SAP NetWeaver Technology Platform

SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP NetWeaver Cloud, "NEO", ... Confused?

Bjoern Goerke — Fri, 10 May 2013 23:11:48 GMT

With the recent announcement of the SAP Hana Enterprise Cloud, a number of questions have been circulating about how this offering relates to SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP NetWeaver Cloud Platform, “NEO” etc.. Confused? So let me try to put things straight, it’s actually pretty simple:

What is SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud?

The SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud offering is a comprehensive cloud infrastructure combined with managed services to allow customers to run their SAP HANA applications, including SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA, in a managed virtual private cloud environment. We prefer to refer to this as an Enterprise Cloud.

What is the SAP HANA Cloud Platform?

It is (and remains to be) SAP’s only public Developer Platform-As-A-Service (PaaS) offering that allows SAP partners, SAP customers and SAP development itself to build, deploy and operate applications in an open and standards-based Cloud environment. Building these applications is made easy by our offering of a number of shared application services and in particular the power of SAP HANA in a service-based manner. The SAP HANA Cloud Platform is hence tailored towards the huge SAP developer community: It provides both Java and Java VM-based language environments like Java itself, (j)Ruby, Scala, Python, Clojure or Groovy as well as HANA native development capabilities like e.g. SQLScript or River Definition Language.

SAP operates this infrastructure, partners and customers can focus on their applications without having to worry about the operations of the underlying technology stack.

While in general allowing to build a wide variety of application types on top, the platform is particularly optimized for two major use cases:

Serving as an open extension platform for
- SAP Business Suite solutions running on-premise in a customer landscape,
- SuccessFactors solutions running in the Cloud as a Software-As-A-Service offering and of course, since the recent announcement,
- SAP Business Suite solutions powered by HANA running in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.
Building completely new, powerful and high-performance applications on SAP HANA

Examples are “edge” applications extending core functionality in the SuccessFactors Employee Central offering, or extending the reach of classical SAP Business Suite applications like Human Capital Management (HCM) employee self-services with a consumer-grade user experience via mobile devices using HTML5 (e.g. via SAP UI5) or native mobile device experiences.

SAP NetWeaver Cloud Platform is the retired name for a subset of HANA Cloud Platform, which has meanwhile smoothly evolved into something even bigger. It provides the SAP HANA Cloud Platform with its core operations framework, the core services like Identity Management, Single Sign On, Cloud/On-Premise Connectivity, Persistency, Metering and Monitoring, integration into the SAP Store for subscription and billing purposes, etc..

“NEO” has been the SAP internal project name for SAP NetWeaver Cloud platform before it was originally released last year and — as such nicknames tend to do — has been more sticky with people than the marketing department has been hoping for

How do HANA Enterprise Cloud and HANA Cloud Platform fit together?

As outlined above, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is focusing on providing SAP solutions powered by HANA as managed services in an enterprise-grade, virtual private cloud environment. SAP HANA Cloud Platform can be used to extend these solutions via our public cloud Platform-As-A-Service offering, as one can already do with SAP solutions “classically” operated on-premise or SuccessFactors solutions offered in a cloud environment itself.

Both SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud Platform are running collocated in the same certified SAP Data Center sites and hence allow to be efficiently combined and put to action for dedicated scenarios. In a way, SAP HANA Cloud Platform is available with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, or it is contained in it, but somehow these statements appear to be a bit academic to me. What is really important is that these two offerings fit and work together: One does not replace the other, but each of them solves a specific problem of our customer and partner ecosystem. They compliment each other: All capabilities offered by SAP HANA Cloud Platform can be put to work with solutions provided by SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.

Hope that helps to clarify a bit.

SAP NetWeaver 7.4 made Generally Available (GA)

Bjoern Goerke — Fri, 10 May 2013 13:52:48 GMT

Today is a big day for us! We have made the next release of SAP NetWeaver generally available (GA) to the public: SAP NetWeaver 7.4!

I have outlined the direction of our activities around our technology platform which is productively used in more than 70.000 system deployments world-wide in one of my previous blog posts. SAP NetWeaver 7.4 is now the next step of this roadmap delivered to our partner and customer ecosystem.

SAP NetWeaver 7.4, now being the new NetWeaver go-to-release for all existing NetWeaver customers, comprises new versions of the application hubs like SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, SAP NetWeaver Portal, SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration and SAP NetWeaver Gateway, the Application Servers ABAP and Java, as well as Lifecycle Management, SAP NetWeaver Identity Management and Single Sign-On as well as new UI capabilities and services, in particular "SAPUI5".

SAP NetWeaver 7.4 is a "non-disruptive evolution" that extends the "classical" NetWeaver into the "dimensions" of HANA, Cloud and Mobile. It continues to support all databases but is now optimized to optimally support SAP HANA. With ABAP 7.4 optimized for SAP HANA it is the foundation for SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA and SAP Business Information Warehouse powered by SAP HANA. With this it plays also an important role in our new SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud offering. In addition, also the SAP NetWeaver Java-based Hub solutions will run on SAP HANA.

During the development phase we put a strong focus on a number of specific cross scenarios that substantially improve the development experience, lower the total cost of development and operations and best support hybrid on-premise/Cloud scenarios.

The most important SAP NetWeaver 7.4 cross scenarios include:

Seamless end-to-end development experience across components based on the Eclipse Development Environment including running sample scenarios provided for trial access in the Cloud, complemented by documentation, tutorials and working code. Check out my related blog post.
Easy deployment to Virtual Private Clouds like Amazon Web Services or (soon) HANA Enterprise Cloud with the SAP Cloud Appliance Library
Further improved support of Business Continuity to minimize the business downtime in customer landscapes
Optimal support for hybrid application scenarios (On-premise/Cloud) with SAP HANA Cloud Integration as already used by SuccessFactors to integrate with SAP Business Suite
Easy creation of Mobile applications with SAP HANA Cloud using SAPUI5, SAP NetWeaver Gateway and SAP HANA Cloud Gateway and SAP Mobile Platform Cloud Edition
One Identity and Access Management with NetWeaver Identity Managament and Single-Sign On, spanning federation of user data from on-premise to cloud and allowing seamless Single Sign-On capabilities

You might want to check out the new SAP NetWeaver 7.4 "landing page" on the SAP Community Network to get in-depth details about what's new and exciting in SAP NetWeaver 7.4.

That much for today...

New landing page published for SAP NetWeaver 7.4

Karl Kessler — Fri, 10 May 2013 08:42:52 GMT

Today, SAP NetWeaver 7.4 was released to SAP customers for general availability.

