In my last post about the SAP ecosystem, Mark Yolton mentioned in comments that I neglected to mention the SAP Developer Network (SDN). Part of the reason I didn't discuss it further there is that I felt it deserved a post of its own. I spent most of today walking around the SDN Clubhouse, talking with members in the community and listening to some demos.
As I said earlier, the SAP community - and enterprise developers in general - is a smaller community than, say, Microsoft developers. As such, their goal is deeper, not broader, involvement. It all starts with the enthusiasm of Mark Finnern and Craig Cmehil. Mark said that his challenge initially was trying to build the SDN community. Since then, the community has taken a life of its own and he now describes himself as the "community listener". I'll tell you this much - Mark and Craig's enthusiasm is contagious.
Perhaps the best evidence is Edwin Harpino, an SDN member in Indonesia who earned over 20,000 points in less than year. To put this in perspective, a blog post is worth between 40 and 120 points, and a full article is worth 120 points. This means that he wrote at least 167 long blog posts and articles in about 300 days. As Craig clarified below, most of his contributions actually came from the forums, averaging 2000 points per month where a post is from 2 to 10 points depending on how helpful it is. The photo on the right is from a monitor which plays the top 10 contributors in a loop.
The SDN Clubhouse is very well put together, which
Cote already wrote about in depth. The
areas at the Microsoft PDC were similar, but there is a more intimate tone here (in part because it's smaller, but in part because of the layout). There are very comfortable couches everywhere. They have a Connect section set aside for private meetings in the back. There are, as Cote points out, power strips and network whips everywhere. And free cappuccino and espresso in addition to the standard coffee, tea, and soft drinks.
I think what Cote overhead sums it up best for me: "there's a lot of blog activity...the tone seems to be 'who knew?'".