This release of SAP Jam features key updates to help you be even more productive and find information more easily - while seamlessly connecting with customers, partners, and employees. Discover how SAP Jam can now help you:

• Easily focus on what matters
  • Reduce noise from the feed and focus on activity that matters - with new feed filters
  • Browse through information rapidly - with feed activity improvements
  • Quickly recognize important SAP Jam activity - with notification enhancements
• Drive rapid results with ease
  • Ensure you’re delivering the correct message - by editing posts after they’re posted
  • Discover the key things that you need to know about your colleagues - with profile improvements

For developers

You can now help motivate behavior and create incentives in SAP Jam. Event hooks have been added that enable integration with leading gamification vendors, and UI integrations support items from gamification vendors like badges, challenges, missions, and leader boards. We’ve also included the ability for you to gain even more value from SAP Jam by integrating with additional applications through newly available APIs. Read on to see how you can:

• Motivate and reward colleagues by integrating with gamification vendors

For administrators

Extended SAP Jam administrator functionality helps IT teams remain in control of key corporate data while delivering social collaboration across their entire technology landscape. Ensure group content and activity is appropriate within enterprise business contexts with the addition of support for a number of content publishing and monitoring safe-guards. See how you can now:

• Review content before it's published with group content moderation features
• Flag inappropriate content with "Mark as Abuse/Spam" on feed events
• Monitor data usage by user and by group with storage reporting
• Regain data storage space with the ability to export groups

Easily focus on what matters

Reduce noise from the feed and focus on activity that matters with new feed filters

If you’re using SAP Jam across multiple business processes and applications, you might see more information in your feed than you have time to read. Now, you can choose only the updates that you want to see on your home feed with new feed filters - by picking which types of group and user activity appear.

Let’s say you’re a sales representative and your particular area of expertise is in upselling current opportunities. With the new feed filters, you can select only the items that will be important to you by checking "Opportunities" and "Sales Quotations" for the events in SAP CRM that appear in your SAP Jam feed. If you have SAP Jam integrated with other applications with notifications that appear in your SAP Jam feed, you can also filter and choose those updates to see from your home feed.

Browse through information rapidly with feed activity improvements

Find all actionable SAP Jam events either directed at you or involving your activities in one place with new, in-product notifications. This includes @mentions, replies to your comments, likes of your posts, answers to your questions, feedback on your ideas, and badges you’ve received. The notifications alert in the SAP Jam header displays the number of notifications directed at your or related to you. Hover over the alert icon to display a quick-view drop-down of those notifications so that you can act on them from there or drill in for more information.

For SAP Jam group administrators where moderated participation has been turned on, the new notifications alert you when new content has been uploaded and awaits your review and approval.

For company administrators, the new notifications will alert you to content marked as inappropriate that requires review.

Quickly recognize important SAP Jam activity with notification enhancements

It’s now easier to navigate through SAP Jam updates because certain repeated events in feeds are consolidated. For example, when a user does a bulk upload of several documents or when multiple users vote in a poll in a manner of minutes, SAP Jam now shows you those activities grouped together as one event. To view each individual file upload or polling vote, click the "View All Posts" to see a detailed breakdown of the events.

Drive rapid results with ease

Ensure you’re delivering the correct message with the ability to edit posts after they’re posted

If you need to correct misspellings, typos, or inaccurate information, now you can easily edit your status updates and feed comments after you’ve posted them.

Discover the key things that you need to know about your colleagues with profile improvements

Now in SAP Jam you can quickly gather important information about your colleagues including details such as title, contact information, and reporting structure when you view your colleagues’ profiles. Now in the profile overview page, clicking on ‘Show Additional Information’ expands to reveal additional details.

Profile pictures give us the ability to quickly understand who is participating in online conversations. Now it’s easier to orient and crop profile pictures in SAP Jam with new editing features that appear once the pictures have been uploaded.

For Developers

Motivate and reward colleagues by integrating with gamification vendors

This release of SAP Jam makes it easier to help guide and reward new hires and existing employees. Ensure continuous employee development by encouraging employees to understand the most current knowledge and training available. SAP Jam now has ‘event hooks’ that make integration with leading ‘gamification’ vendors straightforward. User activity in SAP Jam—including interacting with events sent from other applications—can now trigger information being sent to select gamification vendors, where it can be analyzed against established goals or ‘challenges’. Based on the criteria of these established challenges, SAP Jam users can be rewarded with ‘badges’ that cumulatively go towards completing ‘missions’ that exemplify behavior required for employees to be most effective in their jobs. A variety of activity in SAP Jam can be identified as criteria for earning badges and completing missions, such as:

• Adding ideas
• Answering forum questions correctly
• Blogging
• Creating or annotating documents
• Updating service requests or sales orders in integrated CRM applications

In order to implement this capability, a SAP Jam company administrator needs to enable gamification in the Admin UI, and provide various parameters provided by their gamification vendor in the ‘Gamification’ settings screen, e.g., hostname and certain keys. They can also selectively enable various capabilities like in-context gamification notifications, badges and missions, and leaderboards.

SAP Jam Admin Screens

SAP Jam events that can map to Gamification challenges

Setting up a challenge in a Gamification vendor’s Admin UI

Badges Earned and Missions Status

Earning a badge on your wall

For Administrators

Review content before it is published with group content moderation features

This release of SAP Jam provides IT with an extended ability to protect key corporate data with content publishing safe-guards that help you ensure content is appropriate for the business context of a group. Now group administrators have the ability to review all content that is posted within groups before it goes public with a new SAP Jam group participation type. SAP Jam administrators can prevent confidential content from being shared before it reaches the wrong audience. When this new moderation type is effective, group members that upload documents, photos, videos, wikis or blogs, need group administrator approval before this content is visible in the group.

Flag inappropriate content with ‘Mark as Abuse/Spam’ on feed events

When someone finds an inappropriate content or post in SAP Jam, they can easily initiate a process for it to be reviewed by a company administrator by flagging content and posts as inappropriate. This capability is configured by the SAP Jam company administrator, with two different thresholds set for spam and abuse. When group activity has been tagged as spam or abuse a number of times that equals these thresholds, the content or feed posts are removed from view. Notifications are sent to the company administrator to let them know there is inappropriate content requiring their review. This feature requires the use of Content Administration.