Here is the list of the most important facts you should be aware of:

SAP NetWeaver 7.4 is the compatible follow-up release to previous SAP NetWeaver versions.
Previous code for the NetWeaver platform written in ABAP or Java runs without change.
SAP NetWeaver 7.4 is deployed on premise
SAP UI5 and Gateway capabilities have been integrated into SAP NetWeaver 7.4
SAP NetWeaver 7.4 AS ABAP provides optimized access to SAP HANA and serves as a foundation to SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA.
ABAP development and SAP HANA modeling and content development tools can be used based on Eclipse tooling platform
SAP NetWeaver 7.4 AS Java is functionally equivalent to SAP NetWeaver 7.31 AS Java (Java codebases are identical)
SAP NetWeaver 7.4 supports advanced Business Continuity scenarios
SAP NetWeaver 7.4 offers new opportunities for customers and partners to build own new solutions or optimize existing ones in ABAP for SAP HANA.
SAP NetWeaver 7.4 offers guidelines, best practices and integration scenarios which have been developed in customer engagement initiatives.

There is a lot more to know for you about SAP NetWeaver 7.4

Therefore we published a SAP NetWeaver landing page which provides a detailed overview and positioning,

points to all relevant spaces and resources on SCN, and gives you an introduction to cross scenarios that bridge between

important technologies such as SAP NetWeaver, SAP HANA and SAP HANA Cloud.

Please chech out the landing page that ties it all together: SAP NetWeaver 7.4 - Optimized for SAP HANA, Cloud and Mobile - Available now!

We look forward to your feedback and are happy to answer your upcoming questions.

Best regards,

Monika Kaiser and Karl Kessler

SAPPHIRE NOW --- What about SAP NetWeaver Technology Platform?

Gert Schroeter — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:24:47 GMT

As explained in Bjoern Goerke's blog, SAP NetWeaver is our core technology platform, and as such, it will have a sound representation at our biggest customer conference SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando, next week. We plan to release SAP NetWeaver 7.4, soon, including a fresh update of all favorite SAP NetWeaver hubs. At SAPPHIRENOW, and with mega trends of cloud, mobile and big data integration architectures we will paint SAP NetWeaver in a bigger, integrated platform picture toghether with our cloud and mobile infrastructure technology offerings (pls see more information on our activities in the Middleware Guide to SAPPHIRE NOW 2013!).

It is very important for SAP to demonstrate that customers can rely on an integrated and consistent technology platform to securely manage and extend business solutions, regardless of the consumption or deployment model.

Using the same platform tools allow partners and customers to build and run their own real-time applications, guaranteeing low TCO (same operations and expert know-how), as well as the proven reliability fro 70,000+ live installations. Key capabilities include people, process and information integration, together with consistent lifecycle management, security and application development capabilities (including the new ABAP for SAP HANA development!).

Our key technology platform messages at SAPPHIRENOW this year are:

Rapidly adopt new technologies and applications by using a flexible platform, designed for change
Boost business and IT efficiency with integrated on-premise and cloud-based technology infrastructures
Simplify your IT and lower operating costs by removing layers and running enterprise and consumer applications in the cloud.
Open and secure platform for building & supporting next-generation of applications from customers, ISVs and startups.

Featuring our key products in the "Application Development and Integration" area

Connect People: SAP NetWeaver Portal, SAP HANA Cloud Portal, Duet Enterprise, SAP NetWeaver Gateway
Orchestrate Processes: SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration (integration, process management, rules management)
Secure Access: SAP NetWeaver Single-Sign-On, SAP NetWeaver Identity Management
Develop Applications: SAP NetWeaver Application Server
Cloud: SAP HANA Cloud Platform

Customers, sharing their story are the best proof of concept. This year, we are proud to have speakers from Bank of America, Accenture, AmerisourceBergen, Dr Pepper, Pepsico, Danone, ConAgra Foods, Siemens and National Football League!

A bolt summary of how our Database and Technology story at Sapphirenow is told: 38 customer stories, 22 theater presentations, 5 panels, 4 show floor studio interviews, press & analysts engagements, over 123 “Meet the Experts” sessions, 17 demo pods/discussion tables, 64 demo theater sessions, 32 microforums plus SAP HANA specials (find info on our complete D&T activities in this blog)

I look forward to seeing you in Orlando!

Middleware Guide to SAPPHIRE NOW 2013

Harald Nehring — Tue, 07 May 2013 10:00:33 GMT

Let's get terminology out of our way first - I'm talking about the stuff you use to build apps the way SAP builds them, then integrate them, present them well and secure them tightly. Most of this is called "middleware" by the market, and who can be against the market. In the old days this was easy to translate into SAP offerings - it was all SAP NetWeaver. Now with the cloud, mobile and new data architectures being everywhere it's a bit more differentiated, so you'll see me mentioning the SAP HANA Cloud Platform as well as the SAP Mobile Platform at times.

What can you expect middleware-wise at SAPPHIRE NOW next week? No major announcements, but steady progress in all relevant areas. We're expecting SAP NetWeaver 7.4 to be generally available by then, the best development platform for large-scale SAP HANA applications, including a refresh of all your favorite SAP NetWeaver hubs. We're expecting this to be picked up as quickly as 7.31 last year, with more than 3,600 customers live today.

To make things easier to navigate I'm breaking SAPPHIRE NOW down into four areas for you:

Develop applications - application servers, development tools, frameworks
Orchestrate processes - integration, process management and monitoring, rules management
Connect people - portals, UI frameworks, UI connectivity
Secure access - identity and access management

We weren't able to put these on the showfloor signs (unfortunately), so I'll summarize the most important sessions and stations you should visit for each of these areas. If not noted otherwise, all of these will be located in the "Database and Technology Campus". Links to the agenda builder are provided to help you add sessions to your personalized agenda. If you need to get a quick overview on site make sure visiting Eduardo Chiocconi and Helmut Grimm at discussion table DT624,

Additionally I'd like to highlight a rather innovative application of our platform technology, the SAP Financial Services Network. Built on the SAP HANA Cloud platform, using its network foundation and integration services, it provides a true business network connecting corporate finance organizations with their banks. It is shown in the Business Network Campus, make sure visiting expert table BN210 there.

Develop Applications

Highlights for application developers include the SAP HANA Cloud Platform as well as the latest SAP NetWeaver 7.4 enhancements for developers of applications with deep SAP HANA integration.

