A couple of weeks ago at work we decided it would be fun to participate in a relay marathon. 5 boys and 3 girls volunteered.
On Saturday it was time for the race, and we couldn’t have asked for better conditions.
The relay marathon was split into 8 legs, with various lengths: 5,8 – 4,8 – 5,7 – 4,8 – 5,1 – 5,6 – 5,1 – 5,3 km. We actually ran faster than expected, making the carefully planned logistics a big challenge.
In the end we finished 7th (of 90 teams), the time was 3:16:01!
Here is the proof if you don’t believe me:
Considering we are a bunch of geeks, who normally don’t move much during the day (except to the kitchen to grab a snack), it was better than we had thought possible.
If you live in Germany, and are going to the Berlin TechEd in October, then this is how you want to get there.
If anyone is interested in sharing rides, a bus, etc. please comment here so we can figure out how big of a demand there is and then see about the possibilities of organizing something (THIS IS US not SAP – just a bunch of community folks here not a company involved)
Many people have, during the last couple of weeks, asked me about the difference between IM and ESME. There will probably be many more asking, so instead of answering everyone individually, I will explain it here.
Listed, these are the main differences between ESME and IM:
Opt-In Following: Allowing an asynchronous follower/following behavior.
Group Concept: Post different messages to different groups.
Tag Clouds
Integration of different corporation back-ends/SAP integration
To explain the opt-in following concept, I will use a story that happened to me recently.
It demonstrates the power of Twitter and explains (one of the ways) how ESME can be a valuable tool for the enterprise.
I will write more about the other points on the list in the weeks to come.
I was installing LiveCycle ES at work, using a so-called turnkey installation, that turned out to be not-so-turnkey after all. (surprise surprise!)
Because this was a part of Adobe’s prerelease program, finding help was difficult and the forums on the prerelease program site wasn’t exactly like the forums I was used to on SDN. Days went by without any answers, so instead of wasting my time waiting for one, I shared my headaches with my friends on Twitter.
My friends shared that with their friends again, and within a couple of hours I had Adobe employees writing to me on Twitter offering their help.
The next day all problems were solved and I could finish my installation.
Everyone helping me were people I didn’t know, so without Twitter I wouldn’t have known where and how to find them. This approach lets them find me.
Because a service like IM uses a mutual following concept, you would have had to tell every single individual in your contact list about your problem individually and they would have had to do the same with their contacts etc.
With Twitter you write your message only once and it reaches hundreds of people (of course this depends on how many people follow you), and if a friend re-tweets and he has a couple of hundred friends and so on, you can reach thousands of people with only 3-4 messages.
Finding the right person to ask can sometimes be as time consuming, as solving the problem itself can be. This is no different in big organizations.
If you don’t know whom to ask for help solving your problem, finding this person can be a daunting task.
This is where ESME comes into play.
We all know that Thomas Jung has been working on some very cool stuff lately. Nigel James blogged about it not so long ago, and now that TechEd and the awsome SDN Mentor Hands-On Workshop (with Rich Heilman, Dan McWeeney, Thomas Jung and Ed Herrman) is coming nearer, we finally got a sneak peak at the coolness!
Among the new features are:
Full control drag and drop
Sort inside the value help
Arange columns within the value help
Customize the screen while it runs (user customization)
Formatted text editor, in this example for header texts (bold, italic, font-size, list for instance)
Row-repeated output for the output of multiple addresses
Slider to rate, the colour changes while sliding (in this example, to rate the customer)
Pop-ins (in this example on item level of the sales order) This allows you to expand an area without having to navigate to another screen
A new UI element: ICFExecute. To launch arbitrary applications on the desktop.
Flash Islands
I cannot wait to get my hands on this, and I hope the Las Vegas sessions will be made available on SDN.
For those of us, who have worked with the SAP-Adobe integration for a while, these Flex components, which look like native UI elements, will take our work to a new level.
On July 11th it was time for RedMonk/James Governor’s Nanomonk”Adobe meets SAP: Nanoconference” in London. James Ward, Adobes’s Flex/RIA evangelist was in town, so James invited those interested to come and learn more.
