Getting Technical

Darren Hague and I had a odd idea two years ago.

“Why not run an unconference for SAP developers and consultants in London.”

So we did. We have run what has become known as SAP Inside Track in London twice now. On 19 June 2010 we will be giving it its third outing.

This year we tried to mix it up a bit by heading up to the midlands but the venue was proving a little tricky so we have gone back to IBM Southbank. Many thanks to Zoe Slattery for all the logistical assistance with the venue.

So you know the date and the venue, but you also need to know there is a small charge to cover the lunch.

There are several SAP Mentors coming to the event from around Europe and the UK. These guys like to get their hands dirty on real SAP systems. You wont be hearing vaporware or marketing speak from them.

The list of sessions that we have already is impressive. We have James Farrar from the SAP Sustainability Team. James recently presented to the SAP Mentors at SAPPHIRENOW in Frankfurt about the SAP Sustainability report.

Ant Phillips from IBM will be presenting a session on Enterprise Patterns.

Dennis Howlett will be leading a topic on Marketing. We have people from inside SAP and consultants and it is well worth getting down to IBM to listen to a bunch of really smart people talk about SAP and Enterprise Technologies.

The other sessions planned for the day are on the SDN Wiki.

If you are into twitter then follow along with the fun at @SAPInsideTrack.

One final thing to say is that the great people at Keytree have agreed to put some money behind the bar so we can have a drink after the event at one of the local pubs.

WORLD CUP NOTE: I am aware of the England game the night before and Australia and the Netherlands are both playing on Saturday so set your recorder and come along to a great day of information and networking.

So, put your name on the wiki page, pay your tenner for lunch and we will see you there.

[Picture of SAP Inside Track 2009 courtesy of Yojibee]

This week I am in SAPPHIRENOW, Frankfurt. SAPPHIRE is the annual ’sales’ conference of SAP. This is the week where they have pitched their message to the market place.

A lot has changed in the last 100 days at SAP. It was 100 days ago today that Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe took the reigns from Leo Apotheker. In the language yesterday there was a lot that sounded like it was a political administration. The first 100 days has become a symbol of making change quickly and hitting the ground running.

Even just in the first half day of this conference we can see an energy and enthusiasm about SAP people not least from Co-CEO’s themselves. I think when the new Co-CEO’s were announced there was some skepticism whether this arrangement would work. I think it is working and there seems to be a new direction about the company.

Last night there was a reception for press, bloggers and mentors at a local art gallery. It was at this informal gathering that I heard someone say that ‘SAP has got its MOJO back‘. Craig Cmehil conspired with Jen Roach, Head of Global Communications, to introduce Jim Habemann Snabe to the collected SAP Mentors. He was very engaging and explained how well he and Bill are getting on as a working partnership. It was apparent that not only do they get on well but they are able to work together effectively even with a large time difference between their US and European offices.

Even though at this stage in the conference in Frankfurt there has not been too many announcements, it is clear – at least to me and some of my colleagues – that change has come to SAP, that SAP is continuing to innovate and that SAP has turned an important corner.

I am looking forward to the rest of the conference and more announcements today and tomorrow.

Recently I was set up with a system without the correct SAP systems on my ‘logon pad’. This made it a little hard to access the systems I needed but here is the tip.

Use the sapgui.exe application to access the system you need.
Simply (from windows) hit the start button and then ‘Run’ and then type:

sapgui [appserver-domain] [system number]

If you add the switch /WAN it will treat it as a low speed connection.

One of the benefits of this is that it doesn’t start the SAP Logon application which will save you about 20M of memory. The downside is you don’t get the application in your tray that shows all the systems you are logged on to when you right click it.

More information here [SAP Service Marketplace link - credentials required]

It has been a long time coming this year, but I can now confirm that I will be attending TechEd in Vienna.

Vienna - I'll be there.

It will be a flying visit as I fly out  Thursday night so not much time to enjoy the highlights of the city.

So what will TechEd hold for me?

I have planned a few sessions to attend but there will be lots of SAP Mentor meetings , Demo Jam (SAP Entries notwithstanding), Hacker Night, catching up with virtual friends in the flesh and a keynote or two.

I note that Leo Apotheker will not be speaking. That is interesting all by itself.

The wonderful Community Network people have produced these badges and I love this one. “Come See Me Speak”. I know it is meant for people who have official sessions but you could come just to see me speak. I will be talking after all.  See you in Vienna.

Speaking at Vienna (well I am not a mute)

Earlier this year we (a couple of SAP Mentors) put on an Inside Track event in London. As the SAP TechEd series of events is coming around now I am starting to think about what we could do for next year. Here are a few questions for you:

Did you enjoy the event this year?

Would you recommend it to a friend?

What went well?

What could we improve?

Given there is an event in Bonn in the first half of next year would you come to both?

What dates work for you?

What topics would you like to see covered?

Answers in the comments please.

For more information about the SAP Inside Track series of local events follow http://twitter.com/sapinsidetrack/

Note for the lawers amoungst us: SAP Inside Track is a community run event organised by SAP Mentors in various cities around the world. It is not officially endorsed as an official education channel by SAP AG or any of its local subsiduaries. Having said that the people who come to these events know what they are doing and you 1. might learn something and 2. might meet someone. You should come.

Darren Hague and I had a odd idea last year.

“Why not run an unconference for SAP developers and consultants in London.”

