I’ve seen a few comments on Idea Place, I’ll aim to address all.
First Idea Place is a new channel to provide ideas and feedback to SAP. The challenge we’ve discovered, is that it’s not in person meetings or an online process that will get more ideas into the product… like any product there is simply limited time and resources. And this is a challenge that product managers have.
The goal of Idea Place is to leverage social practices that enable product managers to scale while allowing more customers to have a say on the product direction. Onsite visits, customer meetings, focus groups, single customer submission systems, are time consuming activities for both parties and they only allow the product manager to talk to a select few customers. Now this is not too say, face to face or focus groups are not effective, they always will be but these meetings are much more effective for qualitative activities, where Idea Place strength is more quantitative.
re: any ideas implemented
It will take time, Idea Place is starting out. Ideas can take 1-3 years to get into the product. With that said, WebI had quite a few ideas in 4.0.
https://cw.sdn.sap.com/cw/community/ideas/businessanalytics/sbowebi
click on the delivered tab to see over 40 ideas delivered. I expect to see more come in 2012.
re: accepting ideas for new versions vs existing versions
Idea Place was initially planned for ideas on future releases. However, it is up to the product owner how they wish to manage. We have product owners who are taking ideas on existing releases too. This is not really an Idea Place challenge; fixing items in older versions take away from the ability to deliver new versions and vice-versa. I am open to suggestions on whether we should encourage product owners to take more or less for existing versions. Or perhaps this is better for existing feedback channels???
re: Support using Idea Place as a dumping ground
The problem is simply resources here, again. I would ask if you noticed more of the ideas submitted to Support got through before? Not that I have seen. The challenge with submitting ideas to support is that the ideas are interpreted by someone other than the owner, duplicates are encouraged, no one owns the idea, there is no way to see anyone else’s idea and to get an update you need to call in.
Idea Place does aim to address these issues. By have a public central place, you can submit ideas and see what other ideas people have. Instead of creating duplicates, customers can vote on an idea. Not only does this save the product manager a lot of time trying to review ideas, it also adds a prioritization for them to look at popular ideas. And if you want to see how your idea is progressing, the stage describes what is happening or not happening.
In some capacities, I would even think that ideas submitted through the various channels at SAP could appear on Idea Place. Even to track the status and see whether ideas are being reviewed, that way the product owner doesn’t have to update in multiple places.
Cheers
Kuhan
kmilroy 
(BOB member since 2008-10-24)
I have a question – what determines how Ideas advance from Submitted to Under Review? I have several that I submitted over a year ago that are still in Submitted status.
(BOB member since 2002-08-29)
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(BOB member since 2005-01-06)
It does work !! SAP Idea place does work !!
but was sure of one thing, that I would definitely like to see a more simple and straight forward version number (like many of you here). So gave idea place a shot !
(BOB member since 2003-11-27)