick to "never touch a running system".
The most important thing is:
I hate companies who think they need to provide web pages for mobile customers with fat fingers... but they forget that we don't want to zoom in our browsers and to see buttons in 800x600 size 🙁
Yet another new platform (Khoros)? Not sure if I will follow.
[insert SAP re-naming joke here]
Joachim Rees
Hi Joachim!
Just wondering: Khoros would only be a new platform if you haven't joined any of the SAP Community Groups yet. And these have been around for a while.
Cheers
Bärbel
Oh yes, it's true: I never joined (well, maybe I did, but never learned to like/use it) those group things.
Blog and Questions, that is what I use in SAP Community.
...maybe I'm getting old. But that is ok! 🙂
haha.. it's like programming. You know, every single time there is a new technology around, you have to be curious. It will be for sure doing something a new way.. take a look and after digging a little make your choice 😉
Thanks for sharing
Dark mode for these community pages is much needed. Currently the theme is too bright.
Excellent job, Craig and the entire team on this new initiative! I have a strong belief that based on what I've observed so far, this move will be beneficial in serving customers, partners, and SAP employees.
Thank you all!