SID	Highlights	Time
64309	Panel with Siemens, Danone and the National Football League on SAP HANA Cloud platform development.	THU 2 pm
64607	Microforum discussing SAP NetWeaver application development on SAP HANA.	TUE 3 pm
64313	Microforum discussing challenges and benefits developing on the SAP HANA Cloud platform.	WED 1 pm
64311	Demo showing SAP HANA Cloud platform application development including connectivity and analytics.	TUE 3 pm THU 11 am
64312	Demo showing a customer application built on the SAP HANA Cloud platform.	WED 11 am THU 2 pm
64606	Demo showing how to extend existing ABAP applications to profit from SAP HANA.	WED 11 am THU 2 pm
65257	Demo showing dynamic visual prototyping with SAP Application Visualization software by iRise.	WED 11:30 am THU 2:30 pm
DT627	Expert table discussing building and running apps on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.	All day

For more information on application development at SAPPHIRE NOW check out Gert Schroeter's blog post.

Orchestrate Processes

Witness the latest version of SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration, as well as the new process monitoring and analysis capabilities with SAP Operational Process Intelligence.

SID	Highlights	Time
64585	Theater session showing how Bank of America automated and orchestrated its unique invoice processes.	WED 3:30 pm
64582	Theater session presenting how AmerisourceBergen simplified its complex distribution services.	WED 5:00 pm
64587	Microforum discussing all things integration - A2A, B2B, and cloud-to-ground.	TUE 11:00 am
38513	Microforum discussion on integrating the cloud with SAP HANA Cloud Integration in the Cloud Campus.	THU 11:00 am
64589	Microforum discussing the use of rules technology in customizing decision-making logic in applications.	WED 5:00 pm
64584	Demo showing the full SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration toolset for integration and BPM.	TUE 3:30 pm THU 11:30 am
64583	Demo showing the new SAP Operational Process Intelligence tool for process monitoring and analysis.	TUE 4:30 pm WED 4:30 pm
DT626	Demo station showing SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration, SAP Operational Process Intelligence and SAP NetWeaver Decision Service Management.	All day

For more information on process orchestration at SAPPHIRE NOW check out Mariana Mihaylova's blog post.

Connect People

Besides updates to on-premise SAP NetWeaver Portal, Duet Enterprise and SAP NetWeaver Gateway you can see the evolution of portal technology into mobile use cases and the cloud.

SID	Highlights	Time
64598	Theater session by PepsiCo discussing their user experience projects.	WED 5:30 pm
64604	Microforum discussing content management with the SAP NetWeaver Portal.	THU 11:00 am
64603	Microforum discussing Duet Enterprise and SAP NetWeaver Gateway to extend the reach of your applications to more users.	THU 11:00 am
64602	Demo showing the latest user experience technologies on premise, mobile and in the cloud.	TUE 1:00 pm WED 4:00 pm
64600	Demo showing the latest enhancements of SAP NetWeaver Portal to modernize your portal deployments.	TUE 4:30 pm THU 1:30 pm
DT625	Demo station showing user experience technologies, from SAP NetWeaver Portal and its extensions to UI frameworks, SAP NetWeaver Gateway, Duet Enterprise and the SAP HANA Cloud Portal.	All day

Secure Access

Centralized identity and access management has become mandatory for organizations.

SID	Highlights	Time
64591	Theater session by Accenture about replacing an aging identity management solution with SAP NetWeaver Identity Management.	THU 3:00 pm
64595	Microforum discussing application security challenges and solutions.	THU 2:00 pm
64594	Demo showing how to better govern your provisioning and entitlement processes with identity management, single sign-on, and access control.	WED 1:00 pm THU 4:30 pm
DT622	Demo station showing SAP NetWeaver Identity Management and SAP NetWeaver Single Sign-on as well as IT management tools.	All day

For more information on access security at SAPPHIRE NOW check out Gert Schroeter's blog post.

SAP Financial Services Network

The world's first online business network directly connecting banks and other financial institutions with their corporate clients is now open for business. See it in action at the Business Network Campus.

SID	Highlights	Time
NA	"Meet our customers" session with Visa, discussing integration of your electronic accounts payable and virtual purchase cards via SAP Financial Services Network with Visa. Three half hour sessions in the "meet our customers" pavillion.	TUE 10:30 am
24760	Panel discussion including Citi about business networks in action.	TUE 2:00 pm
27252	Microforum discussing future trends for financial services providers using business networks (BN204).	TUE 3:00 pm
3707	ASUG session with Visa explaining integration of electronic accounts payable (room S310C).	WED 1:45 pm
1914	ASUG session with Bank of America Merrill Lynch about integrating treasury and payments to banks (room S310A)	THU 4:15 pm
BN210	Expert table discussing SAP Financial Services Network.	All day

For more information on the SAP Financial Services Network at SAPPHIRE NOW check out Uwe Erdtmann's blog post.

In addition to all of the above you can find a slew of in-depth presentations from customers, partners and SAP managers in the ASUG educational program, too many to list here. All that remains for me to say is safe travels and enjoy SAPPHIRE NOW, Orlando!

Best regards,

Harald Nehring

VP Technology Marketing

Building space for building teams

Bjoern Goerke — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:59:53 GMT

Inspired by a comment to one of my prior posts (You know that story of the Russian cosmonaut?), a comment about noise and getting into love with it, I thought it may be worth sharing some of our experience with building (office) space for building teams.

When we moved large-scale into Lean and Agile Software Development methodologies five years ago, the role and work of "the [cross-functional Scrum] team" got more and more important and we started to consider office space concepts that would better fit the new working model than our traditional 3-4 people offices that we had in some of our development locations (e.g. in the headquarter offices).

Colleagues were in search for collaboration space, needed spots for daily Scrum stand-up meetings and their Scrum boards, needed meetings rooms for the takt-start planning and takt-end review and retrospective meetings (all at the same time, of course). Also, we wanted to be able to move individuals easily and quickly around, if e.g. teams were changed or a UX designer was supposed to join a team, and we didn't want to always wait for weeks to get an official move approved and implemented by facilities or contractors... "Grab your laptop and make yourself comfortable at your new spot" was the goal...

As a first try, we had experimented with 3 "team rooms" which had been set up by tearing 2 walls down and making 3 normal offices into a bigger team room. While the pilot teams that moved in liked the space after some adjustments for their team related work, it quickly became clear that a) they had only accepted the room because each one of them still had their original desk in their prior office room and b) the team room was "an island" that was missing support infrastructure around: ad-hoc meeting rooms the team could retreat into to not disturb the others, "phone cells" for phone conversations that were disturbing the others or private in nature. So we figured out that we need more than "team room" islands in the classical office environment, but a space for teams that has been designed for that purpose from the ground up.

That's how we started the initiative called "Office Space for Teams" (OS4T), a collaboration of Facility Management, our central Lean unit and "the business", i.e. parts of my R&D unit. The goal was to pilot concepts for office space particularly tailored at teams and their need for communication and collaboration, supporting innovation and creativity.

There's meanwhile a short video about it on YouTube that you might want to check out (3 minutes) to get an impression yourself:

We quickly figured out that in a "Lean" environment, it would be stupid to not involve the main stakeholder into the whole design exercise: the Scrum teams themselves. So we ended with having a joint team from the three units above, plus external architects, plus representatives from the development teams themselves that gave input and guidance to the actual design the architects and interior designers came up with.

The declared goal was to emphasize "networking over nesting", i.e. priority 1 was to provide teams with an environment that would foster communication and collaboration supporting innovation and and that would not make the individual's wish for "nesting" the main goal. "Nesting" meaning: "let me alone, I want my private spot where noone disturbs me and I can 'nest' in".

The area affected was two "H"-shaped wings of our building, seating around 280 colleagues before the remodeling. The restructuring of the old smaller office rooms, meetings rooms, coffee corner into a coherent overall concept, resulted in more than 30% additional workspaces, places where people could sit and work, simply due to the fact that a lot of space was "wasted" in the past with pathways to connect the offices. So the new design made better use of otherwise "dead" space.

I don't want to bore you with the full story and all the nitty-gitty details -- this goes beyond a blog post I fear and the video above may already give you a good sense of what Office Space for Teams is about -- but share a few of the insights and learnings that we have made over the past months while "living" in the new space (I myself as well):

1. Open space for helping opening minds
If you want to foster creativity and innovation -- and software development is a highly creative undertaking -- provide the team with light, color, diversified and a haptic rich environment.
It helps getting into a creative and open state of mind. Sitting alone in a closed room, grey walls around you, a neon light buzzing at the ceiling and a steel door keeping everyone else out, is for sure not going to help make yourself more creative. Just to paint some extremes...

2. Flexibility is key

One of our goals was to make changing teams and "who sits where" easily changeable. One can think about moving tables -- even though one has to acknowledge that there are health and safety regulations in place that forbid to place tables or workstations anywhere, have power lines crawling all over the floor etc.. But one can standardize on the workplace equipment, e.g. provide everyone with a (powerful) laptop and mobile rather than a workstation and a landline phone, have people use containers with rolls rather than fixed cupboards etc.. So that in practice they can move their own stuff within 5 minutes rather than waiting for 4 weeks for a contract mover to carry their boxes and IT to re-wire their workstation... So far, from what we've seen, things are flexible enough in our new office space and there wasn't a strong demand to completely rearrange everything from ground up. We have changed team mixes a few times and people have been moving around quickly and easily. So it seems that one worked out.

3. Not all teams like such a collaboration environment
It seems that in particular teams, that rather are groups of people that work more or less independent from each other, consider a less "collaborative" environment more preferable as it is less distracting for them. If you're in a team that is heavily interacting, e.g. because you are working in exploratory mode on a brand-new product idea, then the situation is very different. Feedback from such teams has been very positive. Which leads to the next finding:

4. Believe it or not, but people are different

No matter how well you design the workspace, people -- and teams -- are different. What works well for one, can be a pain in the neck for the other. So it seems advisable to provide people with enough "variation" of workplaces: some Design Thinking rooms for whole teams when in creative mode. Some more separated spots where individuals can work if they need concentration and don't want to be disturbed. One developer wants to work rather isolated for a while, while others prefer to be more part of the group etc.. The only thing limiting what one could provide is normally space constraints. Or the fact that you won't accomodate everyone's perfect preference and still keep a team together locally somehow. Or finally the nasty constraint called "budget" -- you cannot foresee everything and planning for the extreme case means usually "over-provisioning". And this isn't an option in most cases. So there's always certain trade-offs to accept. And some learnings to be made.

5. People will need time to "settle down" in the new space
Whether you come from a completely open "cubicle space" environment or from a classical "two or three people in a room" one, you will need time to adjust yourself to the new setting. Also, people need to figure out how to use the space in the best way. We have one meeting room with bean-bag like seating, no table, just a projector at the ceiling and some whiteboard wall. Originally, the feedback from the team was: we can't use that room. Later, when we wanted to actually change the room into a Design Thinking room, the same team came back and objected and wanted to keep the room as it was: because they had figured out what meetings were best done in that kind of setting (and liked it that way). And for other purposes they simply chose a different room.

6. Beware of the "library effect"
Being part of conversations is great. But only if it concerns your work. So while teams like the fact that you are easily informed about what's going on in your team by "listening in" or being able to easily contribute, if the communication "flows over" from some neighboring team that is unrelated then it's considered "noise". So better make sure that teams are acoustically separated from each other. Otherwise you will quickly end up in what we call the "library atmosphere": everybody is so concerned about disturbing someone else with their talk that no one dares to make any noise at all any more. The result is an artificially silent space: No one wants to speak because you feel everybody else in the room can understand every single word.
So the more open a space is, the better your sound design needs to be. Concrete floors and bare ceilings, as stylish this may be as an "industrial look", are probably not a good idea while carpets, sound absorbing ceilings and "sound breakers" in the room can make a big difference. Some glass walls (or real walls) and sound-proof doors are a great idea as well from time to time. Not everything has to be completely "open".
As a result, we have put glass walls around the "team living rooms" that were originally openly placed within the teams regular workplaces. The effect is that these spaces now get used for various purposes by the team -- informal meetings, face-to-face discussion, reading, relaxing with a coffee after lunch... The glass walls shield sounds, but keep the open and light atmosphere overall.

7. Fun is a serious thing in Germany
So you have to plan for those things very thoroughly as well ;-) We turned some former server rooms into a pool billiard and a kicker room. Who works seriously needs to have some serious fun from time to time...

We have made several surveys with people after we moved in: If asked whether they want to rather stay in the new office space or move back into the old office layout, roughly 2/3 prefer the new one over the old one. This is after 15 months "living" here roughly. This result was showing up after we had done an intensive "care-taking" phase immediately after moving in, collected feedback from the teams and adjusted dozens of specific details here and there based on input we had received. We now consider the concept a success overall, with admittedly the potential for further improvements as mentioned above. There's always things to improve...

So that's my personal experiences with our Office Space for Teams project, without the claim of completeness or final truth. I love to work in the new office space. But that, of course, is personal preference and taste.

P.S.: Uh, I forgot, we heard some concerns about "private space" in an open office environment. Developers (sometimes even managers) are a creative species. Nature always finds it's way... ;-)

Think "Brain Surgery". Think "Marriage". Think "Three Sixty Kickflip".