Monitor data usage by user and by group with storage reporting

Effectively leverage your SAP Jam deployment by understanding how SAP Jam data storage is being used at your company. There are new reports for company administrators that provide monitoring for storage consumption, including how much storage is being consumed by group and by user. In addition, notifications are sent to company administrators when they are at 80% and 100% of their storage allocation. New reports also help administrators identify which groups have not had any activity in a long while, allowing them to free up storage by either deleting or archiving these groups via the new Group Export feature.

Regain data storage space with the ability to export groups

When company administrators need to free up storage in their SAP Jam instance, they can now export these groups to free up storage. Once a company administrator identifies groups that are consuming a lot of storage which are no longer being used, the export feature preserves the state of the group at export time. This allows companies to remain compliant with various rules and laws concerning data retention.

This feature is only available to company administrators, although it is exposed in the SAP Jam user interface via the Group Admin menu within each group. To enable this option in Group Admin menus, the company administrator must first turn on Content Administration mode, which ensures that such activity is thoroughly monitored and reported in the activity logs.

We hope you enjoy the new features and enhancements to SAP Jam with this release. To stay up to date with all the latest happenings for SAP Jam and other SAP Social Software products, please follow us on Twitter @SAPsocial.

IDC expects worldwide enterprise social software applications revenue
to grow from $0.8 billion in 2011 to $4.5 billion in 2016,
representing an impressive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 42.4%. 
– IDC Press Release – June 2012
                         

The Customer Go-to-Market Imperative
Transforming Silos to Social Business and Community Building

Increasing revenues, profits, value, and growth depends on collaboration with customers at the center of an organization’s support system.

Silos impact performance when geographic, business unit, and functional boundaries impact sales and the delivery of products, solutions, and services.
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Cross-teams often unintentionally work on their own areas successfully but are unable to connect to the bigger picture. These roles can include senior executives, thought leaders, sales, marketing, services, product management, finance, operations, engineering, R&D, and related experts.

The solution is both simple and complex: creating a combination of "private" and "public" social business community hubs where the "sum is greater then the parts" is essential to innovative organizations.

SAP Jam is an ideal platform to anchor this approach around business processes. Jam can
stand on its own and/or integrate with enterprise applications such as SharePoint, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) which includes sales, marketing, and customer care as well as Human Capital Management (HCM). 

So what are the benefits?

• Revenues – Equipping front-line sales teams with the most current information to drive pipeline and innovation with customers and prospects
• Customer Collaboration – Enabling private communities which facilitates improved communications with customers, sales teams, and multiple aligned business units
• Productivity – Saving time in finding information in one location vs. disparate (or non-existent) locations with an eye on benchmarking faster access to knowledge 
• Communications/Collaboration – Developing organizational working relationships and content sharing by way of blogs, discussions, videos, and better access to experts
• Ramp-up – Improving on-boarding of new and current knowledge workers to help reduce training costs
• Business process – Mapping out the respective use case requirements such as customer collaboration, sales, marketing, and the essentials of customer service

For today’s business and technology leaders, it is critical to recognize the compelling business issues, priorities, and market conditions which impact both the organization at hand and customers’ buying decisions. 

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Providing a central approach in a SAP Jam hub is far more effective then going at it in a disparate misaligned way.

The factors to consider in developing an enterprise social network for a respective group or audience includes: strategic priorities, market conditions, end-to-end processes, product/solution/industry requirements, global/regional/country communication and language support, governance, cross-teaming, business and technology acumen, information architecture, HTML, program management and the discipline to sustain the effort. 

Often community hubs fail because the business and community owner(s) lack "vision" and "leadership" and only have a sub-set of the required skill sets, limited experience, and a narrow vs. a big picture view. When there is an over emphasis in the technology and a lack of high quality, sustained tactical delivery around specific work practices (“use cases”), the desired results will fall short. It’s important that a core team of responsible workers blend their skills (i.e. advanced, intermediate, beginner), time, and focus with co-team members or else the community can easily fall apart.   

Success requires strong listening skills and the ability to build cross-teams relationships (representing multiple cultures) with an understanding of their charter, goals, objectives, and key performance indicators (KPIs). Overall social business community hubs must address a specific purpose and show value where workers want to “opt-in.”

In our global team workshops we often zero in on 4 important considerations:

1. Access – Do the right stakeholders have administrative and participant access?
2. Content – Are all the right content contributors on board to contribute regularly?
3. Communications – How are you creating awareness for the community?
4. Collaboration – Are the stakeholders encouraged to post and see what’s new?

Social business is very much about change management. People are stuck in their ways! Habits are formed around e-mail and ad-hoc communications. It’s easier to keep things status-quo.

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The challenge for leaders is to rise above the clutter and recognize that a “whole” solution approach is far better then a disparate one. Leaders who realize this vision can positively impact organizational change, support new innovations, accelerate revenues, and provide a better customer experience.

The end result is filling gaps, moving the organization forward as well as partnering to ensure transformation takes place around customer ("outside looking in") and company ("inside looking out") goals and objectives.

Next steps include…

#1: SHARE INSIGHTS: “Birds of feature” who share in this approach should exchange ideas on best practices, case studies, tools, and resources required to help organizations go from ordinary to extraordinary.

#2: EQUIP: Understand the critical importance of equipping the sales team and customers on a daily basis!

#3: INVESTIGATE: Learn more about SAP Jam based on what it provides today and the investments planned over the next 1 to 3 years as an integral part of the SAP and SuccessFactors' roadmap. Take advantage of the free trial.

#4: EMPOWER: Find out how executives, experts and content contributors provide the essential source of information and collaboration with customers and how an enterprise social business strategy on large scale can support one economic decision maker at a time.

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About the author:

Richard D. Blumberg, President, World Sales Solutions, LLC, (WSS) (www.WorldSalesSolutions.com) provides 25+ years of thought leadership on a variety of "View from the Top" strategies including: Enterprise Social Business, Go-to-Market Strategies, Business Development, Talent Development, and Community Building.  WSS is a long-time supporter of the SAP Community Network and the SAP Ecosystem. 

Prior Blog:
View from the Top: Bill McDermott shares his success secrets at a #fireside chat!

