SAP TechEd 2011: Thursday

 

CD166 - ABAP in Eclipse in Action
Thursday 8:00 a.m.
Sweet.  Really nice demonstration on using Eclipse as an ABAP editor.  SAPgui runs inside the Eclipse IDE.  Developer can connect to multiple systems at once and is not limited by six sessions.  :)  Forward navigation is supported (Ctrl-click).  No native support for dictionary objects, but the embedded SAPgui is used instead.  Features: cool code completion, code locking, integration with Change Transport System, problems view, check/save/activate process.  This tool improves the efficiency of using a test-driven development methodology.

MOB117 - Consume SAP on Your Mobile Device in Under an Hour
Thursday 10:30 a.m.
This is the low-cost option for building mobile applications.  In this session we learned the basics of what was needed: no SAP NetWeaver Gateway, no Sybase Unwired Platform.  Just a simple SAP Web Application.  Tools used: jQuery and jQuery Mobile, DOM, JSON.  Web application uses JSON to call to SAP backend and build web page dynamically.  JSON is generated by SAP ICF handler class (find blog on SDN).  Consider looking for ABAP to JSON open source project.  HTML page uses includes from jQuery, JSON, and Phone Gap libraries.  HTML page makes a call to the ICF handler and uses JSONP to process the results into HTML.  jQuery Mobile takes the HTML results and formats it properly based on end device.  This method is fine for “getting it to work”.  This method is best suited for simple applications: display-only reports.  User management (as with the SUP) is not available.

I was #9 on the SAP TechEd Knowledge Quest Leader Board after lunch today.  Rock!

CD267 - Quality Tools Within ABAP Development
Thursday 2:15 p.m.
Learned about many tools available in ABAP development environment that help support quality testing. 
Static Code Checks – Code Inspector in SE80.  Create the Inspection to associate an object set (objects to check) with a check variant (checks to perform).  I also learned how to create a unit test class for ABAP classes.  Test Driven Development was identified as an important methodology to use.

EIM209 - SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search in Non-SAP Systems
Thursday 4:30 p.m.
SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search 7.2 connected to PLM, DMS and many other SAP products.  Also connected to many non-SAP systems.  Additionally, it appears that this team has implemented the PLM Web UI.  Security was implemented to restrict access to search results which would meet our FDA/ITAR restrictions.  I didn’t have opportunity to discuss the SAP-side (as this was a non-SAP lecture).  But I have contact information and think we should contact him for a discussion.

CD116 - Workflow Approvals Anywhere: It Saved You How Much?
Thursday 5:45 p.m.
Presenter described a solution in which a Workflow was used to catch new Purchase Order objects and send an email to the approver(s) with a key file.  When the approver clicks a link in the email, a new email is generated and sent (with the key) back to SAP.  Another SAP program catches the incoming email and approves the PO on behalf of the email recipient.  My thoughts: a similar process could potentially be used during a Change Order approval process.  Looks nice: they generated a rich HTML-based email; not just plain text.  Next they enhanced the process to include other SAP objects: hire requests, customer invoices, travel expense, etc.

SAP TechEd 2011: Wednesday

 

MOB230 – Developing Simple Mobile Applications Using OData
Wednesday 8:00 a.m.
This is an alternative method for developing mobile apps for SAP. The OData method differs from MBO method in that OData requires one less server-side process. The device makes calls directly into the backend system (through an SAP gateway and SUP), bypassing the MBO data modeller. This is a more simple footprint, but you lose the potential benefit of caching all results in the middleware and retrieving only the results you need to display on the device.

CD205 – Technology Preview: ABAP Programming Model Evolution
Wednesday 9:15 a.m.
1. Neat video on the evolution of the ABAP editor.  Looks like they’re pushing the Eclipse tool as the standard SAP development environment.  It provides the latest intelisense for ABAP, but is also a natural editor of other languages used by SAP developer: Javascript, CSS, etc.
2. Improvements to the data modeling concept and type system w.r.t. table relationships.  It sounds like many of these improvements are in preparation for making SAP R/3 available for the SAP HANA system.
3. Enhancement to service consumption and data binding outside of Web Dynpro.  I don’t get this yet – is it for standard ABAP or mobile or what?  It was all theory – no example.
4. Listened to an overview of the Advanced Query Language (AQL) – again in support of SAP HANA.  This is basically a copy of .NET’s LINQ to SQL, only in ABAP.  Looks pretty neat and provides performance improvements in that it only retrieves data requested instead of traversing nested loops to get at related data.

CD260 - SAP NWBC: Enhancing SAP GUI With the Side Panel
Wednesday 10:30 a.m.
NetWeaver Business Client NWBC can be used either as a desktop installation or as NWBC for HTML, access through the browser.  In the 2nd case, no client installation is required.  PFCG is used to configure role-based menus and side panels in NWBC.  Floor Plan Manager (FPM) is used to design simple UIs for transactional data.  Page Builder is used to combine views from disparate, related content into one screen.  This is awesome.  Just listening I can think of many business cases for this: reviewing financial report – show sidebar of specific BW chart; reviewing material – show sidebar of current AMPL; in the enhanced MIGO ‘KEG Material’ tab, move the classification table and AMPL to sidebars to make room if additional fields are requested.  SAP has developed and provided a number of side panel CHIPs out of the box.

MOB265 - OData Mobile App using SUP via SAP NetWeaver Gateway
Wednesday 2:15 p.m.
OData is short for Open Data. It’s a REST-based protocol that is becoming popular because it uses less bandwidth than SOAP.  The SAP NetWeaver Gateway is a piece of software that is installed into SAP NetWeaver and talks OData.  The SUP is an application that provides reverse proxy and user management services for devices and talks to the SAP NetWeaver Gateway.  There are open source alternatives to the SUP.  Entity modeler file (.edmx) was generated using Visual Studio 2010 (coming to Eclipse later).  Great lab.  I learned a lot about the back-end portion of the development.  I skipped the 2nd half (regarding SUP and Eclipse) to check out some other lectures.

MOB105 - Mobilizing SAP Workflow Approvals at HD Supply
Wednesday 4:30 p.m.
HD Supply is a big Blackberry shop.  Explored three potential solutions for mobile delivery of workflow.  Choice: Leapfactor (not Sybase!).  The team utilized SAP Workflow to create a standard SAP approval step to be placed in the SAP Inbox.  Next a task was scheduled to retrieve changes to workflow inbox items and push it to the mobile device.  The development of the mobile application was not discussed in detail.

TEC203 - SAP User Interface Strategy and Roadmap
Wednesday 5:15 p.m.
No strategy.  Just a review of every possible UI option.

BI105 - SAP HANA: How to Set Up a High Value Analytic Scenario
Wednesday 5:45 p.m.
1. SAP HANA comes as a big empty black box.  The first step is to model your data.  You transfer the data to HANA in-memory db.  Develop a Business Object (BOBJ) to query HANA.  Then design a web report to use the BOBJ. 
2. There is something called the HANA Studio used to create the tables in HANA.  You need to create all necessary tables: KNA1, MARA, T001W, etc.  At some point, there will be a way to model your tables from ERP and import them to HANA – it’s not there yet.  Next you need to maintain the source/target system connection.  Today this is NOT simple.  Next you load the data: tables, BW extractors, files, web services. 
3. HANA has three views: attribute view, analytical view, calculation view.  You use these to create measures and dimensions.  HANA is NOT a replacement of SAP BW.  In ~60 days, HANA is a potential database for BW.  Starting to get the idea on this: move all the data as-is to HANA; write a calculation view that performs calculations in memory to transform to the result data; display report.

SAP TechEd 2011: Tuesday

Here’s a short summary of each of the sessions I attended.

SCI266 - X.509 Certificates for SSO
Tuesday 10:00 a.m.
I attended a hands-on lab on the topic of the new X.509 SSO technology from SAP.  Really nice feature.  I’m not a basis guy, but after walking through the entire process myself, it feels pretty easy to configure.  In addition, I think it could help us reduce maintenance cost of our existing SSO solution – especially with respect to web application single sign-on.  I think I heard tell that it is only available for NetWeaver 7.3 (maybe 7.2 also).

