Thursday, July 31, 2014

What are SAP Streamwork and SuccessFactors JAM?

They both are part of SAP Social Software. They both provide environments for enterprise collaboration between workforce to drive cooperation while sharing data.

SuccessFactors JAM - Is social networking collaboration platform within enterprise from SAP. Basically it is kind of “facebook” type of thing platform for enterprises. It enables collaboration of employees between companies and their partner companies while they all work on joint projects sharing applications, processes etc. Features of the platform span from discussions, notifications, follow-ups, creating (micro/blogging, wiki), and sharing content, organizing, tasking, learning and all it is provided in “feed updates” like user interface. Main goal is to engage workforce and boost their performance. The Jam platform supports mobile devices in large extend. From its competitors point of view we can say that JAM is like Microsoft’s Yammer. Jam got into SAP’s portfolio while they acquire SuccessFactors in 12/2011.

SAP Streamwork – then there was Streamwork. It (was)/is solution homegrown in SAP. We can say that it has broader scope then SuccessFactors JAM due to a lot of integration to SAP’s backend systems like ERP, CRM, SRM, BW. And that’s one of main powers of Streamwork – integration.

So guess what happened during 2012 while SAP was integration SuccessFactors as its daughter company. They integrated both products into one as well. It is called SAP JAM as their platform for social software. The JAM’s underlying platform seems was taken from SuccessFactors while a lot of features from Streamwork were built into it.

PS: SAP started to evaluate SAP Jam platform also for their Massive Open Online Course (MOOS) initiative open.sap.com. The very first course utilizing Jam platform is rapid implementation of Predictive Analytics with SAP HANA.

Useful links:
sapjam.com

Update – 30.12.2015 –
Just updating few more details how SAP started with SAP Streamwork. Initially it was called as collaboration software previously known as 12sprints and/or Constellation. There was also Elements application as next Enterprise 20 tool. All these finally merged into Streamwork. Needless to say that all these initiatives were aiming as competition to Google‘s Wawe. During its development the 12sprint (collaborative platform) was open to users through a public beta. The 12sprint cloud-based service is designed to help teams of internal and external users share information, collect feedback, brainstorm or analyze across the group.

History knows it that Google Wave was shouted down in August 2010. And SAP’s Streamwork was ended on December 1, 2015 but replaced by SAP Jam.

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