How I Got SAP to Open Their Doors and Start an Epidemic!
Editor's Note: The following is a guest post from Craig Cmehil, a technology and community evangelist at SAP.
SAP's developer community and their business process communities signed on board with NewsGator just a few short weeks ago. It's an exciting time for our communities and thanks to NewsGator it's getting even more exciting!
The SAP Developer Network (SDN), SAP's developer community of over a million of our customers, partners and employees joined together to discuss and collaborate around SAP technologies, products and our NetWeaver platform have excelled at generating content, millions of forum posts, thousands of wiki pages, tens of thousands of blog posts, articles, eLearning and more. Parallel to that the Business Process Expert Community (BPX) quickly growing and expanding at astounding speeds is beginning to generate enormous amounts of content of their own including the recently published "Process First", created and collaborated on by the community within a wiki. To top that off recently the addition of the Business Objects Community (BOC) has caused a content explosion that needs to be handled, optimized and sorted to continue to provide our combined 1.4 million and growing user base with the information they need in ways they can consume regardless of where they choose to start their day.
Over the years we've explored various means of getting our content into the hands of those who can most benefit from it, popular but still not main stream our RSS feed activity has seen remarkable growth since we began broad use back in 2006 and our own widget activities have been extremely popular so it seemed a logical choice to research available viral widget options in the market.
It didn't take us a long before we realized that when you want quality, scaleability and extreme flexibility NewsGator was the name we continuously came across. We did at one point even considering using our own considerable resources and building a solution but it was NewsGator's millions of feeds and content that also interested us, not to mention their attention to detail and professionalism!
The team I was put in contact with to help me work through whether or not this was the right solution for us, if it would work with our platform, what about security issues and an seemingly endless number of other questions that their team patiently addressed, answered, found a solution for and kept on in a highly motivated fashion. It was a great experience working with the folks at NewsGator (Craig, Walker, Jeff and others) that I found it hard after we ran out of the technical stuff, the legal stuff and everything else to find a single reason to even hesitate. It was a week or so after we worked through everything that I cornered several of my management folks at one of our events and through dinner, cocktails (an entire evening event) I spoke about the potential use cases for the community, the ROI, the simple value proposition.
The next day I was nothing but smiles as a decision had already been made, money allocated PO's approved and we were ready for contract negotiations.
We've officially completed those negotiations and we've had amazing results from our very first pilot widget, so when the NewsGator team asked if I was interested in sharing a bit of our still very new story I jumped at the chance! Our first pilot widget was associated with our 80 SAP mentors, a program started not so very long ago itself to highlight the top 1% of our SAP ecosystem. Those individuals in our ecosystem that question, critic, support, give feedback, push back and pull forward; these are the folks that we look to in order to ensure we are listening, acting and changing when and where necessary to continue to give our customers the highest quality of product and services possible. We asked several of our Mentors if they would be interested in a small experiment, simply give us their RSS feed for their blogs, we had the ones from within our own environment already and wanted to see how the system worked with a good mixture of content. Several of those we asked agreed and we created a simple widget, not much to look at from design but the content was of course top notch.
The widget we placed on my personal weblog, Craig's Rantings..., and waited to see what would happen. We didn't advertise, simply told one or two community members to see what would happen. Over the course of several weeks we came to have 14 descendants and over 50,000 widget impressions. A solid test, better than I could have hoped for! Now armed with our full team ready to go we have begun to explore together with the NewsGator team the various options available in our "Editor's Desk", extremely user friendly interface giving us total control over our widgets. Our graphic folks are experimenting with the design and layout options and our platform team are busy building in standard and easy ways to add the widgets with little effort to our standard SAP NetWeaver Portal which is the backbone of all our community sites.
We also tied this to another experiment we have around the Facebook platform and were amazed to see this widget being used by almost 300 users with an average of almost 100 daily! Actually within Facebook we have a group, fan page and a few other things as well, so these feature was a perfect fit.
We've added a couple of more for our tests and have begun to explore the styling options as well.
- SAP mentors - View your widget in the NewsGator gallery
- Community TV - View your widget in the NewsGator gallery
- SAP TechEd - View your widget in the NewsGator gallery
One of our main hopes or wishes behind such a move is to fulfill a request from our own communities, many tell us,
"I login to my computer in the morning and I'm on my Yahoo homepage, why can't I get my SAP updates there as well?"
Our first reaction to this was, "but you can", after talking to more and more of the community members we came to realize that the shear mass of great information within our communities was simply spread across to many different mediums and they didn't want to have to add multiple different input feeds but they rather wanted a collective. We worked out a solution to combine our own feeds together but we felt there was still something simply not there, something that was missing.
NewsGator gave us the answer, we can now give our community the ability to "take the community with them", what they want and how they want it - where ever they want it!
