Download - Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP by Justus Bross

Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP

Presented by

Justus Broß

Paper written by

J. Broß, M. Quasthoff, J. Zimmermann, S. Mac Niven and C. Meinel

presented at BlogTalk’09 | Jeju, Korea | September 16th

"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea

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The next 20 minutes...

1. Introduction: Social software & weblogs

2. Corporate weblogs – capabilities and challenges□ Forms of deployment□ Success factors, risks and best-practice

3. Case study: Point of View□ Scope, motivation and vision□ Configuration of the standardized□ Design issues□ Fact sheet

4. Suggestions for further research

5. Conclusion

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Social Software & Weblogs

■ Weblogs belong to the group of “social software”: simple, easy-to-use and flexible applications that not just enable but facilitate cooperative gathering of content

■ Consent among all existing social software tools next to weblogs (e.g. Instant Messaging, Wikis, Forums or multimedia-sharing-platforms) is that the surplus value is generated out of collaborative (social) activity.

■ Social software therefore enables affiliation to (social) networks as well as structuring and channeling of attention towards a certain field of interest.

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Numerous areas of application

■ Individual weblogs (diaries)

■ Educational blogs

■ Political blogs

■ More …

■ Corporate blogs:

□ CEO blog

□ PR blog

□ Internal communications tool

□ Crisis blog

□ Branding blogs

□ …

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Hype Cycle (2009)for Emerging Technologies

Sou

rce:

Gart

ner

(Ju

ly 2

00

9)

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Corporate weblog success factors

■ Know what you doing, be honest, be prepared, understand the medium (Long-term monitoring, test & try, media-conformity, back-up and emergency plan)

■ Involvement, topicality, institutional backup, good resource planning (Moderation, content-generation)

■ Fitting company values and culture => blogging policies ( IBM Blogging Policy, Sun Policy on public discourses, Weblogs at Harvard: Terms of use)

■ Who, why and for what or to whom? What are the objectives, goals, milestones, target-group, etc.?

■ Overall fit=> social software strategies

■ Technology: security, scalability, etc.

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What’s wrong here?

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Deployment possibilitiesfor corporate weblogs

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Sou

rces: Z

erfa

ß (2

00

5), D

B R

ese

arch


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Best practice examples

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■ IBM’s “Innovations Jam” (Collaborations blog)

■ “Frostablog” (Product blog)

■ “Openblog” (CEO blog by Xing), similar to ones of:

■ Sun

■ Intel

■ Adobe

■ GM “Fastlane” … and thousands more…

■ Daimler blog (Customer relationship blog)


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Scope, motivation and vision for SAP blog “Point of view”

■ Especially in a time of crisis, generating open dialogue is paramount to managing fear and wild speculation

■ Triggers that had generated an atmosphere of uncertainty:

□ The transition of a new CEO

□ the global economic and financial crisis

□ the first lay-offs in the history of the company

■ “Point of View” shall be

□ the first step toward ubiquitous dialogue throughout the company

□ an approach to facilitating open, transparent dialogue is arguably the single most pivotal enabler of internal cultural transformation at SAP.

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Deployment

Point of View

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Basic requirements

■ Basic (and requested) blogging functionalities have already been provided by WordPress MU:

□ Ready-to-use, open-source (cheap) and easy to handle CMS

□ Post & comment authoring and moderation

□ Permission and role management

□ Handling of multimedia files within postings

□ Generation of permanent URI (so-called permalinks) for posts and comments

□ Generation of separate statistics for readers and moderators.

□ Bi-lingual support (WPMU)

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Configuration of the standardized

■ benefit of using a popular blog-system like WordPress MU is that some customization requirements can be achieved by using systems-extensions such as freely available plug-ins or add-ons.

■ A considerable part of the system and its extensions needed to be configured and adapted to fit SAPs functionality-requirements:

□ Display nested ("threaded") view of comments

□ Highlighting selected comments, e.g. in a dedicated area of the Web site

□ Anonymous voting and ranking (requirement by work council)

□ Enhanced search and browsing functionality for postings, comments, and tag keywords – including portal search

□ Authentication issues (SSO, HTTPS, LDAP)

□ Design issues – fitting Ci/CD requirements of SAP, browser compatibilities, barrier-free-programming, etc.

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Case study: „Point of View“

Single-Sign-On (SSO)

Anonymous rating

functionality

Barrier-free-programming

Bilingual (MU)

Commenting order: Wok council first, employees, „highlighted comments“

Design Issues (CI/CD):

e.g. Browser compatibility

„Highlighted comments“: moderation (back-end)

highly customized

SAP-portal integration

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■ Initially, participation was slow, and employees waited to see how the channel developed.

■ Following critical statements, people felt encouraged to participate.

■ Platform has begun to take on a life of its own with 128 comments for 1st post alone, even 2 months after it was posted.

■ Around 19,000 employees have visited the platform, and it has clocked up 55000 page views.

■ This far exceeds the initial expectations and shows the need for feedback was indeed very present.

■ An increase in access to the blog via tags has also been identified, a trend expected to grow as more content becomes available.

Fact sheet

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Research suggestions

■ Https-support of Wordpress (e.g. embedment of external video

players, authentication issues)

■ Standardized option (plugin) for linking corporate authentication

system to Wordpress backend.

■ Language issues (switching, some plugins only in one language)

■ MU vs. SU: Most plugins are developed only focussing on SU.

WPMU is constantly behind.

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Contact us

Justus Bross, MSc. Int. Business & MBEScientific Assistant & Doctoral Candidate

Hasso-Plattner-Institut | IT Systems Engineering University of PotsdamCampus Griebnitzsee

14482 Potsdam, GermanyTel: +49 (0)331 5509-524Fax: +49 (0)331 5509-325Email: [email protected] Web: www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de

"Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP" presented by Justus Bross (HPI) at BlogTalk'09, Korea In

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The End


Thank You