SAP Community keeps growing and growing and I am super excited for this Welcome Corner as it gives the chance for not only new members but everyone to get to know one another and connect with each other. As my colleague @Katherine_K gives an overall introduction to the Group and what you can expect from it in her blog post, I’d like to take the opportunity to start a discussion about the different locations represented in our global SAP Community. I am interested to read where you are located and where SAP Community is spread around the world. I am from Germany and currently living in Wiesbaden, which is the capital of one of the sixteen German states located in the west. After years of studies and living in different places, my hometown has caught me again with its charm and the closeness to friends and family has won me over. But now I am curious, where are you tuning in from? ... View more

SAP Inside Track Fortaleza will have its fourth edition in Fortaleza (Brazil) on October 26, 2024. Look here in the SAP Community Event Calendar. The event is present in several countries around the world. Its organizers are active members of the SAP Community with the aim of sharing knowledge and strengthening professionals among the participants. The event has more than 15 years of existence in Brazil, having been held in 11 different cities in 28 editions across the country. Learn more about how to hold your SAP Inside Track event in your city through this LINK. Inscription:   Participant: Includes: Access to the event; Access to all the lectures; Candidates can be received to participate as a volunteer of the event; Admissions to the event, here in the Link      Speaker: Take this opportunity to share your knowledge and help us make this event even better. Applications for lectures can be made at this LINK A proposal with the title theme and a synopsis should be sent with the subject SITFor The lecture time is a maximum of 40 minutes. The last day for submitting proposals is  Set  21, 2024. Wait for the contact of our team until Set 30 with confirmation. Online lectures are possible and will be presented during the event week ( 21 Oct to 25 Oct )     Event’s place Hotel Luzeiros Fortaleza Av Beira Mar, 2600 Meireles / CEP 60125 121 Fortaleza – Ceará – Brasil  +55 85 4006.8585 / 4006.8586 On October 26 2024  (Saturday) Agenda 8 am – Reception 9 am to 12 pm – Presentations / lectures 12h to 13:30 – Lunch 14h to 17:30 – Lectures 17:30 to 18:00 – Closing session Lectures Online lectures will be presented in the week of the event ( 21 Oct to 25 Oct ) Presential lectures will be presented in the event ( 26 Oct ) Applications for all lectures can be made at this LINK   Organization Team Manuel Robalinho ( @MRobalinho ) Amanda Almeida Mauricio Studart  Jonys Arcanjo  Josieudes Claudio ( @josieudesclaudio )  Alexandre Faraco Joelson Matias ( @joelsonmatias )   ... View more

Hi everyone, I wish to write an SAP Blog. I am facing issue with getting started. I have completed the required training and steps however i am still facing the issue. Request to kindly help ! Regards ... View more

Find out in this post what an SAP Inside Track is and get some guidance to organize one. ... View more

We are excited to share this group with all SAP Community members. You are most welcome to this friendly space where introductions happen, connections are made, and lively discussions take place! ​ ... View more

