Collaborating on SAP Community Network

This SAP Insider article shows how unrestricted social networking tools, such as Wiki, blogs, and community-moderated discussion forums, can help you transform processes and create more value in relationships between customers, partners, and employees.

To quickly get started on publishing, please see this web site. It contains short instructions on all major ways of publishing on the different communities.

This table gives you a quick overview of the different types of channels that are available to you to publish and collaborate on the different communities.

What is a forum?

The forum is the place to turn to if you have a specific question about a product, configuration, or process. You may be able to take advantage of the fact that other community members asked your question before and the answer already exists on the forums. To find it, simply use the search and restrict the search to forums, or use the advanced search to provide more details and achieve more precise results.

If you can’t find an answer to your question, post a new question. In order to participate in forum discussions, you need to be logged on the SAP Community Network (click here to register). Use “Post New Thread” on top of the listed forum threads to publish your question. Here, a simple editor opens to let you post your question or discussion topic. It allows for very basic formatting, such as bold, italics, and underlined characters as well as the inclusion of links.

The individual forum threads are marked with icons to help you quickly identify new content and questions among the discussions (what each icon means is explained below the list of threads). So if your new thread is a question, don’t forget to leave the box “Mark this thread as a question…”checked.

If you posted a question, it is important to show your appreciation of helpful answers by assigning points. See Contributor Recognition Program FAQ for details.

In order not to annoy the fellow community, it is very important for you to always perform a search before you post a forum question and make sure a similar question hasn’t already been answered a dozen times.

Choosing the appropriate topic for your forum post increases the probability of getting interesting answers. Experts on a certain topic preferably spend their time on the corresponding forums, if you post your question in the wrong forum, chances are there won’t be an expert around. Also, experts tend to be impatient with people who appear to be posting their questions randomly. If you don’t invest the time to find the correct topic, why should they invest their time to help you out?

Regardless of whether an area is represented on the editorial pages or not, new forums emerge when a discussion topic creates a certain amount of traffic. As soon as we’re aware that there’s a sub-topic of an area that needs its own dedicated forum topic, we will make sure a new forum is created.

To find out more about forums and how to use them, please see:
Forum FAQ
Asking and Answering in the Forums – Rules of Engagement

What is a blog?

In order to be able to blog, you first need to become an SAP Community Network blogger. Find out how from this blogging overview page.

Blogging itself isn’t complicated at all. All you need to do is go to the blogging area (either through right hand navigation, or top level navigation, or through opening a link to an existing blog). You will then see “Post a Blog” in your left hand navigation. Click on it, and you enter your own blogging area. Here, you have an overview of all your posted blogs and your author page (the page a reader sees when he clicks on the name of a blog’s author; it includes your picture, your bio, and a list of your last blogs).

You will find everything you need to know to fill out the blogging form and use the blog editor also on the blogging overview page..

Valuable tips and tricks to make your blog a pleasant read for the community are available here.

 

Video Blogging

Through the use of a third party service we are been able to offer two channels, one for the SDNers and one for the BPXers to share their thoughts via Community TV. You can use a webcam or any other camera attached to your computer to record directly or you can upload a video you already have prepared to the BPX Channel or SDN Channel share it with the community.

More information:
Contributor Corner – Video Blogging

 

Podcasting

You can use Community TV as described above also for podcasting, just record only audio and upload it to the SDN Channel or BPX Channel. If you would like your podcast to appear on our dedicated podcasting channel, please create an audio file and send us a link to the prepared audio (or contact us and we will give you the ability to upload it to us).

More information:
Contributor Corner – Podcasting
Community Podcasts - Submission Guidelines

What's a Wiki?

The Wiki is the perfect collaboration tool as it allows for joint content creation on a website. It’s perfect for all kinds of lists you’d like to see completed by fellow community members, for the collection of information on a topic, such as links and definitions, or for the gathering of FAQs on a topic. The Wiki is also perfect for virtual projects, such as round tables. And the best thing is: The Wiki is easy to use. You don’t need to know Wiki markup language, a simple online editor allows you to format and structure your pages and additions nicely and attach all kinds of files for a project.

The Wiki FAQ contain more detailed information to help youget started with the Wiki and to learn more about creating and editing pages. Please be aware that although Wiki markup language is mentioned at several points, there is no need for you to use it. Visit the Wiki sandbox  to try everything yourself. This page introduces the Wiki sandbox and gives you tips to customize your Wiki landing page.

What is an Article on SAP Community Network?

Articles are the most reliable resources on SAP Community Network. They go through an approval process during which editors try to respect the author’s individuality but sometimes at the same time try to improve the readability. Articles are usually rewarded with more points than most other contribution (see Contributor Recognition Program FAQ) , depending on their quality, originality and the effort an author put into their creation.

If you would like to publish an article, we kindly ask you to first perform a search and make sure the same topic hasn’t already been discussed thoroughly. If you find your subject is unique, you should then decide how to publish it on SAP Community Network. To decide whether your content is appropriate to be published as an article as opposed to a blog or Wiki page, this table can give you an idea of the differences and specialties of the different media on SAP Community Network.