SAP Inside Track London 2009

We had both been to SAP Community Days and thought we could pull something off. So we hustled together a venue and a wiki page to handle the signups and sessions.

It was a lot of fun. So much so that this year we are repeating the whole process.

This year we have managed to secure IBM Southbank as a venue. Thanks to a lot of help from Zoe Slattery. 

The date is April 4 and there is a small charge of £10 to cover the lunch. (Signup quickly in March for the early bird rate. In April it will rocket to £15!)

There are several SAP Mentors coming to the event from Europe so it is a great chance to hear from them and particularly the ESME team.

Ant Phillips from IBM will be presenting a session on connecting SAP up with Project Zero, the community version of Websphere sMash. The other sessions planned for the day are on the SDN Wiki.

One of the  sessions is a discussion on certification. This has been a hot topic in the SAP community lately. New Mentor Michael Koch is currently running a survey on how certification relates to contractors. You can complete this survey here and it would be great to see some good results from that survey at the unconference.

You can follow the fun in twitter at @SAPInsideTrack.

One of the great benefits of these days is the networking and conversations with people in trenches.  In credit crunched times such as today these can be even more valuable than official training sessions and (dare I say it) certification.

If you would like to come along to meet the mentors, participate in the sessions, run a session for yourself there is still time to signup.

I was mildly amused to see that open source analyst James Governor has put an SLA on his blogging activity.

In retrospect it is not such a bad thing. So here goes mine:

I will write at least one post a month on anything that mildly relates to SAP, PHP, Eclipse, Usability, Web Applications, HR, CRM, Cycling, Cricket or anything else under the banner of Life the Universe and Everything.

I am also over on twitter.

Thinking about Life, The Universe and Everything – this week is week 42 of the year.

I didn’t expect to take this long to announce the winner of the caption competition. Thanks to all those who took part.

Congratulations to Johan who came up with the winner.  SFLIGHT is the be all and end all. What else would you need? I am sure that the SAP Airline Industry solution is build on the solid foundation of SFLIGHT. (For all of you who don’t know the SFLIGHT is a simple database model that many introductory ABAP courses use as a learning tool.)

I’m convinced now! SFLIGHT is better than their current system.

Thanks for playing along and next time I am sharing aproximate space time coordinates with Johan there’s I’ll get the first round.

The rise and rise of ESME is something I have watched with interest in just the past couple of weeks. At the SAP London Community Day, Darren Hague showed off Scala and Lift and push messaging. It looked pretty cool. A few weeks later he puts this page up on the SDN Wiki and then showed a couple of SAP Mentors the initial progress he had made with Scala.

Well in the last couple of weeks ESME has gone a little nuts. All sorts of guys have come to the party to produce the demo that is below and entered it into Demo Jam – the annual SAP contest to find innovation from within the ecosystem. I think they are the first in the history of the jam to publish their submission video before the competition.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1dPAV8C0Tw]

At last weeks nanomonk there was several of the core team present. Giving demos and explaining the proposition.

My original concern was that what does this add that you can’t get from enterprise instant messaging?

The immediate response on twitter was:

With IM you have to know whom to ask and requires mutual adding to contactlists. #esme works like Twitter #

@njames #esme tag clouds, group concept, integration of different corp. back-ends, etc.  #

So it’s all about getting what you want without having to know where to get it from. It’s about breaking open information silos and sharing information with colleagues to create solutions quicker and get the job done.

I am very much looking forward to what these guys, who I am happy to count as friends, pull together. The thought that in about 5 years time I might be using a ESME like tool is exciting. I am saying 5 years as some of the large enterprisey type clients can be a little slow on the uptake. I would love it to be Q1 09!

For other information about ESME check out the following series of posts:

• Abesh on SDN
• Richard Hirsh on SDN
• Yojibee
• Yojibee taking it to the next level
• Dennis Howlett on SDN
• Dennis Howlett on AccMan
• Hashtags
• Summize (Twitter search)
• Roebot (MindTouch) and again
• Ustream

As always the London PHP meetup last night went off.

I met a whole buncha new people. Some of whom were from bluhalo.com and others were from iBuildings.

Ian Christian presented a great talk on doctrine (rhymes with whine not win apparently but I guess that depends on what school you went to or what country you were born in)

Doctrine is a ORM tool for mapping your classes into databases tables. His presentation went well even with offline google docs!

I later got into all sorts of conversations with the afore mentioned new iBuildings guys and aparently the are an international company now because they are in two countries. Well judging by the nationality of them they are a global company! Other people drifed into the conversation and I mentioned I was a SAP consultant by day and someone (not the iBuildings guys FTR) had decided that SAP was all proprietory and was not into open standards blah blah blah. I tried to press him for evidence for his assertions but none came and someone else conventiently came along to rescue him.

I could go on here about how you could connect with SAP dozens of ways including SOAP, REST, Java, .Net, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby with connectors some official and some open source (how’s Zend Core for SAP coming along guys hint hint ) but if you have decided that SAP is not open then I guess your mind is in a similar state.

A small group of Symfony guys found a table and started doing the symfony thing and I managed to see Ian was getting prepared for the Agavi presentation next month. (Backstory here)

At the end of the evening I saw Marcus giving a one-on-one with someone so I came over to see what was happening and ended up getting a personal tour through simpletest and intro to TDD.

Thanks Marcus.