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Es gehört zum Selbstverständnis vieler Manager und IT Entscheidungsträger nach Wegen zu suchen, ihre Geschäftsabläufe dahingehend zu optimieren, dass sie ein optimales Arbeitsumfeld bieten. Im hier und jetzt, aber auch im Hinblick auf die zukunftsgerichteten Herausforderungen des Unternehmens, daher gewinnen Enterprise 2.0 Konzepte immer mehr an Bedeutung. Vor allem kundenorientierte Geschäftsbereiche, wie beispielsweise Vertrieb und Marketing, agierten - aufgrund größerer Bereitschaft aber auch Notwendigkeit zur Veränderung - als wichtige Innovationstreiber für entsprechende Konzepte. Von grundlegender Bedeutung sind die Zusammenarbeit innerhalb des Unternehmens und eine verbesserte Kommunikation in und zwischen Teams sowie eine Steigerung der Mitarbeitereffizienz. Aus diesem Grund wird Kollaborations-Software heutzutage in einem Großteil der Unternehmen eingesetzt und eng in Verbindung mit Enterprise 2.0 gebracht.

In der Tat erleben wir dieser Tage einen neuen Boom relevanter Konzepte. Dies wurde kürzlich sehr deutlich auf der Cebit 2013 in Hannover spürbar (siehe Keynote von Sameer Patel, Global VP Enterprise Social Software, SAP) und auch der anstehende Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT in Paris widmet sich intensiv verwandten Trends und Herausforderungen im Unternehmen.

Das E-Mail-Paradox

Da E-Mails inzwischen als zentrales Kommunikationsmittel zum Austausch von Informationen dienen, müssen viele Unternehmen und ihre Mitarbeiter eine sich aus dem Informations- und Kommunikationsüberfluss ergebende immense Arbeitslast bewältigen. Paradoxerweise kann dieser rege Austausch per E-Mail sich negativ auf die Arbeitseffektivität auswirken, insbesondere in großen Teams und Unternehmen, deren Teammitglieder sich möglicherweise nicht kennen. Heutzutage sind Aussagen wie „Können Sie mir die eine Präsentation bitte nochmal schicken? Die, die wir für die Besprechung unseres letzten Team-Meetings benutzt haben?“ an der Tagesordnung.

Die Evolution von Social

Das immense Wachstum und die Verbreitung der sozialen Technologien auf der Konsumentenseite haben den Innovationsdruck in den letzten Jahren deutlich gesteigert. Zahlreiche Firmen haben in der Hoffnung, ein Wunder für die Organisation zu vollbringen und das E-Mail-Chaos zu lösen, in soziale Technologien für Unternehmen investiert. Die Strategie, die Masse an E-Mails im Unternehmen zu reduzieren, gewinnt an Popularität und hat eine Reihe herausragender Ideen und Projekte hervorgebracht, wie z. B. das globale Professional-Services-Unternehmen Atos (siehe Link).

Es wäre jedoch falsch anzunehmen, das Wertversprechen sozialer Netzwerke für Unternehmen bestünde darin, E-Mails, Intranet oder Unternehmensanwendungen überflüssig zu machen. Das Problem kollaborativer Technologien zeigt sich vielmehr in der Erkenntnis vieler Unternehmen, dass es zu Informationssilos kommen kann, weil viele der vorhandenen Tools nicht mit den übrigen Unternehmenssystemen verbunden sind, beispielsweise mit Transaktions- oder CRM-Systemen.

Solche herkömmlichen Unternehmenssysteme sind ideal für definierte Prozesse, da sie auf eine bestimmte Gruppe von Anwendern zugeschnitten sind, d. h. auf diejenigen, die für den Prozess zuständig sind. Sie sind jedoch nicht dazu imstande, die Anforderungen einer wesentlich größeren Gruppe von Menschen zu erfüllen, die einen Prozess beeinflussen oder von ihm betroffen sind. Geschäftsanwendungen stoßen in dieser Hinsicht immer wieder an ihre natürlichen Grenzen: Wie lassen sich informelle oder soziale Aktivitäten unterstützen, die einen wesentlichen Teil der Geschäftsereignisse darstellen? Herkömmliche Unternehmensanwendungen unterstützen derartige Ad-hoc-, flexible Kooperationsszenarien nur unzureichend.

Werden soziale Lösungen eingesetzt, die nicht mit der Prozessebene verknüpft sind, funktionieren sie bestenfalls als reine Kommunikationsmittel und machen Outlook Konkurrenz, anstatt Menschen bei ihren Unternehmensaktivitäten zu unterstützen und damit den Weg für eine erfolgreiche Zusammenarbeit zu ebnen.

Zurzeit entsteht eine neue Generation von Technologien, die es ermöglichen, die isolierten Kommunikations- und Kollaborationsprozesse zurück in den eigentlichen Geschäftsprozess zu integrieren. Als Marktführer im Bereich Unternehmensanwendungen hat man sich bei SAP dem Ziel verschrieben, Unternehmen im Bereich der Zusammenarbeit über Social Software entscheidende Wettbewerbsvorteile zu verschaffen.

SAP Jam

Die Social Software-Plattform SAP Jam adressiert den Wunsch vieler Unternehmen, dass sich soziale Technologien eng an der Arbeitsweise und den Aktivitäten der Menschen im Unternehmen orientiert; unabhängig vom Aufenthaltsort (via Mobilgerät, in der sozialen Plattform oder der entsprechenden Geschäftsanwendungen) und ihren Vorstellungen darüber entsprechen, wie sich Mitarbeiterproduktivität und Geschäftsergebnisse durch bessere Zusammenarbeit verbessern lassen. Mit SAP Jam haben wir diese Vision Wirklichkeit werden lassen, denn SAP Jam kann durch die Integration mit transaktionalen SAP-Systemen auch Teil der geschäftskritischen Prozesse in Ihrem Unternehmen werden, sodass Menschen auf der Grundlage Ihrer Tätigkeit oder des Ziels nun enger und produktiver miteinander zusammenarbeiten. Dies bietet Unternehmen die Möglichkeit  über und unter dem Strich Vorteile realisieren zu können.

Ich werde Ihnen dies anhand eines Szenarios für CRM veranschaulichen, denn wie bereits angedeutet stellen kundenorientierte Prozesse und entsprechende Mitarbeitertätigkeiten im Unternehmen ein ideales Social-Collaboration-Konzept dar:

Stellen Sie sich den typischen Prozess einer Marketingkampagne eines Unternehmens vor. Der Marketingmanager arbeitet zusammen mit den Teammitgliedern der Marketingabteilung, den Stakeholdern und einer externen Marketingagentur, die die Entwicklung der Kampagne unterstützt, an einer Kampagne eines der Produkte des Unternehmens.