Bjoern Goerke — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 12:23:31 GMT

I've written about it before, but in late 2008, we started a major transformation of our SAP NetWeaver development approach, processes and organization: We made a bold move with my world-wide distributed, 2000 people organization to adopt Lean and Agile Software development methodologies in a large-scale, systematic and consistent manner. The transformation was a major project and I have blogged about it on the SAP Community Network before (see my blog posts Square One, Good Riddance and Different people). The transformation was a major effort over several years and is still ongoing today -- Lean and Agile are a journey, a mindset, not a one time act of implementation. In the meantime, we have added additional methodologies, e.g. Design Thinking, into our set of tools and they actually fit very well with Lean and Agile.

When we started the whole transformation, we often got critical remarks from people in our own organization who were concerned that Lean was a methodology originating in production environments -- Lean was invented by Toyota in the 1940s already -- and was not a fit for Software Development. That's when I started to think about how to convince people that Lean (and Agile) was more than something for the automotive industry. Even in retrospective and after having had hundreds of individual talks and discussions around Lean, I like my original storyline around Lean Software Development back then. And I thought it might be worth sharing... So here's my "dog and pony show" presentation why Lean is relevant for any larger Software Development organization:

Lean Production goes back to Toyota. Taiichi Ohno introduced it first in 1940. It was originally targeted at manufactoring. A lot of criticism we hear about Lean in Software Development seems to come from the wrong perception that we would believe we can apply this 1:1 to our business. But we know we are not building cars – luckily!

We are in Software Development which is non-deterministic by its nature. It’s much more like animation movie making or modern architecture – you need to get the craftsmanship right, but more important to success is the creative and innovative character of what you are doing. It is a creative process, it’s an information creation process, learning is part of the journey and hence change is inherent to Software development. So rather than ignoring change, one better sets himself up to cope with it right from the start.

Nevertheless, what is common between car manufacturers like Toyota and us in Software Development is the strong desire to sustainably and profitably stay in business. In essence, it means eliminating all the waste that keeps you from maximizing customer value.

Luckily, we can look outside and see that a lof of people and companies in the same business as we have thought about and made practical experience how Lean Software Development can work. Just to name some examples: IBM has e.g. transformed their DB2 business, Salesforce.com has changed an 500 employee organization to an “agile development model” in recent years as well… And Microsoft has radically changed their way of developing e.g. their OS platform and development tools following lean concepts and agile principles. Mary and Tom Poppendieck have condensed their findings into writing and the following slides will explain in a bit more detail what the 7 core principles of Lean Software Development are.

The first thing to keep in mind is the fact that “Lean” is not a one-time activity, some procedure to implement and then you are done. It is about mindset and about sometimes surprising or seemingly counterintuitive thinking. It is for sure about continuous reflection on how you are approaching things. The foundation of lean is about continuous improvement and respect for people.

Principle #1 is to eliminate waste – and without going into details, all Lean Production “waste types” translate naturally into software development process “waste types” as well…

The second core principle is about learning as much and as early as possible and about correcting what you are doing. Like training to ride a skateboard in a half- or full-pipe: repeat often, learn quickly, adapt in the next cycle. Obviously, this principle gets manifested in fixed takt cycles, shipping working software early and often, involving stakeholders and customers from the start in each takt evaluating and giving feedback about the software, doing Scrum reviews and retrospectives to thrive for perfection in execution, looking at software development from an end-to-end perspective, etc.

Fooling yourself to believe you can predict the future or making decision based on premature information at hand, can be very costly to revert if you have to change plans afterwards. So core principle #3 is about making decisions as late as possible – but not later! One example is to tackle problems with a set-based approach, trying out more than a single solution in parallel, only later deciding on the best option. Or doing early prototyping and first getting customer/stakeholder feedback…

Core Principle #4: Deliver as fast as possible – both internal and external. It’s the-fastest-to-market who wins, not the biggest! It helps to avoid “inventory” on the shelf, gives you feedback early and allows you to put the right things into the next (short) development cycle – maximizing customer value!

Most challenging is “think different” probably for management – which is why we need “lean freaks” in management. It is about the insight that you get the best results, if you empower the teams, the colleagues who know best how to get things done, how to approach a certain goal. It is about respect for people. It is about getting rid of “process police”: you manage things, and you release people.

If you want to deliver fast and are dependent on fast feedback, if you want to maximize customer value, then quality cannot be an afterthought. You have to build quality into the product and the process simultaneously. And quality is more than defect-free software! It is about change-friendly code and architecture, about usability, about flexibility – it is about the integrity of the whole product.

Finally, think from a customer perspective – think from the delivery side. Don’t just optimize one area, but strive for making the whole a success.

To become “lean”, all of the 7 core principles have to be considered jointly, not “pick some, ignore the others”…

That's why Lean and Agile make perfect sense in software development as well. Dear Automotive Industry -- no offense meant! ;-)

Long-living or rather living teams?

Bjoern Goerke — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 11:53:15 GMT

Another recurring question I have been running into and have heard heated debate about is whether our cross-functional teams have to be "long-living" (sometimes "forever-living"), i.e. they don't change their setup and mix of people, or should rather be "living" in the sense of adapting them optimally to the changing tasks at hand. Do you bring teams to work or work to teams?

As I had written in my prior blog post before, a well-functioning team is a huge asset. So you don't kill productivity achieved in such a team light-heartedly by ripping the team apart every now and then for arbitrary reasons. Rebuilding a team and getting it back into a high level of productivity is time-consuming and hence expensive.

At the same time, sticking to an existing team setup just because it's a functioning team but seeing that the product priorities and goals have over time changed so much the current team setup is more of a misfit than a fit, doesn't look reasonable either.

So somehow one needs to find a healthy balance between long-living and living team setups. As always, before triggering any change, why not empower those impacted and potentially best knowing what to do ideally, i.e. the teams themselves, and let them work it out on their own? ;-)

To co-locate or not to?

Bjoern Goerke — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 11:51:36 GMT

In late 2008, we started a major transformation of our SAP NetWeaver development approach, processes and organization: We made a bold move with my 2000 people organization spread out into development labs world-wide to adopt Lean and Agile Software development methodologies in a systematic and consistent manner. The transformation was a major change effort and I have blogged about it on our SAP Community Network before (see my blog posts Square One, Good Riddance and Different people). Looking at where we stand today as an organization, our ability to deliver customer value, to deliver reliably, to adapt in an agile manner, to interact with customers and to innovate our product portfolio in a high quality manner, I consider this multi-year transformation a big success!

