By Anne Widjaja
The launch of a new and improved SAP Community Network (SCN) was announced in January of last year, and promised more functionality, cleaner navigation and improved networking features. Now, after several delays to the launch date, the SCN was finally launched over the past weekend – but has met with mixed reviews.
The SCN has long been established as an online platform to help SAP customers, IT professionals and end-users interact with one another to solve problems, network and access resources such as community contributor blogs and forums.
When users began complaining about the out of date functions on the SCN, an overhaul of the network seemed like a necessary measure to ensure that the site remained responsive to the needs of the SAP community.
The plan for a new and improved SCN, to be launched at the end of 2011, had the SAP community eagerly anticipating its arrival.
Mark Yolton, senior vice president, SAP communities and social media, described in a blog entry that the new SCN would have capabilities such as: more organised content, blogs and discussions; streamlined navigation; social media functions such as the ability to ‘follow’ authors; relevant updates on matters of interests and features on top participants, top viewed and rated content.
However, the decision to delay the launch to early 2012, and rumours that the SAP team was still trying to fix elementary problems, quickly dampened the hype.
The new SCN is now live and functional, and according to Yolton’s most recent blog, the social media response has largely been very positive.
He also admitted that there were several unresolved problems with the SCN, explaining that the site would remain in beta so it could continue to be improved in response to user feedback.
Yolton identified specific key areas of improvement as: 1) speeding up performance, 2) ensuring log-ins would not bounce back, and 3) adding missing discussion threads.
Despite Yolton’s positive attitude, a number of SCN users have since posted complaints about the new system. The issue of the missing search function and content on the site was raised repeatedly in the comments, with most users writing that they preferred the old SCN.
However, considering the new system is still less than a week old, these negative responses may be premature. Whatever users may think about the new SCN, it at least appears that the SCN team is committed to responding to user complaints and bringing the functionality of the site up to scratch.
