Getting Technical

Thomas Jung has been working on some amazing stuff. I love the power of adobe flash interface to produce slick looking graphs. He twittered yesterday that he was making some new screen casts of what is coming soon to the Netweaver Stack. Although my current gig is not running that sort of rig and I twittered back that I wouldn’t likely get near it until 2011, I was interested to see what was going on. Tom kindly sent a preview of the cast and this screen shot is of a flash graphs generated from within Web Dynpro for ABAP.

I am a big fan of visualising these kinds. Flash is a great way to deliver this sort of data as they make data more usable. This kind of innovation is what keeps me excited about what SAP is doing in the market place even though I may not get to work on them for a while.

These screen casts are going to have voice overs attached and appear in the eLearning section of SDN soon.

Bonus Link: If you have not heard, James Governor is running an Adobe SAP Nanoconference on July the 11th Adobe’s new offices in Regent’s Park, London.

What follows is the text stream as I listened to the keynote from Leo Apotheke Co-CEO SAP from his keynote this morning. You can find the webcast here.

World in flatter and faster.

Business networks are the answer.

Business network creates barriers to entry, creates competitive advantage.

Operation excellence is the entry point to the network.

Network will expel the weakest link.

John Clarke – CIO of Nokia

Growth constrained by IT. Profitability constrained by IT

384 million devices last year made by Nokia

Nokia has the world’s best supply chain say AMR.

Moving to be a mobile services company.

Connect you to what matters most

No longer one size fits all – different devices for different markets.

Increase in research to market products that capture the imagine of customers.

4000 active concurrent users on the Nokia system

Global single instance

Near real time visibility of information.

Quick financial closing.

Strict enforcement on policies.

Technology enabler in phones and in network esp SAP

Lesson from Tesco – “Better Simpler Cheeper”

Paul McGarry – CIO EMEA Colgate-Palmolive

$13B sales last year

Long time SAP Customers.

99% of business is on SAP in over 100 Countries.

Streamlining order processing, taking out complexity of the system.

Profitability increased as SAP was rolled out across the business.

Leo

Moving to small and midsize companies (SME)

All in One and ByDesign share key points with the Business Suite.

Supply chain demo by Ian Kimball.

Scenario with a business network

Forecasting or demand demand based production.

This would look great if you were a supply chain organisation.

Business all in One

New pre-configured, pre-tested. All in One by IBM and HP

Selecting the right data to mine is critical BI + BO have the tools.

Broadband, data storage, processing all cheep – bring better analytics to managers without a Phd in Statistics.

Co-Innovation – SAP’s own network.

SAP + RIM

Jeff McDowall from RIM

“The future of enterprise mobility software”

Lot of overlap with RIM and SAP.

Think what blackberry did to email. Trying to now do the same with enterprise software.

Demo-ing with Blackberry Bold 3G “IPhone Killer”

Start with calendar

One click to account.

One hand and two clicks to get to amount.

One click to map with directions.

Log phone call with call notes and updates live to CRM.

Access to data is quick.

Jeff presents Leo a BlackBerry Bold as a gift.

Leo

Enterprise Support

Trying to make it easier for you.

SAP Enterprise Support – only one thing to do call SAP.

I arrived in Berlin a day early so I could catch up with some friends and then meet up with the guys who were in town for the conference for dinner. I had a great lunch with old friends who has a bunch of people round for lunch which was a pleasant way to meet the real people of Berlin. Later that evening we took at drive around the sights and given that is was over 20 years since I was in Berlin last, a few things had changed.

Firstly, and most significantly,  there was no more wall.

This brick line traces the path of the wall and is a ghostly reminder of what once was.

This little knot of tourists was hearing the story of the wall and how approximately 240 or so people where shot in the no mans land between the two walls.

Amazingly, there are one or two watchtowers left and this one was just a stones throw from the new Potsdamer Platz that my intrepid guide knew where to find.

The Potsdamer Platz has been massively redeveloped into a new shopping entertainment centre, which is never complete without a pseudo-Australian restaurant.

Yes it really is called the “Corroboree Australian Bar and Restaurant”. I didn’t dare get any closer but if they are worth their name on the door then they probably serve Crocodile, Emu, Kangaroo, Ox, and a variety of other game, but it is probably more likely they will sell you a steak with Fosters.

Later in the evening I met up with my fellow mentors and bloggers and we headed out for some food.

Sitting at the table was Sig Rinde, Robin Carey, Gregor Wolf, Richard Hirsh, Raja, Dennis Howlett, David Terrar and myself. We were later joined by Oliver Kohl, Eddy DeClercq, Michael Krigsman, Thomas Otter and Phil Wainewright.

It is always a pleasure to sit down with these guys and if markets are conversations then these nights are priceless.

Working both in the worlds of SAP and PHP is very rewarding when you are able to have some influence on one world with the other. Joe Haynes, a basis[1] consultant whom I follow on twitter was asking the other day for recommendations on php frameworks. I immediately jumped in and recommended Zend Framework as I have recently started working with it and am very happy with it. I also pointed him in the direction of Paddy and Matthew who both have excellent information on their blogs. Better I might say than the official quick start from Zend.

Looking forward to hearing as update when your project gets going Joe, especially if you get some SAP integration going.

[1] a basis consultant, if you don’t know the secret technical SAP terms, is the guy who installs and monitors your servers

A quick update from the first totally community organised London Community Day. The general consensus was it was a huge success. A full post will be up on SCN later.