With the move to systematic, standard Scrum methodology within the organization, cross-functional teams moved into the focus of our interest. "Cross-functional team" meaning people across the necessary disciplines working closely together as "one team", namely software developers, software architects, information developers, UX designers, Scrum Masters and Product Owners to name the usual suspects. The great thing about these "cross-functional" teams is the ability to optimize the interaction between everybody that you need at the table to get the product done: efficiently and effectively. The more closely we can get this team to cooperate and interact, the better. They will share a better understanding of the overall goal of what they are trying to achieve, communication paths have been shortened as much as possible, diverse skills will increase the ability of the team to develop better ideas and approaches to the problem at hand, delivering more customer-centric results. All of this is also supported by the principles behind the Design Thinking methodology. And last but not least, once being "standardized" on Scrum approach, you can start training and developing complete teams in certain further skills, e.g. agile test practices, increasing likelihood to establish new software engineering practices in a sustainable manner.

Well functioning teams are a huge asset! While we sometimes like to see software developers as creative artists that can barely be forced into any constraint -- at least that's the romantic point of view that I myself tended to fall into when I was still developing software myself --, a fact is that almost all bigger software development projects are not done by a single individual but quickly by a number of people that somehow need to collaborate to get something relevant done. So the infamous "lonely guy behind a door" is something one does not necessarily see as the ideal working setup if you want to keep your customers happy and your business secured. Well functioning Scrum teams with predictable and transparent progress on the tasks at hand can be a big relief here.

Most of the time where I have seen teams to be dysfunctional or failing, have less been a general issue with working in cross-functional (Scrum) teams but rather could be attributed to the following:

1. Bad cut: The team did not work on a common problem, but was just a collection of people working on unrelated individual topics; sometimes "cutting" teams in a different way made this issue disappear

2. Bad chemistry: There were individuals in the team that did just not buy into the team as such; sometimes just assembling teams a bit different made this issue disappear

Very often I have been hearing discussions about the question whether teams have to be co-located, i.e. all team members being in the same physical location, or could -- or even should -- rather be distributed, e.g. across different locations or timezones.

I think either position -- when taken rigorously -- is somewhat shortsighted. Here's why I think so:

We form cross-functional Scrum teams to make the group internal communication and interaction as efficient and "personal" as possible and get diverse skills to the table. Of course there are modern means of communication like phone, instant messaging/chat, Skype, telepresence etc. that have made the physical distance less of a problem. Still, if you imagine that a team sits in the same office physically and makes use of these communication means mentioned, you would ask yourself whether it wouldn't be more efficient to just ask the question across the table or listen in on some side-discussion going on spontaneously on the whiteboard behind at the wall? Would be strange, wouldn't it? So while it is not impossible to work together even when distributed, it is probably more efficient to be co-located. At least in most cases.

At the same time, there are good reasons to accept or even actively establish a "distributed" team: e.g. if your product manager needs to be local to your customers in a certain region or a certain market. Or if there is specific or outstanding talent that you did not find "locally" but had to look for abroad. And this was considered more valuable than the potential loss in optimal communication efficiency associated with it.

So I think the important thing here is: there may be very good and valid reasons to accept that a team is distributed, but those reasons should be well considered and consciously decided. Not arbitrary "accidents". And they must for good reason outweigh the benefits of co-location.

Rules should cover the common sense 80% case. Exceptions always apply.

Glory Days

Bjoern Goerke — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 11:49:46 GMT

I believe it's the best times ever for software developers.

Software developers never had more influence than today. Look at companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, SAP and others, to name just a few, that have made it into the top ranks of fortune 500 companies within the past few years largely based on software assets directly or indirectly. Starting as startups and outgrowing many other industry players by sheer speed and total market capitalization. All based to a large extent on the work and intellect of software developers.

At the same time, it has never been easier and cheaper for a software developer to get her hands at an abundance of hardware power for a bargain price and software components for free:

Cloud computing with hourly or resource based hardware subscription prices make upfront investments into expensive computer infrastructure unnecessary
There are few problems where there wouldn't be a number of Open Source software components available on the Internet free of charge to be thrown at the problem you're trying to solve. The tools necessary, you get for free as well.
You are not familiar with any technology used? No problem: There's tons of information on the Internet, readily accessible if you have a rough idea what to "google" for. And if you are tired of reading, how about all the video tutorials on YouTube?
You need to market your product? It has never been easier and cheaper to get your message out to millions of people via social media.
Last but not least, the Apple Store or Google Play allow you to easily distribute your product to millions of potential users -- and they even do the invoicing for you.

Back then when I started developing software myself, things were quite different. You had to invest in hardware upfront, software libraries and frameworks were rather the exception than the rule, the Internet did not exist and what you needed to learn you were teaching yourself out of books that you got in University libraries and bookstores if you were lucky.

I can still remember that during my first "professional" software project -- I was freelance student programmer at SAP in 1988 -- I was coding a graphical windowing system on my own as part of some graphical org chart rendering and manipulation product that connected to an R/2 Human Resource backend system initially and later to an R/3.

These graphical windowing systems were state-of-the-art on the computers I knew from home, a Commodore Amiga or the famous Atari 512, but if it came to Personal Computers in the office environment, the DOS console was still predominant. As Microsoft Windows was still not something to be assumed commonly available at customer sites, I had to come up with my own solution. So I coded a windowing library, mouse drivers, clipping algorithms, UI control libraries, printer driver code etc. What a stupid idea from today's perspective, but back then? OK, perhaps it was even stupid back then... But nobody kept me from doing it ;-) The more concerning thing though is the following: How often do we make the same decision today? Re-invent rather then reuse? That's why I believe Open Source is the way to go in many many cases.

"Back then" as a developer, you were basically working in a single programming language that only changed every few years. I started as a student in seventh grade with Basic on a Commodore VC20 that a friend of mine had invested into. Only to figure out quickly that the really cool and fast stuff needs to be done in 6502 assembler/machine code. I can still remember one family vacation as a highschool student when I was writing a hundred pages of assembler program "freestyle" with paper and pen at the beach in the shade to later on type it in when I was back home -- LOL.

Later I switched to Pascal, Modula II, Java and C/C++ if it came to "serious" programming languages. It was only when I ported the ABAP kernel on all the SAP supported Operating System platforms from C to C++ compilation -- I wanted to embed an XML parser I had written in C++ into it -- that I blew up the kernel's binary to a size of more than 100MB due to the C++ debug information required oll of a sudden. That was when someone wise pressed the emergency button and decided to promote me away from development into management to make sure I don't create further trouble ;-).

Today, you have to handle a much bigger number of computer languages if you want to stay up to date with the trendy programming environments. The number of special purpose Domain Specific Languages is constantly growing, each of them often coming with their own specific environment and libraries, and JavaScript is on the best way to establish itself as the universal glue language not only between all the other domain specific languages and frameworks but also as a bridge between the gazing crater between client-side and server-side software development skills.

