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.