Im vorliegenden Szenario ist die Mitarbeiterproduktivität gefährdet, da die sozialen Interaktionen nur unzureichend durch die IT unterstützt werden. Nur ein Teil der Prozessaktivitäten (z. B. Entwicklung der Kampagne und Budgetgenehmigung) erfolgt in Unternehmensanwendungen wie CRM-Systemen; der Großteil der Kommunikation findet jedoch außerhalb der CRM-Anwendung auf Wegen statt, die vom jeweiligen Geschäftsprozess isoliert sind.

Vor dem Hintergrund der isolierten Schritte innerhalb des Prozesses sind individuelles Wissen und der Kontext der zugehörigen Aktionen und Diskussionen zum Geschäftsprozess von entscheidender Bedeutung für die erfolgreiche Umsetzung der Kampagne, doch diese Aspekte werden in keinem System erfasst. Denken Sie nur an all die Informationen, die dieses Projekt zum Erfolg führen oder sein Scheitern bewirken können. Und dennoch fehlen sie in den für den Prozess genutzten Systemen gänzlich oder sind kaum auffindbar. Hinzu kommt, dass Fragen aufkommen, auf die im Laufe des Prozesses Antworten gefunden werden müssen:

• Wen sollten wir bei der Planung der Kampagne hinzuziehen?
• Wer kann mich durch sein Fachwissen unterstützen? Wen muss ich lediglich informieren?
• Wen kann ich um Rat bitten? Welche externe Agentur ist hierfür beispielsweise am besten geeignet?
• Wo kann ich die Besprechungsprotokolle des letzten Meetings finden?
• …

Diese Liste ist schier unendlich – und hier setzt Social Software an, deren intelligente Funktionen einen enormen Mehrwert für Unternehmen schaffen können.

So bringt SAP Jam Ordnung in das typische Chaos, das mitunter dann entsteht, wenn Sie Personen innerhalb und außerhalb des Unternehmens zur Unterstützung kooperativer Aufgaben hinzuziehen – und auf diese Weise funktioniert heutzutage nun mal ein Großteil der CRM-Abläufe. Dank SAP Jam können Menschen und Teams im gesamten Unternehmen und in dessen Kunden- und Partnernetz auf einfache Weise miteinander in Verbindung treten. Die soziale Plattform lässt Sie Informationen und Videonachrichten mit dem Team austauschen, sodass sämtliche Beteiligten hinsichtlich der Feed-Updates und Teamaufgaben stets auf demselben Stand sind. SAP Jam stellt Tools für Entscheidungsprozesse bereit, mit denen sich u. a. durch die Planung von Agendas, die Zuweisung von Zuständigkeiten und den Austausch von Ideen oder Best Practices Ordnung in den sozialen Aktivitäten schaffen lässt.

Vor allem aber ermöglicht SAP durch die Integration mit Unternehmensanwendungen, einschließlich CRM- und Customer-Experience-bezogener Lösungen, die Zusammenarbeit genau dort, wo die Menschen arbeiten. Unterbrechungen im Prozess gehören dank dieser revolutionären Lösung der Vergangenheit an. Im Gegensatz zu herkömmlichen Kooperationsumgebungen stellt SAP Jam einen umfassenden Kontext aus dem betreffenden Geschäftsprozess bereit. So werden z. B. Kontakte aus der jeweiligen CRM-Aktivität automatisch eingeladen oder Anlagen für die entsprechende Gruppe direkt aus CRM übernommen. Auf diese Weise erleichtern Sie allen Beteiligten die Arbeit und schaffen ein besseres Verständnis der gemeinsamen Zusammenarbeit.

Darüber hinaus bietet SAP Jam einzigartige Funktionen, die das gebündelte Wissen innerhalb Ihres Unternehmens nutzbar machen. Mit SAP Jam entdecken Sie mithilfe von Feed-Updates und Empfehlungen Personen, Inhalte, Gruppen, Daten und Aufgaben. Und Sie können in SAP Jam Filter und Tags für die Suche nach relevanten Inhalten oder Funktionen einsetzen.

Dank der Social-Collaboration-Technologien stehen Ihnen also bisher ungeahnte Möglichkeiten für die Förderung von kooperativen Arbeitsweisen zur Verfügung – und zwar sowohl für Ihre kundenbezogenen Abläufe als auch für die internen Prozesse in Ihrem gesamten Unternehmen.

Niclas Otte (@ottenic) – Senior Director Social Software, SAP AG

Social and business networks remain a key pillar in transforming enterprise software beyond cloud, mobile and “Big Data.” Social is becoming an important enabler for enterprises, bridging relationships by enhancing information exchange and improving productivity. In addition, business networks are gaining traction, with networked supply chains becoming a critical part of B2B collaboration.

Key trends in 2013 as predicted by analysts:

• Social Collaboration
  • Identity management: Consumerization of IT will expand beyond mobile devices and proliferate into enterprise security. Lines between work identity and non-work identity will blur.  Enterprises will use consumer social networks' (e.g. Google, Facebook) identity management as a foundation for new authentication, with secure communication transcending beyond firewalls
  • Shift from point offerings to suite: Context will play a defining role for social in articulating value. There will be a shift from best-of-breed applications to embedded technologies including use cases in customer service, HCM, e-commerce, sales, and contract management
  • SMBs and social: Analysts predict that SMB retailers will be carving out up to 24% of their IT budget on social media in 2013; social would be leveraged as a bi-directional platform to gather feedback and to provide awareness on new products. Given SMBs’ limited resource pool, many retailers consider the effort behind social data mining to be their greatest concern

• Business networks
  • Analysts predict 10x increase on B2B e-commerce (from 2008 to 2013): Improved process automation, increased forecasting needs,  and real-time business essentially translate to more protocols and data connections
  • Holistic view of supply chain: As service excellence emerges as a key differentiator, supply chain organizations will take a much more holistic view of service and products. Disparate systems (PLM, ERP, SCM etc.) will be interconnected and efforts will be made to leverage scale of supplier relationships, rather than approaching them in silos
  • Community-based clouds: Financial services will leverage community based clouds primarily driven by “Fin-tech” providers. This will be more pronounced in the U.S. due to regulatory concerns and budget constraints

Check out SAP slideshare presentation to learn more about the 2013 trends.

