SAP Business ByDesign – Where Are We Now?

The first time Business ByDesign’s Feature Pack 2.5 was on display was at SAP’s Influencer Summit in Boston December last year. There were many blog posts covering it, for instance this one by Brian Sommer or this one by Michael Krigsman.

After that event there were a couple of questions which were left unanswered so I had a briefing with SAP executive Rainer Zinow (Senior Vice President for SME Strategic Solution Management) to get an update on the latest developments.

Reference customers:

Not much has changed since December.

Business ByDesign still has 100+ customers, and out of these around 50 are live. 50 or more will go live in the next months. All customers are now on Feature Pack 2.0 and 40 partner solutions are already integrated into ByD.

Microsoft Silverlight vs. Adobe AIR:

Adobe is the RIA of choice for larger enterprises for SAP, so why Microsoft’s Silverlight for ByD? 
With Feature Pack 2.5 (scheduled for release later this year), it was clear that ByD wanted to move away from an HTML based architecture. Some of the factors the ByD team looked at before deciding which platform to use were adoption rate, how fast the communities is growing and what is delivered out of the box.


The team felt that Silverlight is moving at a higher pace than Adobe, “Adobe never really took off”, and concluded that Silverlight is the industry leading standard. At least for the time being.


There were a couple of other factors which were important for choosing Silverlight. It had the best desktop feel and because the market recommended Visual Studio/.NET for the SDK, choosing Microsoft’s Silverlight seemed like a natural choice. Another advantage is of course the tight Microsoft Office integration.


It is however important to note that if Silverlight should disappear it would be a trivial piece to move to Adobe AIR.

The SDK:

The ByD SDK will be available in the second part of 2010.

Right now SAP is working with a few selected German partners, but will soon extend it to include a few US partners too. Some, but not all of these, are SAP partners.

Visual Studio was chosen as the development environment for the SDK. It was recommended to SAP and lets them tap into a big community of developers and partners which they wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. SAP is hoping to attract new partners, but this is of course a bet they are making and it remains to be seen whether or not this was a wise move. I just hope SAP isn’t alienating too many of their current SME partners by introducing yet more tools, programming languages and IDEs to deal with.

The standard development language is C#, which is then converted to ABAP at runtime. We ABAP’ers we have a new word to learn: ABAPsl = ABAP scripting language. ABAP syntax and keywords can be used in this version of Visual Studio.

Adobe LiveCycle Designer is used for forms.

The new UI:

I agree with many of the comments I read from the Boston event that the new UI with Feature Pack 2.5 is a bit boring and 90ies looking. With ByD I feel that SAP finally had a chance to break away from SAP standard UI design and do something refreshing and new. Instead we get more of SAP’s usual blue screens.

Partners can and will be invited to reskin ByD.

But SAP will recommend that partners stick to standards and guidelines if they don’t have a reason to deviate from it. That way the end user will find it easier to get used to partner provided applications. There shouldn’t be a difference between an SAP delivered application and a partner delivered application.

My take on SAP’s new “Guidelines for Best-Built Applications”

This is a cross-post from SDN.

The other day I saw that SAP is doing a small push around their new “Best Built Apps” program by releasing a document called “SAP Guidelines for Best-Built Applications”. Many of us have been waiting for such a document for years, so I was happy to see SAP finally release it.

So far the marketing of these guidelines has merely been two blog posts on SDN (here and here). The URL provided in these two posts (http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/bestbuiltapps/), as well as the link to the wiki with the document itself, tells me that the marketing will probably stay on the internet and within the community network.

My first thought was even though the community is a great place to start not all partners are even involved in the community and therefore seems to me as a misplaced effort to reach the masses in terms of these new guidelines. Will these guidelines help me be a better SAP partner? Will they help me be a better customer with more knowledge of how best to build applications within the SAP technology base?

