The official TechEd theme this year was “Connect, Collaborate and Co-Innovate” and when I saw this, all I could think was that this must be the right TechEd for me.
As part of the ESME team and as an SAP Mentor, I had already familiarized myself with these three words as SAP understands them during the last weeks and months leading up to the TechEd.

The journey started on Sunday on the Cluetrain from Frankfurt to Berlin.
This was the pre-pre day event, and as it turned out it set the conversation for the rest of the TechEd. For the first time I was participating in a discussion about openness and collaboration and what this means to SAP.
(On a small side note: The ride was definitely worth the small de-tour via Frankfurt, and I will definitely join next year too!)

This discussion continued on Community Day, where Darren Hague on short notice decided to do a session on “NetWeaver and open source”. During the next two days, the Mentors/bloggers had the opportunity to talk to Zia Yusuf and Hervé Couturier and in both these meetings the word “openness” was re-occuring.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to participate in the meeting with Zia Yusuf as I was tied up in DemoJam preparations, but from what Dennis Howlett writes, Zia was listening intensely instead of arguing.

When I started working with SAP three years ago, I decided to only focus on new technology (ERP5.0 and up), as there already are enough consultants/programmers out there who cover older systems. During my initial trainings the NetWeaver platform was always pitched as an open technology platform, ideal for developing applications.

“SAP NetWeaver: Integrated, open and inclusive”

“SAP NetWeaver provides an open, flexible and adaptable platform that addresses the challenges of today’s IT infrastructures and tomorrow’s IT evolution.”

It didn’t take long however, for me to realize that SAP’s picture of what the words open and inclusive mean are slightly different than how I was used to view those words.
The only way one can develop applications on a NetWeaver platform today, is if you work in for a partner or a customer, who already have a license.

“SAP NetWeaver is a web-based, open integration and application platform that serves as the foundation for enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) and allows the integration and alignment of people, information, and business processes across business and technology boundaries. It utilizes open standards to enable integration with information and applications from almost any source or technology. SAP NetWeaver is the foundation of SAP Business Suite and SAP Business ByDesign, and also powers partner solutions and customer custom-built applications.”

Now what do you do, when the project you are working on, isn’t from either a partner or a customer?

This question first became a reality for me when I started working on the ESME project. ESME is a community-driven project and because most of those involved are passionate SAP’pers we wanted this solution to run on NetWeaver.
Little did we know when we started exactly how difficult it would be to actually find an instance for it to run on. The first version actually ran on a Tomcat server.
I have had many people asking me along the way, why we were making it so difficult for ourselves. Why wouldn’t we just use JBoss like “everyone” else?
Usually, my answer would be “because we are stubborn and stupid”.
The real reason however for going with SAP is that we have hopes things will change for the better.

The Mentor meeting with Hervé Couturier (newly appointed Executive Vice-President Products) was really refreshing and one of my TechEd highlights.
Here was an executive who started the meeting saying “why can’t we?” instead of “why should we?”. It felt very refreshing to be able to present our “openness and open source case” to someone who obviously understood the advantages of collaboration in the SAP ecosystem.

According to the feedback we received from this meeting,
“This meeting was a testimonial to the value the Mentors add to, and I want to thank you for your support. You were great!” the meeting was well received on the other side too.

Now I just hope SAP delivers.

One last note.
This is the comment from Tom Raftery, which was made on the night before TechEd had even started.
“SDN is supposed to be a community of developers. Why doesn’t it have a community-rated shared code library then? Or is that a naive question”.

Yes indeed, why not?

Now, how on earth will I be able to see your website if you resize my window to that size??

My list of websites I am not visiting because of this behavior is forever growing.
My screen estate is carefully planned and I like my window sizes. Thank.you.very.much.

I have even used it a couple of times at customer’s sites, when discussing their form design. Because the tool is so easy to use, and everything is drag and drop, I can create an UI mockup within a couple of minutes, which lets me explore different designs with the customer directly.

I am a person, who still likes to hand-draw my mockups on paper first, so the fact that the controllers in this app all have a hand-drawn look to them, give these mockups the same feeling to them as if they were drawn on paper.

The user interface is intuitive and easy to use.

There is a library of more than 50 controls and 70 icons to choose from, in eight different categories. (Big, Buttons, Common, Containers, Layout, Markup, Media and Text)

When you resize the controls, it will always tell you it’s current size. Great when you have to design for a specific format. Furthermore every element has a property inspector (toolbox), with which you can edit it’s properties. Size, layer, group, colour, state, icon, font-size, borders, alignment, just to mention a few properties, can be changed.

The mockups can be saved as .bmml files, exported as .png or even as an .xml file.

I use the desktop AIR app, but there is also a version, which is integrated into Confluence, JIRA or Twiki.

Take a look at this video, if you would like to see an example of what this app can do for you:

You can find more sample mockups here.

We didn’t win the competition, but internally we felt as winners.
Just seeing a dream come true being presented on that stage, was a win in itself to me.

This was filmed from the audience:

You can also watch a replay of the whole DemoJam here.

Last weekend, as I was sitting in a summerhouse in a rainy Denmark without  internet connection, I had some time to think about the events that lead to this nomination, and somehow I can blame it all on Twitter.

I can’t remember exactly when I signed up for Twitter, but it must have been spring 2007. It wasn’t love at first sight, and I needed two gos at it before I became an addict.

At that time I was standing at a cross-roads in my professional life.
I wasn’t happy with the direction my work as an SAP developer/consultant had taken and my own company (web consultancy firm) ran very well considering it was only something I did in my free-time. The SAP world felt too old, too dry, way too male and not creative enough for me, I had a feeling I wasn’t working with people thinking like me.

Of course, the SDN community was there, but because I was never given permission to go to TechEds etc, the faces on the pictures were never anything but names to me.
Then track came along and suddenly I found a bunch of SDN’ers on Twitter, some of them even nearby. And suddenly it wasn’t so bad to be an SAP consultant after all.

In February Craig Cmehil posted an event on Facebook; an informal SDN/BPX get-together in Walldorf.
I noticed that Oliver, another SDN’er that I had come to know on Twitter, was going, so I tweeted him and asked if he was interested in going together.
A couple of weeks later I got the in the car with a total stranger to drive the 300 kilometers from Cologne to Walldorf.
Oliver had already been to several TechEds, so he introduced me to more SDN/BPX’ers; Craig, Mark, Marilyn, Thomas and some of his ex-collegues at CoE (Center of Excellence).

From there on, the ball started rolling, and soon I found myself blogging on SDN, tweeting with all those Mentors who used to be nothing more than pictures to me (considering them friends today), working on ESME with the best people on the planet, securing myself a new job in Norway and now since last week, a Mentor myself.
Wow!

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.

The happy bunch

More pictures from the event here.

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)

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.

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.

By the way, SAP built the AJAX framwork from scratch..

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!

You can find my flickr set from the event here.

Part 1:


Part 2: