Welcome to the SAP Jam release 1505 overview. This release includes many customer-requested features and enhancements that we are very excited about and hope you will be as well. With this release, we categorized enhancements into the following four main categories that we’ll discuss briefly.
This release has many notable topics we think you’d be interested in, but there’s a lot of smaller features included with this release as well. Please refer to the SAP Jam release notes located in the SAP Jam help center at http://help.sap.com/sapjam to learn about these.
The topics for this overview are:
| Streamlining IT Operations | Exposing and Finding Content | Desktop and Mobile Applications | UI and Usability |
|---|---|---|---|
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Desktop and mobile apps for users
SAP Jam activity hub: An enterprise social network (ESN) aggregator, featuring support for SAP Jam and IBM® Connections
The first item we’ll be describing is a new desktop application for Microsoft® Windows® – the SAP Jam activity hub. The activity hub is a social network aggregator that allows you to view the feed of multiple enterprise social networks that your organization may be using in one place. With the initial launch of the activity hub, we are providing out-of-the-box support for SAP Jam and IBM Connections.
The activity hub is available through customer IT organizations and SAP Jam company administrators. Once your IT department has set up the installer for your specific organization, setup is easy: Just enter your credentials for the respective ESN, accept the “grant access” prompt, and you’re all set.
When using the activity hub, users can see the feed of whatever ESNs they have connected interwoven together, or optionally, selective feeds. You can see the feed activity, reply, comment, and like or unlike, just like you can within SAP Jam normally. You can even view document previews directly within the feed. If you need to do something more advanced, such as reading a document, clicking the activity will take you to the respective ESN for normally handling.
The activity hub is a customer-requested enhancement.
SAP Jam desktop file sync client: Offline file synchronization for on-the-go employees
The second item new in this release is another new desktop application for Microsoft Windows – the SAP Jam desktop file sync client. The file sync client is an offline file synchronizer, bringing similar functionality as popular cloud-based storage services.
Benefits of using the file sync client:
- Employees that are on the road or travel frequently will automatically have the latest version of documents readily available.
- This is a great way to make sure sales people always have the latest sales deck available or to have training videos “pushed” to field service representatives.
- The client makes it easy for group admins to manage their content.
Like the previously mentioned activity hub, users get the file sync client from their IT organization. Once installed, users select which SAP Jam groups they’d like to subscribe to and then choose specific folders in the group. After that, the file sync client starts synchronizing files in the background, copying group content from SAP Jam to your local computer for offline access.
The file sync client respects each group’s security and participation settings for content per the following table:
| Permissions | Members | Admins & Content Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Read only | Not synched | Full sync |
| Limited | Download for viewing, changes not synced | Full sync |
| Full | Full sync | Full sync |
| Private folders | Synched if you are invited to them | Full sync |
This is important to understand because the client is a two-way sync. If a content owner or a group admin makes a change to their document locally, the file will be automatically synced back to the SAP Jam group. When files are synced back to SAP Jam, a feed activity happens, informing users of the new version, just as if the document was uploaded via the SAP Jam web user interface.
The file sync client is also a great way for group admins to manage their content. Within Windows Explorer, the file sync client makes special virtual folders visible in the folder tree. You can quickly and easily navigate to the group, browse the content, add new files, move files, and make folders – just as you can with files on your local computer.
The SAP Jam file sync client is a customer-requested enhancement.
SAP Jam mobile app for Android®
The third new client we’re introducing in this release is the SAP Jam mobile app for Android. The Android app joins the already existing iOS mobile app, allowing employees to enjoy access to their SAP Jam groups and content no matter where they are. As this is the first release of the Android mobile app, we expect there to be a slight delay in getting processed through the Google Play store. Be on the lookout for the new app named “SAP Jam.”
The mobile app brings near-identical functionality to Android mobile phone users as for iOS users – viewing group feeds, overviews, and content; collaborating and sharing information; and more!
The SAP Jam mobile app for Android will be available direct-to-users via the Google Play store. The SAP Jam mobile app for Android is a customer-requested enhancement.
SAP Jam mobile app for iOS: Activate via QR code
A new addition to the SAP Jam mobile app for iOS is the ability to activate the app via a QR code. This makes it very quick and easy for people to start using the mobile app – they just point their phone at their screen and they’re all set.
Exposing and finding content and information
@mention business records: Quickly direct attention to relevant business records in comments
As the collection of systems that SAP Jam integrates with has grown, so has the need for us to come up with a way to make referencing and accessing business information easier. This new enhancement makes it very easy for any user to quickly and easily “@mention” a business record from an integrated system such as SAP CRM or SAP Cloud for Customer.
If you’re a sales rep, and you’re part of an account team for say, our fictional customer National Rivera Mexico, and you want to draw attention to the account record in your SAP Jam Cloud for Customer (C4C) system to another person on the sales team, you simply @mention the National Rivera Mexico account in the feed – just like you would a person.
This makes it easier to notify the right people - and it makes it easy for them to quickly jump to the account information within SAP Jam, because they don’t have to copy and paste URLs into the comments or feed. This also makes sure that comments get directed to the relevant objects and groups within SAP Jam.
Content widget: Content rankings as a filter
With the addition of the content ranking feature of release 1502, we now have new metadata that can be used to filter content widgets: “most rated” and “highest rated.” This allows group admins to quickly and easily point users to the most relevant content within the group automatically, without having to manually edit the page.
Content widgets: Photos and Videos
Video widget
The video widget now allows you to quickly and easily pick a video from your group content – without having to copy and paste the embed code. This is a great time-saver for groups that use lots of videos. This is a customer-requested enhancement.
Photo widget
Remove a photo without deleting the widget by clicking the new “clear video” button (it looks like a trash can) at the top left of the photo widget. Prior to release 1505, you had to delete the widget to change the photo. That’s no longer the case – just press the clear widget button and your widget stays in place, maintaining your overview layout. All you need to do next is pick a new photo.
Additionally, the photo widget has been enhanced to better support smaller images. Previously, if an image was smaller than roughly 50px tall and/or 250px wide, SAP Jam stretched it to fill the widget space. Now you can optionally choose to have the image be center-aligned and white-space padded so the image floats in the middle of the widget. You can do this by clicking the button at the far left of the image hover options (it looks like a square with brackets at the corners). If you want to change it so the image is stretched, just press the button again.
User interface and usability enhancements
Forums: Faster and easier with improved layout
The discussion forums (as well as questions and ideas) have gone through a minor layout change to improve usability and improve overall speed as well as some new features:
- A new “+topic” button has been added to quickly add a new topic
- You can now edit the topic name and type
- Feed activity items for forum posts that included hyperlinks are now clickable
- You can now use @mentions in replies
- A visual change to answers marked as “best answer” – they are pinned to the top of the replies and called out in green
Tasks: User editing
Ever since we first introduced tasks, our customers have asked for the ability to make them editable by someone other than the creator. With this release, the group admin can now set the group permissions for tasks to allow that. Tasks can remain as editable only by the owner, allow anyone to change the status (and only the status), or fully open so that anyone can edit anything about the task. This is a customer-requested enhancement.
Feed widget: Share an update directly from overview pages
If you have a feed widget on your overview page, you’ll discover we’ve made a small but very useful addition at the top of the widget – you can now post a group feed activity directly from within the overview page (feed widget). This way, users don’t have to navigate away from the overview page to post something.
Streamlining IT operations
Two new IT work patterns, designed to work with IT service ticket systems
New in this release are two new work patterns (group templates) for IT users: a service ticket escalation group and an IT project management group. Unlike prior releases, these new work patterns are not pre-activated in SAP Jam and require IT departments to install them. This was done because the IT work patterns are designed to be used with your IT service ticket system.
If you still want to use the new work patterns without integration to your ticket system, you can! Just head over to the SAP Jam developer area in SCN and you can grab the necessary files. Later, when you’re ready, you can integrate your ticket system to SAP Jam to leverage real-time ticket information within your groups, in the same way that our SAP CRM and SAP Cloud for Customer integrations work.
Admin-only kudos
Also new in this release are “admin-only” kudos. These are, as the name implies, only available to company admins. These are located in the same “kudos” area of the SAP Jam company admin configuration area and are simply a new checkbox-option for any kudo.
This option allows companies to have restricted-access badges that only the company admin can provide. This is a customer-requested enhancement.
Company and overview branding
Ever since we introduced overview pages, customers have asked for the ability to customize the look and feel to tailor the look of SAP Jam to their respective brands. With this release, we now provide the ability to customize the colors used in various elements throughout SAP Jam including:
- Global navigation background, font, and hover state
- Left hand navigation background, font, and selected state
- Overview page widget header (only visible if the widget has text in the “title”) background and font
- Keyline (the keyline is the colored line beneath the tabs and above the overview content) and overview tab color
To change colors, a company admin simply needs to go to the branding option in the company admin configuration area and enter the color codes.
Note: We recommend experimenting with branding colors in your test system before changing them in your production/live SAP Jam system.
Privacy and compliance
In this release there are two important privacy and compliance options that were requested by customers:
- Remove the contact info and image of alumni users (people that are no longer employees)
- Hide external user contact info from other external users. External users won’t see the contact info of other externals users, but internal users (people in your company) will still be able to see the contact info for external users. This feature is on by default.
Employee onboarding
New in this release is the ability to include a custom content section in the new employee onboarding “getting started” screens in SAP Jam. The company admin can use the built-in mini editor (it looks like the wiki editor) to include, more or less, anything they want – text, images, and even videos to help new employees along.
Additionally, the tabbed interface to the getting started guide has been replaced with a multi-page selector (at the bottom). This was done to accommodate the next item below.
Admin onboarding
Finally, there’s a new getting started set of screens for new company admins. These appear immediately at the end of the regular employee getting started screens. The admin getting started walks the company admin through various important aspects of being a company admin and provides a checklist of things the admin should (might) want to do in managing their SAP Jam system.
For more information about this release, refer to the various user and admin guides on the SAP help site: http://help.sap.com/sapjam
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