The protagonist in this blog is Sambo who recently came in the SDN/BPX world and shares his experience. Past: Sambo has been working in APO for quite some time, having experience in both implementation and support projects. He had been using Service Marketplace and going through Consulting notes to understand nuances of the application. Also help.sap.com is a good source but then it's a ocean and for one on a life-raft becomes very difficult to navigate (or even finding direction). So he Googled for his issues and came across other internet sites (ittoolbox, saptips) etc. Then one fine day he got a mail from SDN "Your S-user Account has been upgraded". He has heard about SDN earlier - a great place where SAP Developers collaborate with lot of code and ABAP geeks exchanging ideas. Is it a place for so-called functional consultants? Anyway he decided to check it out anyway. So he logged in ...... Present: Sambo is now hooked to SDN. He logs to SDN naturally like he logs on to his email client. Takes a look at new Blogs that are newly posted. Checks out his Forums of interest and if there is an unanswered question tries to answer based on his experience and some experimenting in the system. So he started getting points to the forum replies. The day he got his first points - wow he was on cloud nine. Someone else (whom he does not know) has found his response appropriate and recognized it. Slowly and surely his points built up and he passed the half-century, then century mark and so on. Each point brought him more self-confidence and also taught him new stuff even within areas he thought he knew. Moreover just by going through the forums he could learn about issues and topics which he had little knowledge, thereby building his competency. He stopped Googling for SAP related issues instead searching (or should we say Trexing) within SDN. One day he saw a new link BPX Community and before long checked that out. Its a different story that he is still confused about the BPX role, the frameworks and concepts being discussed there. But then there is so much to explore and learn. His recent finding is Wiki and the SCM Topic. He is waiting to contribute to the different pages that have sprung up recently. Future: Who knows what holds in future for SDN. Sambo came up with two ideas - maybe long shot ones but maybe true out in future. One is the points system in SDN. It is a great way to recognize the contributions made. While it is not a currency, it may become so in future in a subtle way. Maybe the resumes in future will mention the number of points. This is by far one of the best ways of recommendation. The other idea - well Distributed Computing is the future. So who knows when you logon to SDN a little bit of your computer resources gets used for processing the SDN related stuff. Maybe that's why SDN is a bit slow. So that has been the experience of a newbie to SDN so far.