What is in it for the ISVs when they follow these guidelines? For now these are just developer-focused guidance offered to ISVs that want to technically align their solutions with SAP’s direction. The applications built with these guidelines may not be labeled as “best-built applications” or even “best-built” in any way. Instead they may only refer to the use of the guidelines during the development effort (quote from the guidelines):

“We developed our application in accordance with SAP guidelines for best-built applications that integrate with SAP Business Suite.”

Really? So what exactly is the incentive here?
Wouldn’t it make more sense if the ISVs could market their applications as “best-built” apps as a reference to SAP’s “best run” marketing campaigns

As for the usual SME market neglect, SAP once again fails to see the importance, not only of the SME market as a whole, but of it’s SME partners and customers as well in my opinion. The “Best-Built Applications 2009″ document is apparently merely a starting point and these will be expanded to cover more territory in the future. But the guidelines as they are today could easily have been extended to cover All-in-One too for instance. I can see that the integration with Business byDesign or BusinessOne has to be different, but why does that have to mean they cannot be released at the same time?

With the onset of the upcoming SAP TechEd events I’d venture to say that this is just the start and we can probably expect to see a massive launch of this new program during the upcoming Phoenix, Vienna, Shanghai and Bangalore events.

As a SAP Mentor, and as Craig Cmehil likes to refer to me, a “Community Influencer” I’ve decided that this program is too important to be just something added to the community but rather something that needs true marketing efforts and a broad, and I mean very broad reach to ensure that the partners and I mean all partners are informed. I am hoping we will be given the opportunity at the event in Vienna to speak with the head of the SAP Ecosystem and partner groups, Zia Yusuf, about this program and their plans to bring it out to all partners around the world in a speedy and efficient manner as wells our ability as partners to influence the content and future paths of the program.

Update: You can read the press release here.

Panaya Getting It Right

I usually don’t use this space to pimp products, but in this case I have to make an exception. First of all because it is a good story and secondly because it is a great product.

First time I heard about Panaya was at last year’s Demo Jam at SAP TechEd Berlin. We were competitors, which of course made me not like them very much. I remember they had a good product and a good story, we of course had a better product, but not a great story (as well as technical difficulties). We didn’t win.
Since then the name Panaya kept showing up repeatedly, on all channels. In the beginning I only found it annoying because they were still competitors right? But many around me seemed to like them, so at one point they started growing on me instead. Not through annoying ads or unwanted newsletters, but through joining the conversation and through providing the community with (free, really no strings attached) valuable content. The latest being “The Big Book of SAP Upgrades“, where they asked hundreds of SIs for their best upgrade tips and lessons, which then was released as an e-book. Free copy of course.
Finally after seeing a demo of their SAP Upgrade Automation product I was sold.

The product is for release upgrades and support packages and in three short sentences this is what Panaya does:
- Reads your custom SAP code and configuration
- Builds a complete model of your SAP system
- Fully simulates the impact of every system change
The advantage for you by doing that is having a system which will tell you exactly what will not work, how to fix it, it will fix it for you where possible and finally tell you how to test efficiently.

The product itself is cloud based, so you access it through a website. It has three main sections “Overview”, “Planning” and “Realization & Go Live”, each section being fully self explanatory. There is no need for long tutorials or time wasted doing courses.

The Dashboard gives you an overview over the analysis, and from here you can drill down to different layers of your system like transactions, support packages, user exits, roles, reports or even 3rd party components. As a developer what I really liked is the screen which shows the difference between SAP standard code and your own custom code.

The “Planning” and “Realization & Go Live” sections will help you better plan and perform your upgrade project, for instance by giving you an overview over which tasks needs to be performed (sorted in high, medium and low priority), progress highlights and task status. It even comes with a project planning tool.



I won’t be showing every aspect of the product here, if you work with upgrades I highly recommend you schedule a demo or request a trial instead. (a trial will only set you back 20-30 minutes)

It is not often companies grows on me like Panaya has over the last year, hope more companies will look and learn, especially in terms of mastering social media. Congrats on a job well done so far!