Overview In this post I will provide insights on why and how to write on the SAP Blog to share our knowledge with the SAP consultant and customer community. SAP employees can watch this 30 minutes presentation on Sharing Knowledge Across Platforms here.   Why ? (credit Peter Sass for the SAP Services newsletter) SAP Blog posts can grow out of a specific customer experience when a particularly knotty problem is solved. The technical depth of the solutions published in the Community blogs are often the result of hours of work and research to find alternate solutions (aka. workarounds) where the customer’s requirements present a challenge for configurable cloud solutions. It’s easy to forget an elegant solution to a problem. Sharing the solution preserves and propagates the answer for future encounters and makes the answer repeatable. Taking the time to write up the solution and share it empowers other consultants who can use the knowledge to solve similar issues for their clients. Customers learn directly, as well. Customers appreciate consultants who can respond and solve complex issues quickly. The Community is a resource to facilitate that and holds solutions to life’s persistent questions. Or at least our customer’s persistent implementation questions. Most of us want to deliver the best way to manage an implementation question—to develop the solution that work all the time. When we take the additional time to iterate, test, perfect and document the solution, it builds our credibility. It only makes sense to share it. My personal driver is to never forget something. I want to make sure I know everything there is to know about a feature I've struggled with in the past when I walk into customer meetings.     How ? Doing it while it's fresh on our mind We should try not to push out the blog post by a few days because we will likely lose motivation to do it. It is key to write or make recordings while we remember exactly how  we built the new design. Challenging the status quo When unsure what to write about we can try to remember things that have irritated us on previous implementations, for example things we've always been told are not doable. Building the test cases in our demo environment (it is of course prohibited to use any customer data or environments for public posts) to try to find creative workarounds will be very time consuming (sometimes entire days or evenings) but the feeling of accomplishment afterwards if we succeed will be very nice. In case the test case requires some inputs from a different module where our expertise is minimal, we should not hesitate to reach out to fellow consultants who are experts in that field to get started faster and with more confidence. Structuring the writing We should remember the important tip from the blogging tutorial to use "we" more than "you" when writing posts to make readers feel more included in our demonstration. Finding the right writing structure and sticking to it is a great way to get started quickly. In my case I like to use the following categories : Overview --> Reason for this topic --> Problem --> Conclusion of the example --> Solution. I keep it in my OneNotes (as well as my ideas for next topics) and simply copy paste it before writing the content inside new blog posts. Deciding which support is best to communicate We can use video recordings when the issue is too complex to be explained with text and screenshots (to make screen recordings we can launch a Webex, Zoom or Teams meeting for ourselves only and download the recording mp4 afterwards OR we can use softwares such as SnagIt) Unfortunately the SAP Blog doesn't provide the ability to upload video recordings directly in blog posts (only pictures can be uploaded directly) but we can upload the recording as "unlisted" on a private channel on video platform such a YouTube and then embed it in our blog post. SAP employees can use video.sap.com to upload their recordings as well but videos uploaded there cannot be embedded to SAP Blog posts like YouTube videos. Always taking a second look a few hours after posting In my case I always find things to edit when I read my posts after a break from my screen. Sharing the post in the community Once our post is live we can share the link with fellow experts or on professional social medias. We can also insert a link to our SAP Blog profile in our email signature, for example :         -- All the best, Xavier       (If you found this blog useful please consider giving it a Like) ... View more

For some of us the SAP Community started off way back in 2003/2004 as the SAP Developer Network (SDN). Later after the Business Objects Community and others merged together it became the SAP Community Network (SCN) - then in 2016 it simply became the SAP Community. I've personally seen a lot of changes to the environment over all these years but one thing has always remained constant - this is a place where you can come to ask questions, meet others and exchange knowledge. Over the years we've had things like "Blog it Forward" that let people introduce themselves to each other. We've also had over the years forum threads and things like that to say hello. We've even created some tutorials to help new comers as well as those like myself take more advantage of the community. Have you taken these 4 tutorials? Tour the SAP Community, Explore the various features of SAP Community, familiarize yourself with community guidelines, discover how to get the most out of your membership, and earn the Tour the Community badge. Ask and Answer Questions on SAP Community, Want to ask questions on SAP Community, but not sure how to start? This tutorial will help you get to know the Questions and Answers section, processes and guidelines, so you can more easily gain and share knowledge. Writing and Publishing Blog Posts on SAP Community, By taking this tutorial, you'll discover how to prepare and manage your blog posts on SAP Community, get tips for better blogging, and learn how to interact with readers. You'll also earn the Blogging Savvy badge. Update and Maintain Your SAP Profile at people.sap.com, By taking this tutorial, you'll explore, set up, and manage the sections of your SAP profile (people.sap.com). You'll also earn the Profile Savvy badge. Would you be willing to introduce yourself to your fellow community members here? Me? Well I started my path into the SAP way back in 2002/2003 when my company told me to learn it so I could install it when I cam back from my project in Germany. I'm sure some noticed the odd bit about that statement. Needless to say I dove in and as luck would have it, SAP had just launched their beta of a Community (SDN) so coming from a web application background I felt at home to go figure things out. @Former Member Was actually one of the first people who helped me to figure things out, my question asking left a lot to be desired as I had no clue about terminology or anything else in the SAP world. Then it was a post by @qmacro about RSS and RFC's that really got me more comfortable and then I just went crazy sharing my experiences and learnings via the blog posts. How I started with SAP Web development… How I Started with SAP Web Development, Cont’d Becoming an SAP Web Developer, Part III Conclusions of the Web Developer integration into SAP… I started a series on BSP and "mini WAS" -  Mini me of WebAS 6.20 BSP / HowTo: Exploring BSP Development and the MiniWAS 6.20 BSP / HowTo: Exploring BSP Development and the MiniWAS 6.20 Part 2 BSP / HowTo: Exploring BSP Development and the MiniWAS 6.20 Part 3a BSP / HowTo: Exploring BSP Development and the MiniWAS 6.20 Part 3b BSP / HowTo: Exploring BSP Development and the MiniWAS 6.20 Part 4a BSP / HowTo: Exploring BSP Development and the MiniWAS 6.20 Part 4b BSP / HowTo: Exploring BSP Development and the MiniWAS 6.20 Part 5 Mini Me of WAS 6.20, the Saga continues…. I even presented at my first SAP TechEd event. BoF, TechEd Munich ’04 – RSS, HTTP and BSP So it's been a crazy start into the SAP world that resulted in me getting a job with SAP, learning that you don't just "install it" 😉 and now I have the pleasure of trying to help others day to day! Start your own thread or reply here, what's your story? Who are you? ... View more

