OMG they killed SCN

The new SAP Community (formerly SCN – SAP Community Network) must be one of the biggest cluster fucks of 2016. It seems to meet all the conditions of the definition:

clusterfuck ‎(plural clusterfucks)

1. (slang, vulgar) A chaotic situation where everything seems to go wrong. It is often caused by incompetence, communication failure, or a complex environment.

After a few weeks and several hopeful attempts I’ve totally given up on this platform. And I’m apparently not the only one. The problem with the previous SCN was that it was hard to find stuff. But, when you finally found the right spaces it kinda worked as you could easily browse the discussion topics you were interested in and see whether questions are already answered.

My Lumira question from 23 November has now 6 (!!!) views and 0 replies. And there are lots of other Lumira topics with even less views. If I look at the Design Studio area I see the same thing. Most of the topics have max 10 views. On the old SCN this was a very popular space and people were almost fighting to provide help. Oh, and the upvoting feature isn’t used at all.

The main problem is that the new SAP Community lacks any clear structure (yes, there are ‘tags’) and the bizarre thing seems to be that this is by design! I get the feeling that it doesn’t want to be like a classic forum for some unclear reason.

If I want to go to the Design Studio stuff I need to do the following: First use the Browse Community page to find the Design Studio Community (but why can’t I save my favorite communities?).

Here I see an overview of some Design Studio related links, and at the bottom a few recent questions and blogs. No additional information on the questions (number of replies, answered or not etc.) and only five of them. Useless.

So I have to click on View More Blogs and Questions. This gives me all the blogs and all the questions. But again, no information on the status of these questions. I can only sort by newest or oldest and filter on either blog or question.

Another way to browse this platform is by using the tags, and this seems to be a bit more useful. Now I can see the number of views, replies and status and I can filter on answered/unanswered questions. Also sorting is possible on relevance (?), updated, created, hottest and votes.

Still, it is not really clear for me how I can easily reach this tag area. I now search for “Design Studio”, click the first question, and click the tag in the question to see all questions with this tag. And, what is the relation between the tags and the sub communities, or is there none?

Besides the issues on finding stuff, I really don’t like how inefficient this site uses its space. You have to scroll a lot as there isn’t that much information displayed on a single page.

Let’s try again next year, maybe they fixed it. In the meantime, as I don’t want to miss any good blogs that people, I setup a RSS reader to stay up to date. Check this blog post on how to do this.

HackingSAP.com - Dec 4, 2016 | SAP, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio, SAP Lumira
Tagged | SAP Community