Monday, January 4, 2010

What year 2009 gave to SDN?

There were a lot of new things came during year. Really year 2009 was so fruitful to SDN. Kindly notice in this post that I do not recognize any more between differed types of community networks. I use term SDN for all of them: SAP Community Network (SCN), Software Developer Network (SDN), Business Process Expert (BPX), BusinessObjects Community Network (BOC), etc. Let me mention at least few new initiatives that enriched SDN during last year:


1.    SAP Collaboration Workspace (CW) – is tool to enable collaboration between SAP and its customers and partners. CW is enterprise social-networking site, powered by Jive Software's Clearspace and its successor Social Business Software 3.0 (SBS). CW initiative started backing to 2008 as wiki functionality was added to SDN. It evolved into orchestrated ecosystem with goal into fast, easy, global, secure, enterprise IP protected collaboration solution. In June 2009, SAP and Jive (at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston) announced an agreement that will see SAP's BusinessObjects BI OnDemand software integrated with Jive's community and collaboration platform. So we can expect much more out of these in future.
Side note: Jive’s Clearspace functionalities of forums and enterprise wiki are used in SAP NetWeaver Portal (based on NetWeaver 2004 SPS23). Forum is called SAP Forums (Primary Components: BC-COM-FOR, XX-PART-JIV-FOR, XX-PART-JIV-WIKI on OSS).      
2.    Integration of BO into SDN – A new community has born – dedicated to BusinessObjects BI products: SAP BusinessObjects Community (BOC). Same as BO support portals was absorbed by OSS; BO communities needed to be under one roof. You can find here plenty of information related to broad portfolio of BO products.
3.    Careers Center – Based on JobTarget platform it does help on one hand employers to identify SAP talents worldwide and on other hand job seekers to show their skills in environment of the SDN.
4.    SAP Docupedia - Collaboration Workspace from SAP, documentation wiki for additional content and community contributions. It is kind of user written documentation of SAP products. You can see how better users are when writing the documentation in parallel to official one at hep.sap.com.
5.    InnoCentive – represents SAP commitment to technology innovation and sustainability. It is a part of InnoCentive which is a global, online marketplace where organizations in need of innovation–companies, academic institutions, public sector, and non-profit organizations–can utilize a global network of over 160,000 of the world’s brightest problem solvers.
6.    University alliances (UAC) – provides connections between university leaders and students, SAP customers and partners, and SAP internal experts. Several universities across the world and involved in here.
7.    SAP EcoHub – includes SAP service provider’s offerings to customers in easy way to discover, evaluate, and buy partner solutions and services from SAP’s community-powered online solution marketplace.
8.    Community Code Gallery – It is a part of SDN wiki which allows sharing of code, snippets, tutorials, etc.
9.    Best Build Application – Official SAP reference of building apps to be compliant SAP Business Suite software. It does contain all the rules, practices etc to meet solutions to architectural approaches, standards, and industry best practices similar to the ones used by SAP. See overview in presentation here. See the guide itself here.
10. Get Active. Stay Active. Build Your Reputation. – SDN is highlighting and showcasing active contributors no matter how that doing it. Even it is answering on forums, blogging, mentoring, documenting, wiki-ing, article contributing and so on. For starting with SDN contributing see FAQs.
11. SAP Mentor Program – If you are so good in particular SAP area; means you are so active at all SDN stages you can become nominated and might be later really become an SAP Mentor. See details of program here, FAQs here.
12. PlaNet Finance Program – Another incentive program for active contributing to SDN. For overview of this program see here. See active top contributors here, top companies here. Here you can even dig into contributors list based on several filter criteria.
13. SDN Events – Place where you can find all SDN related events both: regular and virtual plus recorded ones.
14. BI Best Practices – Offers practices helping companies to build up BI strategies. See details here.

For sure there are much more other initiatives that I’m not aware of. This is just small demonstration how great SDN is.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

SAPPER, Thanks for the great overview of what 2009 brought to the SAP Community Network! Clearly you are paying close attention and we at SAP really appreciate it. If you haven't already, would you consider reposting your blog to SCN? I am sure the community would appreciate your insight.