While in a way the fundamental principles and truths about software engineering and computer science have basically not changed over time, I believe that formerly as a software developer you were much more busy doing the nitty-gitty detail, from the ground up, fixing one screw after the other individually kind of development work and today as a software developer you are much more busy with "orchestrating" how you put powerful libraries, components and frameworks together. It's like getting from building a car in a handcrafted manner to industrial mass production of cars from pre-fabricated components. The impact you can create as a single software developer, as a team or a software company, is by factors bigger than a few years ago.

What hasn't changed though, is the enormous fun and satisfaction that comes out of the creative work that software development meant back then and still means today. "Look, mom! Look what I have created!!!"

Hey, how come I feel so old all of a sudden???? ;-)

For those who think Java is dead in SAP world

Sonali M S — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:43:37 GMT

First of all, this blog does not focus about what is good or not. Instead the focus is mainly on the recent technological advancement which we all have witnessed and which calls for all the best things available today to come forth.

For the past few years, with tremendous growth of SAP delivered standard applications designed in Sap Webdynpro ABAP, there has been a serious buzz going around that slowly but definitely Java will be wiped off from the SAP’s landscape. With more focus from the point of view of whether to adapt Webdynpro Java or Webdynpro ABAP as a design strategy, this assertion slowly caught the attention that why none of the newly developed screens were in WDJ, rather WDA- be it ESS, MSS packages, SRM, CRM , etc business packages hosted onto SAP Netweaver Portal.

With the introduction of EhP5 for ESS, came in the use of NWBC- which totally does not need SAP Portal(a Java based tool) to host the screens. With such steps coming in, foundation was becoming stronger in the technology world that is only ABAP and ABAP based engines which would stay in the long run. Little thought was given to the fact that UWL(Universal WorkList), a prime feature for SAP Portal, is still, a Webdynpro Java based application.

As we all know in recent years, there has been tremendous focus on the new technology innovation areas- specifically mobility, analytics & cloud based solutions. Even for SAP, this was the time to think beyond the in-premise application and take them to cloud. With all sort of new features coming up as part of technology innovation, we see a mix of native applications, web applications, online, offline applications which make the best use of latest available design features. All need the data to be processed in real time, interoperability across all platforms and of course anytime anywhere access with full security. The buzz these days is about Sap’s product HANA, the analytical appliance with great features and answers today’s Big Data concern. It has got some exceptional features and can even support non- SAP systems in the landscape. The end result is excellent!! How many of us have put their thoughts about the base on which it runs? As per the master guide- SAP HANA Box needs Java to be installed too- as it is needed for the SAP HANA Studio on SAP HANA System. Besides this, there is a wide usage of JDBC connectors to support data from all sources.

When we talk about interoperability across devices (from the mobility point of view), again there is a big role to play by the application developers who have strong knowledge of JDBC connectors to support SAP and non-SAP systems related data.

With the advent of cloud and more heterogeneous sources getting into the landscape, the use of Java in its various versions has become a necessity to achieve interoperability across all platforms.

Java will not die, because Java cannot die in SAP’s world. In other words, SAP has given it a more prominent position in the system landscape.

The simple things in life...

Bjoern Goerke — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:23:18 GMT

Often it is the simple things in life that bring you most happiness and joy.

That's why we have worked hard over the past two SAP NetWeaver releases or Enhancement Packages (which are for technology effectively minor releases in the terminology of the rest of the world as we do not support switchable functionality like the SAP Business Suite) to simplify the parallel code lines and version numbers of SAP NetWeaver.

And since the most simple approach is a single code line, we've simply gone for that one.

So while in the past, we had two parallel development code lines of our NetWeaver platform, one underlying the SAP Business Suite as "stable core" applications infrastructure, e.g. the Application Server ABAP, labeled version 7.0x (e.g. 7.00, 7.01, 7.02, you got it), and a separate one for our "faster innovation cycle" standalone SAP NetWeaver "hubs" like SAP NetWeaver Portal or SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration, labeled version 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 7.31 respectively. Confused? Don't worry! You are not alone. And there's more: For our on-demand Business ByDesign solution we had started to build a multi-tenant, HANA-optimized version of our Application Server ABAP, internally labeled 8.0x. In parallel. Again a separate code line.

"I'm confused... No, wait... Maybe I'm not…" [Unknown]

Now, luckily, we got the message from our customers (and we even got confused internally from time to time) and simplified things again: with SAP NetWeaver 7.03(underlying SAP Business Suite 7 Enhancement Package 6) and SAP NetWeaver 7.31 hubs, we have a single, identical ABAP application server again! We merged the two 7.0x and 7.x code lines. And with SAP NetWeaver 7.4 -- the next backward compatible Enhancement Package or minor release version of this combined 7.0x/7.x code line, you will even get major improvements ported back from our on-demand operations optimized ABAP server version. Plus, to complete the picture, you will get optimized support for SAP Hana with it as well. All in one single code line, that we will continue to evolve in a backward compatible manner. And in sync with the SAP Business Suite release cycle.

Our release numbers will reflect this simplicity in the future: 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, ...Got it? Actually, just in case you haven't recognized it yet: it says 7.x all the time. Emphasis being on 7. So SAP NetWeaver will remain backward compatible.

Simple enough?

Where we're going with SAP NetWeaver...

Bjoern Goerke — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 11:50:37 GMT

I quite often get questions on what's happening with our SAP NetWeaver platform and what direction it is taking. While I could easily spend an hour on elaborating this in detail, let's not bore you to death but rather try to give you the quick elevator pitch.

First of all, it is important to understand that we have more than 70.000 productively used SAP NetWeaver systems out there with our customers. Around half of those are underlying applications infrastructure for our SAP Business Suite solution, the other half is "standalone" NetWeaver hubs like SAP NetWeaver Portal or SAP NetWeaver Process Integration. So our customers are not only using SAP NetWeaver to run their mission-critical core applications, but also to extend and integrate those solutions with both SAP and non-SAP IT landscapes for processes and their end users.

It is clear that SAP NetWeaver, our core technology platform, is therefore absolutely strategic to the business of our customers and partners. And so it is for SAP! As a consequence, we keep investing into this core technology platform. Main investment areas are of course the further improvement of the capabilities of the NetWeaver components in detail, but specific efforts flow into the areas of further simplifications in system landscape management, e.g. through our SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management (LVM) solution, extensive integration into SAP Solution Manager for end-to-end solution management, business downtime optimization through e.g. Near Zero Downtime Maintenance procedures, usability enhancements like SAP UI5, NetWeaver Business Client with Sidepanel and many many more.

One of the clear constraints under which we keep evolving this core SAP NetWeaver infrastructure is strictly backward compatibility. As I had written in one of my prior blog posts, we have consolidated the various NetWeaver release lines into a single one (starting with the merged NW 7.03 and 7.31 ABAP lines) and will keep shipping additional "Enhancement Packages" or releases in a compatible, "non-disruptive" manner in sync with SAP Business Suite.