The Facebook Vote

The Facebook Site Governance Vote is up, so I thought it was about time I sum up the “Facebook experience” as I have come to call it.
(if you don’t know what I am talking about you can read this)
For more information on the vote, please read Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post.

I have received many questions about why I think my group went viral and why it grew so rapidly, when there were at least two other groups that didn’t.
One very important factor is that I was first. Secondly I had a big portion of luck.

Furthermore, what I had that the other two group administrators didn’t have, was a huge network *outside* of Facebook that I could tap into.
The two other groups were started by Facebook members, using Facebook only to promote their groups. This of course almost limits them to status updates and writing their friends personally. I, on the other hand, had my blog, twitter and Facebook as tools.
Facebook is a walled garden, blogs and twitter aren’t.
I would for instance search for FacebookToS on twitter and send a tweet to everyone who mentioned it encouraging them join my group. This allowed me to reach people whom I didn’t already know, and through the re-tweet mechanism they all forwarded it to their friends in their networks and so on. The social amplifier.

Lastly, I had mainstream media.
The case was picked up from the Norwegian newspapers already on the first day of the campaign. Norway has 1,5 million users on Facebook. On the second night of the campaign the US mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon and the group was mentioned in the morning news on CNN and later on the Situation Room.

Some numbers.
One of my Facebook links on twitter was clicked 1,346 times. I had two more but unfortunately don’t have any stats for these.
Dennis Howlett who blogged about the incident here, here, here and here on 3 different blogs, had 23,000 page views on those posts.
(thank you, Dennis!)
I at the time had 742 followers on twitter, Dennis had 2,923.
I had about 400 friends on Facebook.

Facebook contacted me very early on, letting me know they were on the case, and have kept me in the loop ever since. And it has been a great experience to be part of the process.

So what has actually been going on behind the doors?
Facebook has read every post and discussion on the Bill of Rights / ToS groups, noted the users concerns and questions and tried to answer these with the new documents. I am not sure how much of this I can blog about, so I will just say that Facebook has really done a phenomenal job in making sure everyone’s interests are taken care of. (thank you Barry for the behind-the-scenes work)

The vote ends on April 23, 2009 at 11:59am (PDT) and will be binding if 30% or more of all active users (an active user is someone who has logged in to the site in the past 30 days) vote. Which means somewhere around 70 million users need to vote.
So far 55,179 users have casted their votes.

Statement of Rights and Responsibilites
Response to Comments from users and experts on the Proposed Statement of Rights and Responsibiliteis:
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=183535615300

Statement of Rights and Responsibilities:
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=183538190300

Facebook Principles
Response to Comments from users and experts on the Proposed Facebook Principles:
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=183539710300

Facebook Principles:
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=183540865300

Current Terms:
http://www.facebook.com/terms.php

Facebook Site Governance Page:
http://www.facebook.com/fbsitegovernance

This Is Pretty Ironic

This just made me laugh. I am now blocked from sending messages on Facebook due to what they call an “overuse of the feature”.
Being admin on a 130,000+ member group means receiving loads of messages every day, and I have done my best to answer every single personally.
I guess it was time for me to take a break or something..

“Facebook has determined that you were sending messages at a rate that is likely to be abusive. Please note that these blocks can last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Unfortunately, we cannot lift the block for you.

When you are allowed to resume sending messages, keep in mind that it’s possible to run into a block based on how many messages you send and how fast you send them. It’s also possible to be blocked when either starting a new message thread or replying to a message. Lastly, deleting old messages will not allow you to send more messages. In the future, please proceed with caution to avoid hitting the limit again. Please be aware that further abuse of such features can result in your account being permanently disabled. ”

The Reply From Facebook

Barry Schnitt, a Facebook spokesperson, posted a reply on the “People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)” group, which I think everyone should read.

Hi everyone,

First, I want to apologize for the delay in response. It’s been a long day with lots of interesting and constructive discussions. Second, I want to thank you for your questions and concerns. As Mark expressed in his blog post on Monday, it was never our intention to confuse people or make them uneasy about sharing on Facebook. I also want to be very clear that Facebook does not, nor have we ever, claimed ownership over people’s content. Your content belongs to you.

