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.

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!

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?

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!

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)

The differences between ESME and IM

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.

ESME – Taking It To The Next Level

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.

Further ESME blogs on SDN:
Dennis Howlett
Abesh Bhattacharjee

ESME – Social Enterprise Messaging Experiment

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!