Social collaboration software stands to vastly improve the way that people work when it is used effectively within businesses. Unfortunately, many social initiatives within companies haven’t provided the transformation that is possible because of barriers to adoption, silos of social interaction, and lack of engagement.

Addressing the solutions to these problems that have confronted businesses who have attempted to adopt social software, SAP's Sameer Patel, GM Enterprise Social Software, will be presenting at CeBIT 2013 to demonstrate the benefits that social tools can have for the enterprise when they are part of a proper strategy and implemented in a way that connects to how businesspeople get work done.

Please join us for the following events that are happening at CeBIT 2013, even if you couldn’t make it in person, you can still attend and participate online.

Roundtable: “Empowering Shareconomy – Business Netowrks – Driving Innovation, Collaboration and Value”
March 5^th, 5:00pm – 6:00pm
+ Click here for the live stream

Join Sameer Patel (SAP), Alexander Saric (Ariba), and Achim Oberhauser (Fleurop) as they discuss the benefits of a shareconomy in order to drive innovation, and unlock value through increased collaboration and communication.

• Follow the discussion and ask questions via Twitter channels @SAPCloud and @Ariba

Event: Rethinking work: The next chapter in Social Collaboration
March 6^th, 12:30pm – 1:00pm
+ Click here for the live stream

Join Sameer Patel as he discusses how to use social collaboration to re-energize your workforce and optimize your core business processes with purpose driven collaboration. Learn how to streamline problem solving, execute faster and drive rapid decision making to achieve your core operational and financial performance metrics.

• For further reading on Sameer’s thoughts on social software take a look at this SAP.info article: Filling the Unstructured Gaps
• You can also follow the discussion during the event live via Twitter through @sapinfo and the hashtags: #SAP #CeBIT13 #CGC

TweetChat with Sameer Patel
March 6^th, 1:30pm – 2:00pm

Please join Sameer Patel for a Q&A session during our TweetChat. You can ask questions and discuss his keynote via hashtag #SAPSocial – we hope you join the conversation!

Related CeBIT resources:

• Sharing knowledge increases knowledge

Sharing platforms have already demonstrated their value in innovative companies, enabling staff to exchange information across department boundaries. Read more…

• Technology creates open channels

Smart software can process the tremendously large stores of data and circulate them to the addressees. Read more…

• The optimal use of costly resources

The shareconomy is accompanied by a basic change in values that aims to employ resources such as energy and raw materials more efficiently. Read more…

Whether you’re attending in person, or online we are looking forward to your thoughts, comments and questions!

Enterprise 2.0 concepts have been gaining in popularity as IT professionals and decision-makers are looking for ways to transform business operations to best support workspace demands. Customer-oriented line-of-businesses, such as sales and marketing, have been key innovation drivers of related concepts. One hot area is collaboration in the enterprise, i.e. improving communication between and beyond teams, as well as boosting employee productivity. As a result, collaboration technologies can be found in most enterprises today.

The email paradox

Many companies and their employees are experiencing the increasing information and communication workload overload resulting from email being used as the central communication and information sharing hub. Paradoxily, all this email communication can get in the way of getting work done, especially in large teams and organizations where team members may not know each other.  Statements like: “Can you please send me that presentation again? The one we used for discussions of our last team meeting?” are very common today.

Social Technologies

The tremendous growth and proliferation of social technologies in the consumer space has caused another major innovation push over the few last years. Many companies are investing in social technologies for the enterprise with the hope that these would bring some new miracle process into the organization and solve “email chaos.” Undoubtedly, the “kill email” meme is gaining popularity and there are some very prominent statements and projects, such as global Professional Services firm, Atos (see link for details).

However, it would be a mistake to link the value proposition of enterprise social computing with being an email, Intranet or enterprise application “killer”. In fact, the problem with many of the existing social technologies has been that they are not connected to the rest of the corporate systems, such as transactional or CRM systems. Such traditional enterprise systems work well for defined processes, focusing on a specific group of users, i.e. those who “own” the process. However, they do not address the much larger number of people that influence, or are impacted by, a process. Business applications in this way keep running into a natural limitation - how to support the informal or social activities that constitute the majority of what happens in business. As such, ad-hoc, flexible, and collaborative scenarios are less efficiently supported by traditional enterprise applications.

By deploying social solutions that are disconnected from the process world they end up becoming ‘just’ communication tools, competing with Outlook, rather than becoming tools that can support people in their corporate activities, allowing meaningful engagement.

A new generation of Social Collaboration technologies is evolving that reduces these siloed communication and collaborative processes by connecting them back into the business process they are part of. As the market leader of enterprise applications, SAP is committed to enable companies seeking the next wave of competitive differentiation around Social Collaboration.

SAP Jam

The SAP Jam social software platform can become a part of critical processes in your organization through its integrations with transactional SAP systems. We have observed that organizations want social technology that is connected to where people work and how they work – (business applications and mobile devices), so that it aligns with how they expect to boost employee productivity and drive business outcomes. With SAP Jam, we have delivered on this vision of social collaboration so that companies can see both bottom and top line benefits.

SAP’s approach to social software supports the demands of business processes, allowing you to seamlessly connect people with information and applications. I’ll demonstrate this using a social scenario for CRM, which is a perfect match for social collaboration:

Imagine a typical marketing campaign process of a midsize company. The marketing manager is working on a campaign for one of the company’s products together with marketing team members, product stakeholders and the external marketing agency that helps drive the campaign.

In the described scenario, employee productivity is at risk because the social interactions are not optimally supported by IT. Some actions within the process (e.g., setting up the campaign or budget approval) occur in enterprise applications such as CRM systems, but most of the communication happens outside the CRM application in a way that is disconnected from its respective business process.

As a result of the disjointed process, individual knowledge and context of the related actions and discussions around the business process will be critical for successfully driving the campaign forward, but this isn’t captured in any particular system. Think of all the bits and pieces of intelligence that can make this project a success or failure, yet they are missing or difficult to find in the systems that facilitate the process. In addition, you have questions that you need help answering along the way, such as:

•             Who should be pulled into the campaign planning?

•             Who can help me with expertise and who only needs to be informed?