We do need certain licenses in order to facilitate the sharing of your content through our service. That’s where the Terms of Use come in. The fact that you’ve raised the questions you have is proof that we haven’t done a good job explaining these licenses in the actual language of the document. In fact, as we were working to answer your questions, we realized the new version of the Terms might technically permit some of the hypothetical situations people have offered. I can assure you, however, that these hypotheticals aren’t ones we had in mind when writing the Terms, and that selling user information for profit or using it to advertise Facebook in some way was never part of our original intent. Assurances aren’t enough, though, and we plan to codify this in our revised Terms through simple language that defines Facebook’s rights much more specifically.

In the meantime, we’ve decided to revert to the old Terms as we work to address this. Mark has explained this in more detail in another blog post (http://blog.facebook.com), and we’ve created a group where people can provide input (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=69048030774). We hope you’ll join this group and post comments. We promise to use these comments to help construct a new Terms of Use that reflects the principles around how people share and control their information, and that’s written clearly in language everyone can understand.

I hope you don’t think your participation in this discussion was a waste of time. Honestly, your questions were very helpful to us in arriving at what we believe is the right decision. Also, I think your questions will continue to be useful as we’re crafting a new Terms.

Again, thanks for the fruitful discussion and a special thanks to Anne Kathrine and Julius for setting up this feedback forum. We hope you’ll all join our “Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” group and continue discussing these issues there.

Barry

Why I Started the Facebook TOS Group

Since I started “People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)” group on Facebook two days ago I haven’t had time to sit down and write my take on why I started the group in the first place.

I was on the train on my way to work yesterday when I saw this tweet from Valdis Krebs. I hadn’t read anything about any changes to the TOS up until then and was surprised to see they were changed weeks ago and without anyone noticing.
I have had an ambivalent relationship with Facebook since I signed up (it’s complicated), and in the years I have been there they haven’t done much to make me trust their service or their judgments, so I felt I had to speak up this time.
After some initial research (reading the old and new TOS for instance) I set up the group on Facebook about an hour later.

Personally it wasn’t so much about getting Facebook to change their TOS (at least initially). If you read the old TOS you would have known that they always sucked and probably always will. Ideally they would add the two lines they removed again, edit the wording in some places, explain why they felt they needed to change the Terms of Service and how these changes would affect their users.

For me it was much more a matter of Facebook AGAIN not communicating properly with their members. Is it too much to ask for a notification or an email stating that they have changed their TOS?
Maybe also explain in details why they did it and what benefits the changes would have to their members? Does Facebook actually think every member read their blog? I still have friends (on Facebook) who haven’t heard of RSS feeds or still don’t read any blogs.

So much of what has happened the last two days could have been avoided if they had told us directly what they were up to. Facebook has a track record of not informing their users of changes to the service. Makes me wonder if they learned anything at all from the Beacon episode a while back.

What I am hoping to achieve is for Facebook to realize that talking to your members actually is a good thing and maybe even that the members start to become more aware of what, how and with whom they chose to share their content on the web.

It is about time Facebook starts to regain some trust with their users. To the end user it doesn’t matter if Facebook is committed to OpenID or not, what matters is what happens to their pictures, links and everything else they choose to share with their friends.

(Parts of this post was also posted as a comment on ZDNet.)

Pirate Bay On Trial

The trial in Stockholm, Sweden against The Pirate Bay starts today.

If you are using BitTorrent you should be following this!
50% of all torrents are tracked by The Pirate Bay’s 8 servers, so some of us (me included) worries what will happen if they are forced to shut them down.
You can read more on Torrentfreak.com here.

Makes me wonder if people are aware that BitTorrent can be used to share files which are not necessarily violating any copyright laws?

You can follow the trial on twitter with the hashtag #spectrial:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23spectrial.
There is also a live audio feed from the trial on Bambuser.com (Swedish only).