After you chose to publish your contents as an article, the first step will be to write the actual text. This Wiki page contains tips and tricks for good writing. Make sure to also check out our Community Guidelines and obey to our policies.

Click on How to Contribute from the topmost right hand area of a page to find short instructions and the template you need to submit your article. We can only accept Word document submissions for articles. After you’ve entered your article into the appropriate template, click on Submit and Track Content and read the notice on the screen carefully. Then click on proceed, confirm your personal data on the next screen by clicking on “Next”, and enter the actual content submission form.

Now fill out the form. First, enter the document title. Be sure to pick a meaningful title, so that someone who comes across your article later knows immediately what it is about. Enter the date when you wrote the article, it should match the date you give within the article itself. Then, please enter a short abstract of the specifics of your article. This abstract shows when your article is part of a search result and may also be used when we highlight your article on one of the pages.

Next, choose the level of expertise needed to work with your article. The next field “Provide Access to” allows you to restrict your article to a certain audience. Usually, all articles should be open for all users or all registered SAP Community Network users, which means people need to be logged in when accessing the document; otherwise they will be redirected to the log-on screen.

The following selection of primary and related topics, i.e., the “tagging”, is very important for your article to actually be found on SAP Community Network. If you do not select those that apply carefully, it won’t appear through an advanced search of the appropriate topic, and it won’t show on any of the article lists. Furthermore, the production process will take a lot longer and your article doesn’t stand a chance of being highlighted on any of the pages at all because our editors won’t be able to find it either. Therefore, please click on both bold blue links (“Select a Primary Topic” and “Select Related Topics”) and take the time to read through the available topics carefully and select all that apply and only those that apply. If your article relates to specific tasks, please select those too.

To further support findability and relevance of your article of those who do find it, specifiy the product release your article relates to, if applicable, and make use of the Keywords for Search field which lets you enter additional descriptive expressions; you may separate these as you like, comma, semi-colon, or spaces will do.

Before you finally click on “Submit”, attach your article to the submission form. In order to do so, upload it directly if the file is less than 30 MB big – which should be true for all document submissions. Use the “Attach File” field and browse your local computer for upload. If, however, your file is larger, you may enter a download link for us to retrieve the file. This can, for example, be a sapmats link if you’re an SAP employee or contractor. If you don’t have the opportunity to provide a link, please contact us at SCNContent@sap.com and we will find a solution.

See this screencam demo to get to know our submission system. Of course, as the different communities grow, the text, the fields, and the possible selections are constantly changing. Nevertheless, the demo helps you get an understanding of the submission process.

Should you encounter any unexpected behavior or need support, the Community FAQ provide you with useful information.

After you hit the submit button, our editorial team checks and evaluates your submission. The internal review process may include several editors and subject matter experts. The review and publication process may take between a couple of days and several weeks. Due to limited resources, we have to rely on your honesty and responsibility towards the entire community as far as the uniqueness and accurateness of your article is concerned. If you chose to cite from other articles, websites, or books and magazines, please make sure to honor those sources in a proper way as plagiarism on the Internet is just as illegal as in offline publications. If you come across a publication that does not obey to copyright and fair use laws or that is outdated or simply wrong, please contact us at  SCNContent@sap.com so that we can take appropriate action.

Once your article is published – you can check the status of your submission under “Submit and Track Content” on “How to Contribute”, right where you uploaded it – it is accessible to the community through the search. Some, particularly important articles will also be “featured” on an editorial page, i.e. highlighted with a little teaser abstract for a certain amount of time, or, if they contain fundamental information of great, ongoing relevance, they become a permanent part of a page on SAP Community Network. In any case, if your article was tagged properly, it shows on the list of articles in chronological order. This list can be found under the headline “Articles” in the right hand area of an editorial page. If it’s not available on a certain page, you will be able to find it one level higher or lower in the left hand navigation hierarchy.

Click here to learn what an eLearning is

To share eLearnings with the community, please upload them to the submission system is not much different from submitting an article. The submission process as such is the same: you go to our submission system, fill out the form, attach your file, and submit it (see Publishing Articles and Whitepapers for details). The preferred format for an eLearning is a flash file (*.swf). Other acceptable eLearning formats are SAP Tutor (*.sim), Interwise Virtual Classroom (*.vcf), and WebEx (*..WRF). If you would like to submit an e-learning in a different format or don’t know how to convert it, please contact us at SCNContent@sap.com.

Please try to keep the file size reasonable, for example, for a screen recording, the frame rate does not need to be the same as for an action movie. Also, please stick to a screen resolution of 768*1024 pixels.

If you would like to submit an e-learning in a different format or don’t know how to convert it, please contact us at SCNContent@sap.com.

Publishing a download works the same way, please zip it and submit it.

More information is available to you under How to Contribute.
The processing of eLearnings and downloads may take up to a few weeks. After this time you will be able to access your contribution through the search or the eLearning catalog or download catalog respectively.