The conference started with James (Ward) giving an overview over the state of Adobe’s software development platform.
Adobe is in a transition, moving away from people using tools to create flash content, to people creating software on their platform. Flex has been around for about around five years and started as a way for developers to create flash content. Today that tool is a platform for software development.
There are three critical pieces in this platform:
1. Runtimes
These are the critical core technologies and the software development stack.
Web runtime, Flash player, desktop runtime, AIR and mobile runtime (yes, they are currently working on this!)
2. Tooling
Flex SDK, Flex builder/Eclipse space and many different community tools
3. Integration
How do we actually connect these client-side applications to our backend servers and services?
BlazeDS -> open source product to connect to a Java backend
LiveCycle Data Services
Seen from the SDN community perspective Adobe still plays an active part.
Andre Salazar has recently joined the community, after Mathias Zeller left to work on Genesis.
Adobe is the title-sponsor for the RIA hacker night during this year’s TechEd. (so far it is confirmed for Las Vegas)
The technical integration between SAP and Adobe continues, and worth mentioning is:
BlazeDS/LiveCycle Data Services
Closer integration, into the development tools we already have, for instance with the Flash islands in Web Dynpro.
FLOB, Flex integration into BSP.
Muse; the Flex NetWeaver Business Client. Comment from Thomas Jung: Version 1.0 is available with ERP Enhancement package 2 and higher. Version 2.0 will be used for Business by Design. Version 3.0 will take all the good version 2.0 features and bring them to the core Business Suite as well.
One of Adobe’s tasks a head is to incorporate developers, as they struggle to understand them. (they get the designers)
One of the longest discussions of the day, was the discussion about the SAP-Adobe alliance ecosystem. I covered this discussion thoroughly on SDN, hoping to get the conversation started there.
James Ward also showed us the coolness of Flex/AIR applications:
(can you imagine the effect of showing potentially new customers something like this?)
Worth mentioning is also the Conference 2.0 aspect of this event.
We were live-streaming via Ustream.tv and tweeting about it at the same time, allowing those not physically present to engage in the conversation.
We had around 15 friends watching and chatting via Ustream.tv, and another bunch following us on Twitter.
I hope this was only the first conference of many to come!
Thank you James for organizing this, thank you James for stopping by, thank you Craig for editing the footage and thank you all for the great discussions!
It is only a week ago, since I wrote my last post on EMSE, the Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment.
In this one week, we moved from loosely discussing frameworks, design and implementation on wikis and Google groups, to submitting a 6 minute video for the Demo Jam at SAP TechEd.
To be part of this team has been an amazing experience, and I have gained much from it, both on a professional and on a personal level.
I will write more about my experience in the next couple of days, I just wanted to present our video for now.
Earlier this year I saw this picture (from Sapphire) with the words SAP, Innovation, Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise social networking together and it got me thinking.
A couple of weeks later, during one of the recent Twitter downtimes, some of us ran to the newly started Plurk, to let the world know what we were doing.
Of course that wasn’t so easy without an API in place, so that didn’t last long.
It was however just enough time for ESME – Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment – to be born.
ESME started off from one Plurk conversations (or here as RSS).
Now 20 days later, the project has already come so far, that the architecture and design ideas are being discussed in detail.
What I have found interesting and fun in this process, is that we have only used microblogging and collaboration tools to plan this project. Not once did we call each other or use IM.
20 people from all over the world have put their names on the ESME SDN wiki page (even though some are involved as “listeners”), so logistically it has not been an easy task.
Though through using tweets with a 140 character limitation and the wiki when we needed to go into details, we have built an architecture, the foundations of UIs we want to use, the implementation, discuss the social network aspects and think of scenarios where such a tool would be useful.
If someone had told me even just a year ago, that something like this would be possible, I probably would have laughed at them..
This has been an amazing experience so far, and I hope this is just the beginning!
My take on SAP's new"Guidelines for Best-Built Applications"
on Mon, 5 Oct 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". This blog post covers some comments I have.
TechEd'09 Cluetrain
on Thu, 24 Sep Sign up if you would like to take part in the TechEd 09 Cluetrain to Vienna
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