MOB110 - Developing Synchronized Mobile Applications
Tuesday 11:30 a.m.
As expected, SAP has had a year to provide more detail documentation and presentations on the subject of mobile development.  It appears that they’ve also provided ways to simply the web development design.  The structure of the Synchronized mobile app is three-tiered.  1. back-end consumable RFC-enabled functions; 2. Sybase Unwired Platform middleware with data model that calls to backend, processes data and stored results server-side; 3. mobile application that calls to SUP and retrieves a subset of the stored results for display on the device.

CD360 – Best Practices for Web Dynpro ABAP
Tuesday 2:15 p.m.
A learning: it doesn’t help trying to guess where people will sit in a hands-on lab in order to manipulate yourself into your own computer.  I almost had it; when the lab started the gal next to me (actually part of group 09) had to practically stretch across me to reach the laptop that was tethered to the desk.  Really nice hands on lab though.  Learned some awesome tips on a new Layout provided called the FormLayout.  Love it.  I really could have used it this last summer with a specific issue I was struggling with.  I also got a better understanding of how to properly use a couple of the layout types I didn’t quite understand.  I learned the golden rule of Web Dynpro: If you want and item to stretch to the size of the window, then all parent containers must have height/width set to 100%.  Next we learned about multi-tab performance and how to use the Web Dynpro performance monitor (Ctrl-Alt-Shft-P).

ALM102 – SAP Netweaver 7.3: How to Get There
Tuesday 4:30 p.m.
Find the master guide.  Download the master guide.  Read the master guide.  Follow the steps in the master guide.

SAP PLM Web UI Discussion
Tuesday ~7:45 p.m.
Caught up with Tom and asked for direction on where to install the components of the PLM Web UI – specifically with respect to customer/supplier access.  As expected, this individuals most familiar with the topic weren’t at SAP TechEd this week.  But Tom was very informative, said that we need to install SAP PLM WUI on the R/3 server (along with the upgrade).  During implementation we will decide what portions of the web PLM solution will be utilized by third party.  We assign a secondary IP address to the server for use by 3rd party and expose the web components required to this secondary IP address in the ICF.  Makes great sense.  Last: there are a few topics that I wasn’t able to make it too.  It would great to have Tom in to show Chris, Chad and I some of the new functionality we’ll get from the upgrade.

SAP TechEd 2011 Keynote

No question, SAP HANA is the main event.  Vishal Sikka has sweeping expectations for this product.  For those unfamiliar with the tool, HANA is essentially a box of high-speed memory to replace hard disk.  This is certainly an over-simplification.  From all advertisements it can take calculations and reports that currently run in hours and days down to seconds.

What I found most interesting is the view that Vishal imagined in which a single SAP HANA hardware instance was subdivided to provide “virtual” in-memory spaces for all necessary systems at a corporation.  This seemed to indicate SAP was entering the VM space as a competitor with the added benefit of extremely high-speed in-memory.

SAP BW was identified as one of the next big pushes in the SAP HANA team.  More information is expected later this year.

This idea of in-memory computing is something that all companies should be looking more into.

SAP TechEd 2011: Gamification

As I would expect with most of you, when I first heard about using games in the business world, I didn’t give it any real consideration.  It’s one of those concepts that initially feel like someone is just out to make a little money. 

But I was convinced by the guest speaker last night.  The idea is simple: lets learn why people today spend so many billions of hours playing games (computer and other).  Then use that knowledge to improve the performance of our employees in the business and “real” world.

Jane McGonigal provided many important business cases in which the concept of gamification (or Game IT) was inserted.  One of my favorite is this.  Jane informed us that 20% of the population in the world is without electricity.  It is also true that soccer is a sport played almost everywhere in the world.  Using these two facts, a company was able to build a ball that collects the kicks and knocks it receives and store this energy in an internal battery.  This battery is then used by the boys and girls who played with it that day to provide lamp light by which to study later that night.  That’s awesome.

SAP has entered into this full force by making it a major theme at the SAP TechEd 2011 event.

Looking forward to keeping an eye on this in the future.