Intrigued by Goodness coming to Web Dynpro Abap near you. I was redirected to this presentation on blip

Web2.0 meets Business Process. Indeed!!

SAP Eventus – The Human Face of Business Scenarios was a Composition on Grails prototype, released to public late last year it demonstrated Enterprise 2.0 principles by highlighting a real life collaborative business process scenario.

The next iteration of Eventus utilizes much more of the SAP products we are familiar with and showcases the “signature design” of the new Business Client “Nova” debuted at SAPPHIRE this year. One thing is for sure with the new look prototype we have a contender for this years Demo Jam.

SAP never looked better – drop and drag widgets, drag and relate objects, google maps, enterprise and web searches, Flash/Flex/AIR, BSP, Webdynpro, SAP Gui and much more all seamlessly delivered in a single UI, I even saw Textpad in there somewhere, I can only imagine the services and events utilized behind the scenes.

Sign me up, where’s the project, I want to start imagining the possibilities.

I am a big fan of chess, as a life tool i find it teaches me to have patients, not be impulsive and to understand the consequence of every action.

Thomas Otter has done a good job of comparing principles of Chess, design and software

Poker is another game that i like to play, Software Development Lessons Learned from Poker teaches us to be aware of the variables and act on the ones that matter.

What is it really like working for a big 4 consultancy?
“Do it for your resume and get out”
“OK, but a bit soul destroying.”
“Great place to launch a career, .. plan to build a strong network on day one.”

What would it be like working in Silicon valley?
“An Elitist’s Playground”
“Great just isn’t good enough.”
“a fantastic place to work.”

How do their salaries compare
Google – $US $113,000
Yahoo & Microsoft – $US 106,000
Apple – $US 89,000

Just a few of the comments and salary reviews employees have left on Glassdoor a new website allowing us to look through the window and see how green the grass is.

This pic reminds me of my time in London cause it looks like the underground tube map. The bubble had just burst, the market was volatile, technology was fleeting and customers demanding. Do I get off at first stop and specialize in a technology that i like, running the risk of missing the needed connections. Or move on constantly reinvent and have to compete for a seat in the crowd.

Not much has changed – know everything about nothing or nothing about everything.

ABAP is an abbreaviation of the German word Allgemeiner Berichtsaufbereitungsprozessor if you run the phrase through babelfish and it translates to “General report preparation processor”. For a long time ABAP was seen as that a report writing language, to the uninitiated it was viewed as a lesser easy to learn language and the programmers who used it were looked down on as coders and not developers. ABAP has gone through many iterations, the biggest of which would have to be the introduction of SAP WebAS where ABAP finally broke away from being a report writing language and became the backbone to a suite of web application development platforms.

Prior to the SAP WebAS Web enabling was quite frustrating for SAP developers. The SAP ITS (internet transaction server) programming model was SAP’s preferred enabling technology, essentially you screen scraped SAP transactions and with the aid of a template language you could present browser based screens. It was very proprietary, hard to integrate, hard to extend and tightly coupled. Other techniques for e-enabling were to use lightweight SAP connectors or roll-you-own. Without a reliable framework most companies opted for the trusted reliance of brokered middleware solution.

Then along came the SAP WebAS server, it promised and delivered open integration. Web applications and webServices written in ABAP. Initially there was very little help available. Then in late 2003 when most needed the SAP Developer Network (SDN) arrived. Everyday there was a must read article. We were learning from the ground up, direct from the horses mouth – product developers and architects. To begin with we learn t the basics like how the webserver worked, then on to more advanced topics reusable patterns and creating patterns engines. We weren’t only learning about iterators, singletons, factory methods and effective coding principles like serializing, data binding, stateful vs stateless, but getting context into how they could be best incorporated into our developments.

6 months after SDN started and SAP integrated Java into the WebAS platform, previously SAP like many of its competitors had been using Tomcat to deploy its J2ee apps, a few smart takeovers later like TopTier and InQMy and SAP had their own J2ee engine. Here was a framework which incorporated arguably the most complete Java environment. No more source control headaches, the Java Development Infrastructure (later NWDI) had a completely integrated change management and transport system. The development tool set offered a WYSIWYG model driven RAD design IDE. The main benefits webServices and webdynpro meant that SAP had now got enterprise interoperability – structured (EJB, webServices, RFC,s etc) and unstructured data could be presented in a client agnostic enterprise grade front-end.

For many the introduction of Java was seen as the beginning of the end for ABAP, SAP would surely see the error in the way and stop investing in the legacy of ABAP and start looking to the future.

For a good 2.5 years up until 2006 there was a real thinktank on SDN and the ABAPers were leading the way. Now in 2008 and the developer thought seems to have been replaced with strategic talk around eSOA and business processes, the must read articles for me are few and far between.

What happened – is ABAP dead?

My view is that the Netweaver development platform has matured to a level where currently there is just nothing new to talk about at present, this will change.

As I read the agenda for SAP TECHED 08 “CONNECT. COLLABORATE. CO-INNOVATE!” SAP seems to be veering away from proprietary Netweaver and heading towards “heterogeneous inter-operable” Netweaver. This will mean adopting a more plug and play approach for development to cater to for the best of breed needs of its customers, case in point the Enterprise Service Bus. To me ESB means a paradigm shift from middleware hub-and-spoke integration to event driven peer to peer integration, containers and standards will replace the central hub as a means to providing guaranteed delivery.

Hey what do you know ABAP WebAS integration engine is a standalone webservice container, it plays well on its own and also plays well with other containers like the ESR (UDDI compliant – enterprise service registry ) without the need for a centralised hub in the middle (PI). WS-RM is one of the standards adapted into both ABAP and Java webservices as a means to guarantee delivery, this is only the start, better things are sure to follow.

The future for SAP development looks like plug-and-play and allowing customers freedom of choice.

How would you like your integration wrapped – ABAP and or Java?

This years SAP Teched tells us to
“CONNECT. COLLABORATE. CO-INNOVATE!”

Inspiring I know. Before you run off to convince your boss that you should go to Vegas for a week long jolly. Enjoy
“ENTERPRISE SOA – PUT THE POWER TO WORK!”

As expected the main buzz at Tech-ed was again around enterprise services and composite applications. Aside from the usual SAP showcase road show there was a lot of side talk and presentations around Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. A couple of the key concepts that I walked away with were Collective Intelligence applications and Enterprise Widgets.

Contrary to popular belief Web2.0 is more than rounded corners, stripes and beta stars. Web 2.0 is about content and collaboration. A collective intelligence application gets smarter as people uses it. Various examples illustrated were of wiki faq’s, blog product reviews and forum style customer self service applications where the customer and the vendor share the same configuration and data, with use the information becomes a lot more applicable concise and reliable, which means win win.

Widgets were really big this year, widgets are light weight mini apps that allow users to monitor or interact with certain information. Widgets can be desktop based, web based or a combination of both. Some examples of widgets I saw were of system monitoring, reporting and simple approvals for things like transports or purchase orders.Various vendors showcased there widget servers which allowed for remote and local SAP integration through community portals such as Yahoo. This was pretty powerful, say your on the road and need to approve some purchase orders in SAP you can do this through Yahoo. SAP themselves showcased some widget development, I wasn’t quite sure of the positioning of widgets given their enterprise portal solution.

Enterprise Services Oriented Architecture

Went to quite a few workshop and presentations on Enterprise Services and not much has really changed, SAP are still saying the same thing, the nice thing is that they are slowly delivering and this shows through some of the customer presentations.
What I was impressed with was SAP’s market awareness; they are at the forefront of a lot of open and industry specific initiatives. The phrase interoperability has now replaced the word proprietary. One initiative that surprised me was the “Imagineering Fellowship”, SAP have a secondment program whereby they get community experts together from Customers and Partners to brainstorm and prototype new initiatives, I met a few participants the results looked pretty cool.

Process Integration

Went to a quite a few workshops on XI, I was specifically interested in what was coming up and what was the hype around End-toEnd (E2E), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and the Consumer Environment (CE).

XI is going through another re-branding from Integration to Enterprise. This re-branding is due to component changes which align nicely with the ESA strategy, the enterprise repository supersedes the integration repository and provides better global data, service definitions and mappings, this will makes it a lot easier to use and understand. I did a couple of workshops test driving the new product (7.1), some of the concepts like xml validation, pre-defined content and vendor adaptors (interoperability) are a long time coming. The service registry takes the UDDI webservice directory concept into the future by putting governance and process around reuse. On the whole I felt the new applications are leaps and bounds ahead of the initial offering but some concepts are still in beta mode. The service modeling tools are very cool but felt like taking the scenic route.

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) for SAP is still very much a concept when compared with webMethods offering. SAP aims to extend traditional workflow, BPM and BPEL by providing event driven process milestone monitoring using webservices. A lot of key words but the idea behind a BAM framework is to provide an easy, consistent way to centrally monitor heterogeneous business applications. For BPM and BAM to be successful I feel that SAP needs to focus on user federation (principal propagation as SAP coined it) and that the workflow engine needs to be decoupled from the brokered middleware. Maybe this is project Galaxy

I went to a workshop on End-To-End solution operations for XI, this seems to be a packaged service / strategy offered by SAP to do root cause analysis, diagnostics, change management and business process integration. It is quite disjointed to be called End to End however some good tools and concepts.

The Consumer Environment (CE) was something I heard about before I went to tech-ed, I attended a couple of presentations and all i can think of is it is targeted at non XI customers and ISV’s. As it suggests the CE is environment for consuming enterprise services, it appeared to me to be a cut down Netweaver framework with the latest WebAS built on Java EE 5. I can only imagine that they will be adding more later if this is targeted at software partners with a view to enabling and innovating.

Master Data Management

I think everybody is in violent agreement that master data management is the backbone to an Service Oriented Architecture, given this why hasn’t SAP MDM taken off?

I sniffed around a few workshops and demos on MDM to see what has changed in the 12 months since I last looked. The presentations are still the same, heavy on positioning and light on real world examples of delivery. The only thing I could see that has changed in the last year is they have delivered more admin and configurations functions through the portal.

The focus is still very much on modeling processes. The modeling tools delivered by SAP still have that 80/20 feel, as soon as you get into the reality of integration and transaction integrity you realize the modeling is only good for prototyping or very simple processes. As a product suite it feels more like disjointed software and concepts, heavily reliant on XI and Portal for integration.

Duet

Got time with the SAP Duet Product Manager, last time I saw Duet I left with more questions than answers and felt that it far too many limitations, specifically infrastructure requirements, available functionality and the ability to extend.

SAP has added a few new scenarios like E-recruitment and various CRM processes. I was really impressed how Outlook is used as a framework seamlessly deliver functionality of other MS products – for example the Infopath forms combined with task bar and help functions makes the screens very easy to navigate and understand. The product is still focused on occasional users and managers. The scope of functionality is very specific and configuration limited to aesthetics . I was told that in the near future there is plans for an SDK but didn’t get a feel how easy it would be to extend or add own functionality.

Figures quoted to me were around 700 global projects and less than a hand full of sites live. Despite SAP saying that Duet is meant to compliment their Netweaver offerings (Portal), the product feels like a show case for Microsoft Office. Given the limitations in infrastructure, licensing, scenarios and configuration, it begs the question why wouldn’t you develop a solution yourself independent of both SAP and MS.

Conclusion

SAP the company seems a lot wiser and more market conscious. I think that this can be put down to the community networking sites and the industry initiatives that they have been involved in. The last tech-ed I went to there was a real SAP v Oracle v Microsoft v IBM feel, a lot of chest beating, back slapping and hype. This time round there was far less hype and misdirection. Instead of trying to one up their competitors, they are now working closer with them and looking to their customers for inspiration and feedback.

On the whole there was nothing really new at Tech-ed, this is a relief because it showed that the technical directions taken in the past have proven to be the right ones. Apart from a few surprise mergers and acquisitions I think the technology is pretty much set and will continue to mature over the next few years. What I would expect is for SAP to look externally for innovation and start pushing harder Netweaver as an open development platform.

If you define a pattern as recognizing a good solution to a problem. Then an anti pattern could be described as not recognizing you are applying a bad solution to a problem – that is until someone points it out to you.

Every project you go on it is important to share lessons learnt.

Coaster requirement – also known as development by Osmosis, this is when the requirement is given to a developer on a beer matt.

CnP Programming - this is the tendency to avoid writing a program from scratch and try to copy from a tech spec, online help or google. This is usually followed by a resource vacuum, asking everyone else around why it doesnt work, going with the easiest to implement answer.

404 Consultant - the phenomen of having to rely on resources which cannot be found when needed

Programmer by association – also known as FTS (frustrated techie syndrome), been told by a functional person that the solution is to change line XX, before the problem has been defined

Dynamic Resume Syndrome (DRS) – common practice on big projects where for example a bad programmer is let go only to return months later as a functional team lead.

Wearing a box - releasing as little knowledge or responsibility as possible in an attempt to keep your job. aka covering your assets

Sour Milk - how the milk tastes just before the cow goes offshore

Digging your own grave - also known as knowledge transfer sessions

Vapor Lock in – aka the CIO’s new clothes, falling for Vendor hype because you dont want to appear like an idiot

feel free to share and i’ll add to the list

My boss must have just comeback from an IT conference, he calls me into his office starts off by saying “having effective knowledge management can increase the net worth of a consultancy by at least 100%”. He was preaching to the converted, I walk out of his office with the assignment of evaluating Confluence as a knowledge management solution for our company globally.

‘‘If HP Knew what HP Knows we would be three times more profitable.’’ Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett Packard

I love Wiki’s after google, Wikipedia has to be my second most used site. I have used Confluence many times on many sites including SAP SDN, IBM dveloperWorks to name a few. I was looking forward to giving this product a test drive. Plus Atlassan are aussie as.

This was not my first exercise in evaluating a potential knowledge management solution. It feels like groundhog day, every time I finish a project and get some bench time I have to evaluate a KM product – Sharepoint, SAP Portal and KM, E-rooms etc. They say madness is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result, they also say you do what your told if you want to get paid. Here’s hoping this is the last time.

Before i start playing i like to research on the product and their competitors, i went to the Atlassan site and i found a wealth of knowledge on Confluence. Atlassin is one company that do eat their own dog food.

I started my investigation by installing the bundled solution, I have to say i am not a fan of HSQL, as a developer i prefer something more transparent. So quickly downloaded and installed a version on SAP Java WebAS and MsSQL too easy.

The installation footprint was tiny, which lead me to finding out what was driving the application – The dominant components seem to be Sitemesh for content and look and feel and Velocity for templating.

Sitemesh – easily enables you to create panel based layouts. It uses decorators to intercept page rendering from different apps to give your application a consistent look and feel. One thing that impressed me about Sitemesh is the ease in which you can render your content into different formats, Confluences uses this very effectively!

Apache Velocity – is a macro templating engine based on mvc. Separation is encouraged by storing the templates (.vm) independent of java code. Inside these templates you combine VTL (template language), html and resources (file, jar, classpath, url, datasource and xml) to create dynamic content. Using parameters when calling makes it very powerful and easy to re-use.

Confluence provides many different types of plugins, they look very easy to create meaning there is a large community of users creating there own plugins and macros and sharing them.

After a couple of hours of using the application i was hooked. I had created a few simple spaces with a rigid page hierachy, this combined with the flexibility of labels makes for a complete taxonomy.

Writing content and blogs was also easy with the options of rich text editing, wikimarkup and macros.

The dashboard approach, bookmarking, RSS feeds and breadcrumbs makes navigation a breeze. The search is powerful and suprisingly accurate.

The Administration console as expected was rich in features, Themes can be extended, uploaded and modified and applied at a global or space level. Using the theme builder plugin allows for further branding. Security can be applied at user, group, space and page levels.

Simple and powerful.

I am sure the following are being addressed, the cons i found were – the layout has a heavy reliance on tables, ajax is very limited. I know there is limited LDAP support and a complimentary idM product Crowd, however I couldn’t find any mention of SPML or SAML in relation to Confluence, will it fit into existing provisioning?

Some of the features others were hoping for was better IM and forum capabilities. Also suggestions that content macros be put in a visual drop and drag feature and content editing have immutable or restricted to users feature.

So will we adopt Confluence, we have bought a couple of onconfluence hosted licences and started getting some content up there, time will tell.

Move over big 5, training needs a makeover

IN a radical move, German enterprise software giant SAP has finally loosened the grip on its tightly held training and certification program as the shortage of skilled consultants worsens.

SAP certification gets total makeover | Australian IT

The comments make for interesting reading.

In the news i hear about this perceived shortage of labor. In the same bulletin you hear big bank has outsourced entire IT operations, large employer investigated for underpaying workers on 457 visas.

Shortage of skilled consultants – Isn’t this just propaganda and the real shortage is cheap experienced labor?

Experience comes at a cost.

Managers know this that is why they seek alternative markets. It seems that a lot of university students aren’t getting taught basic economics and believe that doing a SAP course will automatically get them a high paid job.

I was at a party on the weekend and was talking to a girl who had just finished her masters, she apparently was some data warehousing wunderkind and was knocking back graduate offers from big companies “I’m holding out for a call from google” – she literally thought one day “hi XXXX, this is Larry Page we want you to come work for us”, I told her to pull her head in do you think Larry was waiting for a phone call from Yanghoo – my advice get some experience first.

The experience was worth it.

I have talked to a lot of colleagues about how they got their break. A lot of people knew they wanted a career in SAP consulting when they left university. The story will go along the lines – i started at the bottom and then spent a couple of years working hard at an end user site, or cut my teeth getting pushed around as a low paid graduate for a big consultancy.

You cannot substitute experience

Who is being targeted here?

• End users – they like their employees skilled but don’t let employees get certified, thats like setting there browsers homepage to Monster dot com.
• Consultancies - they will like the idea of self based training as it will encourage staff to train while billing, but they wont let you sit a test without some kind of human to human knowledge transfer. Furthermore they wont bill you out as an expert to you have proven yourself
• Students and job seekers – they believe that you can fast track your way to a good career by training, Mr Jones makes $1200 a day why cant I

As long as employers keep looking for cheaper alternatives, like outsourcing or work visas, training wont get you your job, experience will

“More companies die of indigestion than starvation.”
(“The HP Way,” Hewlett-Packard co-founder David Packard, page 142)

Back in 2002 HP got heartburn from a Compaq takeover. EDS has over 135,000 staff – I hope they bought some Tums cause its a big fish to swallow.