Certifications – I Did It

More than two weeks after Dennis Howlett’s initial post on certifications on SDN “Should you be certified?” the debate is still rolling. Yesterday we saw two new posts, one from Dennis and another from Blag on the subject.

I have come to realize that among the SAP Mentors, I am one of the few who actually is certified. (SAP NetWeaver ABAP Web AS 6.40 developement consultant or something like that)
I am usually not someone who cares about certifications, I don’t even hold a university degree or any other higher education for that matter. The reason why I chose to get certified was the chance of getting a job.

I went from web/graphic design to form design and from there on realized that learning ABAP probably wasn’t such a bad idea. With that I also knew if I chose to get certified I would most likely get a junior position at a company I really wanted to work for. The certification was not important for this company because it told them I knew something, but because it showed them that I really wanted to work with this.

I looked around for a place to take a couple of courses and do the certification and ended up choosing a private (SAP partner) school in Cologne. They also offered much more than TAW10/12, making it into more of an education than only a certification.

I sat through 4 months of the 6-month program, before I decided I’d had it. I have never in my life experiences something so sloppy and boring. One teacher sat with us for weeks and just read through the PDFs, not being able to answer any of our questions. We had another dude who couldn’t even pronounce things correctly and who was teaching courses he had never done or covered technologies he had never worked with himself.
In all those 4 months we only had one teacher who actually knew what he was talking about and he only came in as a replacement for a week after we had thrown out one of the other (horrible) teachers. I ended up refusing to pay the whole fee and took the certification through my employer-to-come instead of through the institute.

The certification itself wasn’t hard. I had tons of documents with the questions and answers, so I just locked myself in my room for 2 weeks and learned the right answers by heart, travelled to Walldorf, sat down for 2 hours, and except for a few surprise questions I hadn’t seen before, it was a piece of cake. (albeit a very expensive piece of cake)

The problems with this as I see it are:
- The quality of the courses, both when it comes to teachers and material is poor.
- SAP needs to be much stricter when it comes to partner training institutes.
- New certifications or at least change them more often. What is the point when all the answers can be downloaded off the internet?

How much of what I learned have I used up until now?
Maybe 10 %.
Which just shows me that the certifications aren’t really relevant to the work we are doing.

I agree with Léo Apotheker when he says SAP’s job is to certify and not to recommend people. But to encourage customers to only hire certified consultants is certainly not the way to go. At least not as long as the certifications are in it’s current state.

SAP and Openness at TechEd in Berlin

Even though this was my first time attending a TechEd (or any other SAP event for that matter), I decided to go against the “general advice” for first-time attendees, and chose not to make any plans or book sessions before I left. I went as a part of the ESME team, as a DemoJam speaker, as a blogger and as a Mentor. All of those combined didn’t leave me much time to hang around and be stunned, but instead left me feeling as if I had been in a wind tunnel for four days.

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?

Will browser window resizing ever stop?

This just happened to me while surfing:

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.

Great tool for creating UI mockups

Andre Salazar mentioned this tool in his post a couple of weeks ago, and those few lines was enough for me to go and get the tool right away. I have worked with it on several occations already, and all I can say is that this tool is a must for everyone working with UIs.

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.

ESME @DemoJam Las Vegas

As some of you might know, yesterday was the DemoJam evening in Las Vegas.
DemoJam gives SAP customers, partners and employees an opportunity to demo new, electrifying technologies or applications live on stage.

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.

How Twitter Changed My Life

As some of you might know I am now an SAP Mentor.

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!

We Did It!

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.

The happy bunch

More pictures from the event here.

Berlin TechEd Commute

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)