•             Who can I ask for advice? For example,  which external agency is best suited for this?

•             Where can I find the meeting minutes from the last meeting?

•             …

The list goes on and on but that’s exactly the social intelligence portion that makes social software deliver tremendous business value.

This is because SAP Jam can bring order to the typical chaos that can occur when you invite people from inside or outside the company to help out with collaborative tasks or projects – which is just simply the nature of how many CRM operations work these days. SAP Jam enables teams drawn from across an entire organization and its ecosystem, to easily engage with each other as well as with customers and even partners. The social platform allows you to share information or video messages with the team, and keeps everyone on the same page with feed updates and action items. SAP Jam offers out-of-the-box decision-making tools to get the team to commit to a cause, bringing structure to the social activities by planning agendas, assigning responsibilities, and sharing of ideas or best-practices – just to name a few popular use cases.

Most importantly, by integrating into enterprise applications including CRM and Customer Experience related solutions, SAP adds collaboration right where your people work. The revolutionary effect is that you avoid broken processes. Unlike in traditional collaboration environments, SAP Jam adds valuable context from the respective business process, such as automatically invite contacts that are maintained in the respective CRM activity or prepopulate attachments for the respective group coming directly from CRM. In this way employee productivity is now continuous and uninterrupted.

Moreover, SAP Jam provides unique capabilities harnessing the collective genius within your organization. SAP Jam helps you discover, via feed updates and recommendations, people, content, groups, data, or tasks – in addition to use filters, search, and tags to identify and find important information of course.

Therefore, there are significant opportunities to boost social ways of working with modern social collaboration technology - for your customer-oriented operations as well as for your whole company.

Niclas Otte (@ottenic)

This release of SAP Jam focuses on expanding your ability to add social to the way you work by using social interaction for the success of your company. Take a look to see how new capabilities can help you do the following:

Encourage expert mentoring and group collaboration with private folders

• Facilitate expert mentoring using one-on-one spaces
• Work with a smaller group to create content by using shared private folders

Capture collective wisdom and turn ideas into results with forums

• Gain insights from experts with question & answer capabilities
• Foster innovation and continual improvement through idea boards

Streamline your work with document and feed enhancements

• Easily collaborate on creating documents with built-in editing and save time with improvements to file uploads and navigation
• Understand conversations at a glance with feed improvements

For those of you who are developers and power users, we’ve created a way for you to bring social into any application with the new SAP Jam embeddable widget, and quickly add and collaborate around your content with Box Embed in your SAP Jam wiki pages.

If you are an SAP Jam administrator, we’ve added a way for you to quickly resolve administrative issues with super user mode.

Read on to see how you and your company can benefit from the latest release of SAP Jam.

Encourage expert mentoring and group collaboration with private folders

Facilitate expert mentoring using one-on-one spaces

There is tremendous value in mentorship activities—you can learn and improve skills while subject matter experts get to sharpen and polish their own knowledge. Everyone wins.

With new private folders, you can break off into a private area to participate in individual expert mentoring. You can share mentoring-related content, including timelines, goals, documents, and whatever else that is needed for success. For example, in a team group, you can create a private folder for each of your employees to do one-on-one mentoring, and content sharing.

Work with a smaller group to create content by using shared private folders

Create content with a smaller group before it is released to a broader group audience by using shared private folders.  You can work in small teams to edit documents and collaborate on analyses prior to seeking feedback from the larger group.

Ensure that content is ready for release by gathering your team’s feedback before putting it in front of your customers or partners. Using private folders this way helps you deliver high caliber content that will impress your partners and customers so that you can win their trust and loyalty. For example, private folders can be used in external groups in situations where you are interacting with external participants. This means you can work collaboratively on RFP’s, customizing presentations for customer needs, drafting contracts, and numerous other possibilities.

Capture collective wisdom and turn ideas into results

Easily organize the discussions that are happening within an SAP Jam group, and use them to contribute to the success of your business with the new discussion forums. We have modified the discussion feature with this release of SAP Jam, and we are introducing discussion forums and topic boards to improve organization. There are three types of topic content that can be posted in the forums—discussions, questions, and ideas. You can create topic boards, and you have the ability to add discussions, questions, and ideas to them.

For fast access, you’ll be able to go to the discussion forums by using the left-hand group navigation.

Gain insights from experts in your company with question & answer capabilities

Engage the collective knowledge of employees from within and beyond your organization to answer questions that are crucial to your job and the overall health of your company. Let’s say a customer asks a question that your sales team can’t answer—the new question topic introduces discussion posts tailored for submitting questions to a group. Once your sales team has the right answer, they can easily relay it back to the customer and feel confident about its validity.

You and your group administrator can mark questions as answered to indicate that you have found a correct response.

Foster innovation and continual improvement through idea boards

Capture moments of enlightenment that occur in people from around your company by using the new idea forums. Then use those ideas to solve workplace challenges, improve your services, augment products, enhance business processes, and so on—the possibilities are endless! The idea forums make soliciting ideas from a group simple, and getting feedback on submitted ideas from other group members is just as easy. You and other group members can vote ideas up or down, and provide comments to help sort and refine ideas.

After reviewing an idea, group administrators can change its status to give feedback to the idea submitter. Ideas have status indicators to show if they have been reviewed or accepted.

Streamline your work with document and feed enhancements

Easily collaborate on creating documents with built-in editing and save time with new file uploading and navigation

Save time, quickly start the document editing process, and save yourself from desktop clutter by initiating document editing in SAP Jam with the single click of a button.  For those of you who use Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office, there is a new ‘Edit Document’ option which opens the document in Microsoft Office. Once you open the document, saving the document in Microsoft Office uploads a new version to SAP Jam.

Your time is important, so we’ve found ways of allowing you to save time and effectively take action by adding multiple file upload to SAP Jam. You can now also select the destination folder where you want to upload documents, and you’re taken directly to the selected folder after the upload completes.

To allow for others to access the content you provide more easily, we’ve also introduced several navigation enhancements. Static URLs for folders make it easier to view folder content. Sharing folder locations is now as easy as forwarding the URL, and the interface now highlights which folder you are viewing in the group.

It is now significantly easier to find content by using filters in groups to see content by type. The new featured column shows which content is most important. Featuring folders makes them available to the group recommendation tiles.

Understand conversations at a glance with feed improvements

Now you can quickly understand what is happening around your company using SAP Jam without having to hunt for additional information. Conversations, content, and comments are displayed in context of the original update they are associated with when you’re browsing through your SAP Jam feed. When your coworkers add comments or content to a conversation, instead of just adding that update to one’s activity feed, the entire thread of that update is added to your feed. This makes it easier to understand updates at a glance.

For developers and power users…

Bring social into any application with the SAP Jam embeddable widget

Enrich your work experience and remove friction from the way that things get done in your company by adding the new SAP Jam embeddable widget to your work applications. This widget allows you to embed feed updates and group recommendation tiles in the user interfaces of any external application. With this widget, you can add social collaboration to your HCM, CRM, EMA, ERP, or any other application so that you can bind together workflows and business processes by seamlessly interacting between the boundaries of applications and organizations.

Quickly add and collaborate around your content with Box Embed in your SAP Jam wiki pages

With Box Embed, you can now illustrate your point and add depth to interactions by easily bringing in important content for collaboration in SAP Jam.  For those of you who use Box to manage and access your content, you can now embed content folders from Box in your SAP Jam wikis and blogs. Whether you work in human resources, sales, service or marketing, this will help you gain access your content without ever leaving SAP Jam, thereby reducing any friction and having all your content at your fingertips.

Add in Box now to SAP Jam with just one click: Insert the widget in SAP Jam and from there, have all your content available  through Box with the entire Box experience – including commenting, Box Edit, drag-and-drop uploading and more features you love – all within SAP Jam. By helping you find and share content from Box without having to leave SAP Jam, Box will  keep your business aligned and productive.

For SAP Jam administrators…

Ensure content compliance and fix technical issues

For those of you that are SAP Jam administrators, now you can feel confident that you are in control of the content posted within SAP Jam. The new content administration feature allows organization administrators to temporarily go into a ‘super user’ mode that allows them to administer all the private content within their company. Content administrators can search for or browse all the private groups and content. This permits you to address compliance issues, fix technical problems, and work with orphaned data.

We hope you enjoy this release of SAP Jam, and we would like to hear your thoughts. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to let us know by posting in the comments section below.

To take enterprise social software to the next level, SAP is proposing a new approach that integrates social and collaboration technology tightly into business applications.

Enterprise Social Software: Growing, But Facing Adoption Problems

Enterprise social software has been around for around six years, and recent research shows that it continues to be a fast-growing market. According to a recent Forrester Research study, 52% of organizations  will make an investment in enterprise social this year.

But as Dion Hinchcliffe points out, enterprises face much higher adoption “headwinds” for social software than consumers:

The latest research shows that It’s been difficult to get meaningful enterprise social adoption because the applications don’t have a business context. With “non-contextual” social software, the ‘ah-ha’ moment has not happened for a lot of the users, who struggle to understand how social technology impacts the work they do.

For example, Dachis Group’s  Social Business Council carried out a study on the Current State of Social Engagement inside the Large Enterprise and found that :

More than half, 57%, of the survey respondents pegged a mere 10-20% of their eligible workforce as active. There were no members who indicated 100% of their eligible employees were active on the platform.

Executives and vendors have found it hard to justify investments on social software. Unlike business applications such as Customer Relationship Management, there’s no obvious direct link between social software and tangible business benefits. As Mark McDonald of Gartner puts it:

For many executives, social media “appears to be a distraction drawing people away from meaningful work”… “frequently executives ask about the productivity impact of social media and see it as a reason to reinforce control rather than reinvest in collaboration. A social organization means business, so the real question for social media advocates and executives is not ‘to be or not to be social’ but rather ‘What are the right structures for social media in the organization?’”

Today, enterprise social software is often deployed as a silo, separate from where business people do their work. It has been a “white canvas” where proponents have had to “manufacture” the use cases, for example: “a wiki could help you in these six ways and a blog could help you in these three ways” and the business case has had to be built on indirect values.

This lack of alignment with the business has resulted in catch-22 situations: if there isn’t an obvious business use case, then there’s no adoption, and if there’s no adoption, there’s no content being generated, so there’s no real reason for people to go there – and the whole thing breaks down, resulting in “social ghost towns”

Forrester Research also indicates that the biggest barriers to social media adoption are to do with links to the business:

“In environments where social business solutions have been deployed and there have been issues with adoption, survey data demonstrates perceived lack of business value (46%) and lack of integration with workflow and business    
applications (50%) as critical roadblocks”

So what new approaches can be tried to increase the value of social technology in organizations?

SAP Jam – Putting Enterprise Social to Work

Earlier this year, Sameer Patel joined SAP as GM and Global VP Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software. Sameer is a well-known social enterprise analyst and member of the Enterprise Irregulars – “a diverse group of practitioners, consultants, investors, journalists, analysts and full time bloggers who share a common passion - enterprise technology and its application to business in the 21st century”. He explained his reasons for joining in a post on his Pretzel Logic blog.

For the last six months, he has been working with teams from SAP and SuccessFactors on the social strategy of the company. To combat the problems with existing enterprise social software, the strategy is based on four key design principles.

Social Seamlessly Integrated with Work

SAP started from the principle that social software should be something that “shows up when you need it, and it enables and enhances something that you’re already doing”.

Instead of talking about how organizations “have to be a social enterprise,” SAP wanted to look at discrete problems that organizations have today and align social with the core performance metrics that organizations already have. Rather than social success being about “killing email”, it’s about about making what business people do more effective.

To achieve this, SAP brought together a co-innovation council of 20 customers from different industries, who worked together to understand what it means when you say ‘social needs to turn up in the context of work’. The company’s deep experience in applications meant that it was possible to get in touch with the right contacts to think about “day of the life” scenarios for many different roles: sales people, suppliers, HR, finance, etc.

SAP used this feedback to understand where collaboration makes sense in business processes, and what types of collaboration are required – where social and collaboration can and can’t “move the needle”. The company then used this knowledge to embed social into business applications such as customer relationship management, sales force automation, finance applications, and talent management.

Instead of starting with a blank social network, where people don’t know where to start or what to do, users are given social in a business context: collaboration is directly tied to making existing work more effective. It’s an embedded, native experience, so that, for example, somebody who is used to using CRM every day can start from that environment rather than having to switch over to something different.