Hello colleague, I created my first blog in Chinese last week, but it's still under review today. https://community.sap.com/t5/blogs/blogworkflowpage/blog-id/shanghaiblog-board/article-id/23 How long will a new Chinese blog be reviewed? Best Regards, Kevin ... View more

My colleague miroll described his process to write blogs in Markdown recently. Since I've decided to blog about my journey with Garden Linux, I've been looking for a way to write my posts in Markdown. There are a few reasons for this: I'm used to write text in markdown, so I think it is more comfortable to do compared to the WordPress editor I'd like an easy way to share my drafts with others On SAP blogs, the only way I know how to share drafts is to 'print' them as pdf which does not give nice formatting, or to copy the draft contents into an email or similar I like having a backup copy of my posts in case a blog post gets lost I've tried a few different approaches, and I've settled on a simple one. I was looking for a way that automates as much as possible and leaves little room for error. I use pandoc to generate the html from my markdown file: pandoc "$file" --from gfm -o "$file".html My first attempt was to copy and paste the generated html into the 'source' view in wordpress. Sadly, this leaves me with bad formatting. What works better is to open the generated html in a browser and copy the formatted text from there. This gives me nice formatting, but it omits all the pictures. And even worse, if I add the pictures in the wordpress editor make changes to my original markdown file, copy the whole html again and paste it into the wordpress editor, I the pictures are gone. I tried to create 'standalone' html files in pandoc which encodes the pictures as base 64 strings, which allows me to copy and paste the whole post including the pictures, but this triggers a Not Safe for Work filter because the base 64 strings contain 'words' that are in the filter list. I found that when I'm creating the pictures in this format  I do get visual indicators for where the pictures need to go in the visual wordpress editor. This is what it looks like in the editor: So I try to copy the generated html late as possible into the visual wordpress editor and then manually add the pictures. To make this easier, I'm sticking to a name schema where the image file names are sorted alphabetically, for example  03-a-foo.png ,  03-b-bar.png  etc. This schema reduces the chance of me messing up which image should go where in the blog post, as I simply add them from top to bottom of the post in order. It does preserve the alt texts of the images, which is nice. I guess it should be possible automate the whole copy-paste thing via an api, but in the limited time I tried to find a solution for this, I did not find a way to do this. Does anyone know a better way to write blog posts in Markdown? I'd be curious to hear about that. ... View more