We had about 20 or so there for the day and we had some great sessions on the ICF (Internet Communication Framework), Enterprise Services with .NET, Workflow, Dynamic personalisation and landing pages in Enterprise Portal, a session on the Universal worklist and a few others.

The best part of these days is the networking. It was great to meet new people and catch up with many that I have worked with over the years. If you missed out on this day we are planning others. Watch this space.

You can catch up with some of the happenings at the eventtrack feed. Photos and video will be posted “soon”.

If anyone knows about AVCHD M2TS video files and has some tips get in touch. Though google has a few answers it seems.

Most importantly is the SAP London Community Day which is Saturday the 26 April 2008. If you haven’t signed up you may well be too late.

We have some great people coming and some great talks scheduled. We are going to do our best to make sure the lions share of it is recorded and put up for the SAP Community at large. If you are coming and taking photos or blogging or twittering then use the tag ‘SAPLondonCD08‘. I should plug EventTrack at this point because this is exactly what it is designed for.

The other event is SAPPHIRE Berlin 2008 in Berlin on 19 – 21 May 2008. Every time I see the word SAPPHIRE I really see saPHPire, because I would love to see closer PHP integration. Word on the street is that Zend and SAP are working on it but that is all unsubstantiated rumour. So take it with a grain of salt until is announced.

Last time I want to one of these events I got to ask a question to the CEO, Henning Kagerman. (Now Co-CEO with Léo Apotheker.)

[YouTube = http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GSxc0X3l5lc ]

This time I hope to be able to ask many more probing questions to all sorts of people. In particular, I too would like to know why SAP is cutting R&D spend.

I am also keen to talk with some of the CRM people and learn more about what others are doing with SAP CRM and get some more details about the new version 7.

Many thanks to Mike Prosceno and his team for the invitation. I am looking forward to meeting up with Sig, Dennis and James and also meeting a few people I haven’t yet met.

pass it on…

03-04-08

Let me talk quickly about one of the most awesome poeple in my virtual world.

Craig Cmehil is the community evangelist over at the SAP Developer Network. He is awesome because he is always out there on the cutting edge pushing the community trying new things. Thinking of new ways to make the SAP Developer Community rock. Introducing new services like twitter and kyte and ustream to take the community events to the next level.

Like eventtrack – tracking people in the moment,  like helping out Chris Dalby (Microsoft MVP) with Chinposin – ambient avatars, like creating a twitter clone for inside the firewall. I could go on.

Craig you rock.

So it’s good people day – who are you going to talk up, praise, shout out?

If you just read this, consider yourself tagged.

Ahh April fool’s gotta, love it or hate it as the case may be.

Did you get taken in by the new Fashion TV mashup starring Trinny and Susanna and Dennis Howlett?

or Virgil ?

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/v/gWCQYcPlUng ]

Or Microsoft and Yahoo finally inking a deal?

I was going to write some more about SAP and PHP but thought better of it. That can wait for another day.

Update: This post from Chris Shiflet on PHP Easter Eggs was too good not to pass on. The comments are worth reading too.

As Al twittered last night:

thank God 1-4 is over no more stupid April fools for another year.

It is now (un)Official. The SAP London Community Day has a green light and is now officially on Saturday 26 April 2008 in Egham just on the edge of London.

The official details are all over on the wiki .

The best part is that it is Free* to attend.

What does Free* include?

Free* includes a venue provided by Axon (thanks guys) and tea and coffee.

You will need to get yourself to the venue and food will be at your own cost.

We are thinking of about 10 sessions in two tracks. If there are more than 10 sessions that get registered we will work that out on the day, so get your thinking caps on and come prepare to contribute not just attend.

The whole day is in a spirit of sharing all the good information we have learned on the various SAP projects, networking with others and having fun.

Oh it is not just for ABAP geeks, functional consulants AKA BPX’s and other TLA’s are very welcome too.

More information will be out as it comes to hand.

That wiki page again is here and sign up by adding your name to this list.

And the most important thing the official TAG = “SAPLondonCD08″ add it to your blog posts, flickr photos etc.

Spread the word.

It was another great night out at PHPLondon last night.

Paul James (no relation) did a very interesting talk on RESTful interfaces and there was great discussion on the finer points. The slides from the talk will no doubt be up here very soon. I want to follow up on the references and url’s from the last couple of slides.

My take away from the talk is that an API published on a page like this does not make an interface restful. It needs to obey the 5 laws which you will find on the presentation when it is uploaded or by searching for REST.

I also had a great chat with Rob from IBM Hursley who is working on Project Zero. They are creating a lightweight Ruby/ PHP engine that can call Java like the PHP/Java bridge and similar to Quercus in some ways. This might be a way to 1. get BIRT to play nicely with PHP and 2. Get wordpress playing with SAP

Having said that project zero doesn’t need a server as it is self contained. It doesn’t need to be deployed on a Java Webserver be that Netweaver or Tomcat.

I also caught up with Demian and he was a happy man as his latest project Kindo was techcrunched yesterday and the servers coped with the spike in traffic.

I have played with Kindo and it is a nice way to enter you family tree. It is designed to enter the living family so it can remind you about birthdays etc and prompt you with links to Amazon and flower shops etc.

Although it can enter past family that probably won’t do much for the business case.

I also caught up with some guys I have seen for ages and got some feedback on my SAP presentation I did at short notice in December.

Just remember the Annual London Conference is coming up on 29/02. Remember to register.