Forrester outlined the value of this type of collaborative business integration in a recent study, Social Business: Delivering Critical Business Value:

A potential scenario that illustrates this type of integration could involve a salesperson reacting to an opportunity. As information comes into an activity stream from a customer relationship management (CRM) system, it can be critical to activities to drive an opportunity. A high-severity incident with a current client could change the approach to a sales opportunity. A social business layer that is connected to a CRM system could be a perfect mechanism for providing the information to the salesperson in time to drive the right decisions regarding the approach. Additionally, the approach and response to the incident could be refined by collective input from the broader community. Another example would be adding social capabilities to a document-centric collaboration system to allow collective input to content creation and management.

SAP has already integrated SAP Jam into its applications, concentrating on the key areas where collaboration can add value, such as CRM on-premise and on-demand, learning management, and finance on-demand. More applications, including supply chain collaboration inside and outside the organization, and ties to recently-acquired Ariba, will be a focus in 2013.

The Right Social Tools For The Right Situations

So far, most social software has either been “Facebook for the enterprise,” sitting separately from where work is getting done, or “social feeds” inside applications. But the universal answer to every business problem is not always an “inch-deep mile-wide” collaboration tool such as a feed, forum, blog, or wiki.

If a business person has a question that they want to broadcast it to lots of people, these social networking tools provide an excellent solution – for example, if I’m in marketing, and I’m looking for information about a reference customer. But what happens when I receive dozens of replies? I then need to find the two or three people have the best answer, and then I would like to collaborate with them and work to create a document or gather data, make a decision, and rank different possibilities.

These types of collaboration require different “collaborative constructs” that are more adapted to narrower, more work-focused tasks. SAP Jam proposes all the best-of-breed social networking tools that organizations have come to expect from enterprise social software, but also adds a series of more structured collaborative tools, such as dynamic agendas and pro/con tables:

In addition, people can share and annotate documents without having to leave the application or collaboration home screen, including tight integration with Microsoft SharePoint. And there are powerful video tools that help social learning. Anybody can easily capture video, using an iPhone, a webcam, or screen recording, and share it with others in the organization. This is perfect for informal learning situations.

These different tools are then embedded into applications, to provide collaboration along more traditional work processes. This makes it much easier to establish the value of collaboration – instead of talking generically about the ‘value of being a social enterprise’, a VP of sales can see how collaboration can help speed up the lifecycle of onboarding a new sales representative.  Social becomes “just” one of an arsenal of tools making sales more effective.

Finance – perhaps surprisingly – is another area where there are very strong use cases for integrated collaboration. One example is invoice exception handling. Every day in organizations around the world there are invoices that “look strange” – maybe there are data points missing or the organization doesn’t know why the invoice has been received. Finance needs to be able to quickly and easily bring people together to solve the mystery, in an auditable environment. In addition, there are many financial processes such as budgeting that are inherently cross-functional, requiring collaboration with many people across production,  inventory, sales, etc . Using collaborative tools for tasks like this isn’t “social enterprise” as much as just “better finance”.

Here’s a demonstration of SAP Jam embedded into the SAP Financials OnDemand application:

A Seamless Social Experience Across Applications

SAP embeds social collaboration inside applications in a contextual way, but most employees will engage with social across several different applications. So the home page of SAP Jam has been designed as a place to bring together all the employee’s interactions and engagements. If a sales rep has been using collaboration inside CRM, but has also questioned an invoice or an expense report in the Financial application, everything will be shown in one place.

In addition, SAP Jam uses information gathered from different corporate systems to intelligently propose different social interactions and provide default settings – for example, based on job roles, users can be automatically enrolled in particular groups. When you log on to the home page for the first time, users find the typical company feed, but will also see a series of “tiles” with recommendations based on their profile. This could be suggested people to follow, documents to read, training courses to take, etc.

Over time, SAP Jam will learn from what you’ve done and who you are and make more intelligent recommendations.

The social home page becomes somewhere where “users can live” rather than just being another open tab in a browser.

A Social Architecture Available From Everywhere

SAP Jam provides collaborative services whatever an organization's application environment. It is a cloud-based application that integrates tightly with both on-premise and on-demand applications. SAP Jam is designed to be a consistent platform that can outlive any changes to underlying application footprints. There are predefined integrations today for a variety of SAP applications that address all the security and administration requirements that SAP customers rely on. Integration with third-party applications is possible, with a robust API, integration with a variety of single-sign on protocols, etc.

SAP’s Social strategy has three principal layers:

1. Best-of-breed "traditional" enterprise social networking (blogs, wikis, feeds...)
2. Purpose-built social and collaborative solutions, integrated with traditional applications
3. Social media analytics and engagement tools, such as SAP Social Media Analysis

In addition, a dedicated mobile application is currently in development.

Endorsement for SAP’s Work-Oriented Social Approach

SAP’s social and collaborative software aligns with performance objectives organization already have, not just nebulous concepts such as “more sharing” or “more engagement”.

There’s increasing industry consensus that this approach will lead to the next big wave of social software adoption. For example, Dion Hincliffe’s ZDNet article An enterprise-wide vision for social business:

SAP's vision for social… is a view that we're starting to see more and more often as companies begin to think more holistically about the new social channels that surround them and reconciling with the increasingly empty legacy channels they have. In this new view, engagement is the fundamental process that matters most and gets work done. Engagement is also where companies have now realized they need the most improvement. SAP's vision shows that analytics and engagement tools are required to make use of these new channels. Customers, employees, and partners are all connected together in a useful way that ensures business processes are the focus and use social to create an absolute minimum of friction in terms of lack of information or a connection to the necessary resources or people to get any given piece of work done.

Embedding social technologies into work will help get organizations closer to the next "tranformational" business opportunities. Forrester Research puts it this way:

Business as we know it is changing. The next generation of market-leading organizations will digitize their enterprise model with new capabilities enabled by social technologies. But many of today's social technology initiatives fall well short of their transformational potential. Smart business and technology leaders are rethinking business strategy to create a "social business" — moving beyond linear, process-driven organizations to create new, dynamic, networked businesses that focus on customer value. These new organizations are capable of empowering and connecting people in new ways to create value in the marketplace. These social businesses change the competition and set new standards for how companies, governments, and nonprofits deliver value.

More Information

SAP Jam: Secure Social Collaboration Where You Work

SAP Redefines Social for the Enterprise

SAP Jam Overview