! Update see below 🙂 ! The problem Writing my most recent blog post I realised that collaborating on writing posts on SAP Blogs is harder than it could be. Even though I wrote the post by myself, I wanted to show drafts to others before actually publishing, to make sure I was writing comprehensible content. Sharing these drafts however was more tedious than I thought it would be as the only feasible option I found was to "print" the draft page as a PDF file and distribute that to my reviewers. Thinking a bit more about the issue I also remembered that when collaborating on a previous blogs post, this was also a challenge since the different parts had to be joined somehow. My solution To tackle the solution I split the problem into two parts: enabling a helpful collaboration on writing a blog and transferring the collaboration results into a published blog on SAP Blogs. Collaboration Pondering about how to enable a helpful a helpful collaboration quickly brought me to the usage of git, a version control system most (if not all) developers already know and use – most of them on a daily basis. Using git as the collaboration platform for this use case was a no brainer in my mind so since it comes with a plethora of helpful tools when collaborating on artefacts – even if those artefacts are not code. When thinking about git as the solution to the collaboration problem a lot of git features come to mind which can be helpful in writing a blog – especially if it's a bit more complicated and maybe requires a few iterations until it is final: version control and branching to test ideas or roll back to previous states traceability to see who made which change (and why if they use meaningful commit messages 😉 ) issue tracking to invite feedback or correction suggestions pull requests to invite open collaboration on the blog content kanban boards to track progress (e.g. if you're working on a series or multiple complicated blogs at the same time) access control on the repository (viewers, contributors, groups, …) … Now that we've established (or rather I decided 😀 ) that git is the way to go we can move on the the topic of bringing it together in an SAP Blog post. If you want to dive further into the topic of git – especially if you're not a programmer – I'd recommend looking into this blog. Transferring results to SAP Blogs I got a little ahead of my self here: Before we can actually transfer our collaboration results we need to create them first. This bears the question how we'll create the blog since things such as formatting, links and code blocks should be recognised by SAP Blogs. After all we don't want to do the work twice 🙂 . Thinking about how to solve this problem I quickly realised that using markdown would be the perfect fit. Markdown is a lightweight markup language to format plain texts and doesn't require any programming experience. Also there are a lot of visual markdown editors meaning you don't even need to know how to write markdown 😉 . The main point is that you can create nicely formatted drafts for your blog which you can collaborate on using the git features. This enables a collaborative workflow similar to what we're (almost) used to now in an environment with e.g. Word and SharePoint. For technical blogs it's an even better fit as a lot of software projects already use markdown pages for readmes or even the whole documentation of their projects. This means that there probably already is a starting point one might want to include in a potential blog post as well as existing knowledge on how to write markdown . Now the only thing left was to actually build the thing and therefore the tech part 🤓. Choosing node.js as the runtime for my transpiler enabled me to build on existing code – namely the marked package on npm which provides a lightweight markdown parser and HTML output. All I had to do was to add the specific SAP Blogs quirks (code markup, heading style, …) and put everything together. The result is ready to be inserted in the text box on the SAP Blogs edit page. Conclusion If you want to write a blog now, you can set up a git repo for your blog, compose it in markdown (or copy the content from your docs 😉 ) and collaborate on it using the git mechanisms. This also makes reviewing much easier as we can also use tools like issues, pull requests and the built in markdown preview (e.g. in GitHub). To publish the blog you run the transpiler, copy its result into the SAP Blogs page and replace any picture you might have in there. Since markdown supports more features than the SAP Blogs editor (e.g. tables), you might even be able to make more appealing blog posts than you were before 🙂 . You can find the result and instructions on its usage on my personal GitHub page. Please feel free to use it for your next blog and give me feedback! If you find something amiss or want to improve / collaborate on this I'm happy to get in contact with you – just use the issue function on GitHub, open a pull request or contact me here. Happy blogging everyone! Updates 01.09.2023 More updates on images: another colleague, gabrielt, contributed to the image part of this project by making it easier to sync your remote and local images! By doing the mapping once you can now reduce the replacement process of images to one initial time! All details can be found in the GitHub readme linked above. 28.08.2023 I updated the mechanism for the images a bit after the insight wilhelmflo gave me with his blog. You can now replace the images in the visual editor instead of having to insert them by yourself. ... View more