At the same time, our technology portfolio has grown beyond the core SAP NetWeaver solution bundle over the past years: SAP NetWeaver Gateway, SAP NetWeaver Identity Managament, SAP NetWeaver Single-Sign On and others carry the NetWeaver brand but are not per se part of the solution bundle and it's release cycle.

We've been harmonizing the independent schedules, but currently they are a bit shorter than those of the NetWeaver bundle to allow us to bring new capabilities to market quicker in these younger ones of our NetWeaver products.

While we keep investing significantly into the classical SAP NetWeaver core platform as described above, we have to take into consideration that the whole IT industry is currently experiencing major changes, driven by a number of mega trends. Most prominent within those trends are the areas of Big Data, of Cloud computing and Mobile. These topics are reflected in our innovative extensions into the realm of SAP HANA, our in-memory, column-store database platform, our SAP NetWeaver Cloud platform (aka NEO or HANA Cloud Platform) and various extensions into the Mobile platform space.

In the area of SAP HANA, our blazingly fast completely in-memory, column-store database, we're evolving NetWeaver along three directions:

SAP HANA

First, we port all of our NetWeaver offerings to HANA as a fully standard-compliant SQL database. We've done that for ABAP already, as it is used in SAP Business Warehouse on HANA since May 2012. But we're also porting our JEE engine and all the NetWeaver hubs to HANA and will make those available to the market during the course of the next months.

Second, we are optimizing our SAP NetWeaver portfolio by taking specific advantage of the unbelievable speed of SAP HANA. One obvious example is our Business Rules engine, which we have re-implemented in HANA itself to bring the rules execution as close to the data itself as possible and therefore be able to reduce evaluation that otherwise have taken hours down to mere seconds. Imagine what these factors of performance improvements mean e.g. to customer segmentation for marketing purposes or data analysis in the area fraud detection.

Finally, we are bringing completely new capabilities to our SAP NetWeaver platform, like we did with SAP Operational Process Intelligence, the newest kid on our SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration portfoilo, that allows Lines of Business to monitor and react in realtime to custom defined KPIs on processes that run across a complex system landscape, whether it is implicit processes running through many users in an ERP system, or classic Workflow processes or business processes executed in our BPM solution. This solution wouldn't be possible without the power of SAP HANA.

Cloud

What you need to definitely check out -- and where it is actually extremely easy to get your hands dirty with -- is our SAP NetWeaver Cloud platform. It is our open and standards-based development platform-as-a-service for Java developers with the ability to plug in additional frameworks like node.js or php in the near future. It can furthermore host a variety of contemporary, standard programming models for enterprise class application development like Spring, Ruby and others. You can use it to extend your existing business processes quickly and easily into the cloud with a compelling mobile experience, use it as an extension platform to, for example, SuccessFactors solutions, or build brand new applications from scratch to meet new business needs. You take care of your application, SAP takes care the rest!

We now offer free, unlimited developer licenses and you can easily sign-up online at our Dev Center in the SAP Community Network. Once you've update your Eclipse Dev Environment with the NW Cloud tools from our Eclipse Update Site, you'll have your first hello world app developed, deployed and up and running within 5 minutes max. Promised!

SAP NetWeaver Cloud offers native integration with SAP and other back-end applications, I comes as a standards-based development and run-time environment, so there is no vendor lock-in and no steep learning curve for developers. It offers Portal capabilities through SAP NetWeaver Cloud Portal for quickly building appealing, mobile-enabled websites that connect applications, reports, and unstructured content from various sources. With its federated Identity Management and Single-Sign On solution you can seamlessly access applications, even across on-premise and cloud. And last, but not least, it gives you access to the speed and scale of in-memory computing technology with SAP HANA! All of this running in the SAP Cloud, managed by SAP for you!

And we are adding new services every quarter. The next ones to expect are Integration-as-Service, which is the cloud extension of our SAP NetWeaver Process Integration platform. And "Mobility-as-a-Service" that our colleagues from the SAP Mobile Platform are developing together with us.

Mobile

"Mobility-as-a-Service" comes with the official name SAP Mobile Platform Cloud Edition. It naturally complements our on-premise SAP Mobile Platform. We plan to make it available within 2013. It allows you to extend your on-premise business processes and solutions via our Cloud infrastructure to mobile devices of various sorts and form factors for a certain set of mobile applications. It supports the on-boarding of users and their devices, helps you manage your mobile applications and their access rights, and securely connects them with the processes in your on-premise backend if needed.

Two further important examples on how we are evolving SAP NetWeaver into the mobile space are SAP NetWeaver Gateway, which allows you to access to business processes and data running in the SAP Business Suite using standard protocols http(s), REST and OData. With those, it's extremely easy and efficient to access existing backend functionality from mobile applications, whether natively coded in Google Android or Apple iOS or whether you're using one of the many mobile HTML5-based SDKs. One of which is SAP UI5.

SAP UI5 is our standards-based HTML5 control library. It supports not only mobile devices running e.g. Android or iOS, smartphones or tablets, but also all major desktop browsers. It comes with a rich set of fully customizable UI controls, from simple buttons to complex dynamic layout containers or charts for analytical data. It is based on jQuery and can be extended using custom-written or 3rd party UI control libraries.

So this was thought to give you just a quick glimpse into what is currently happening with SAP NetWeaver and what the directions are into which we are taking things...

Bing, 1410th floor. Are we there already??? ;-)

P.S.: All the usual disclaimers apply...

What Developers do well and what drives us nuts - written by a Basis person

Chris Kernaghan — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 16:07:41 GMT

This is a post I have written and rewritten many times over the last few months, I still find it imperfect and will probably catch many flames for it - but what the hell, "If you're not creating trouble, you're not creating much" as Hugh MacLeod says. This blog will attempt to talk about certain developer practices, how it affects Basis/Technical people. I am writing this to start debate so we can explore a more common language and understanding that build a culture supporting philosophies like Lean and #DevOps.

Also I fully expect, in fact I demand, that someone write a rebuttal to this post :-).

I have spent the last 9 months immersed in #DevOps stuff, trying to find ways to engage the SAP ecosystem with it and see how SAP, customers and consultants can learn the lessons of #DevOps the same way it learnt and adopted Agile. So as we have seen in previous blogs, #DevOps is built around a concept of

C - Culture

A- Automation

M- Measurement

S - Sharing

At first glance these are quite technical and operations oriented things, I was a lot more interested in the Developers and how I as a technical person can help/work with them to create something amazing. My first step was to start to learn to talk their language, something which is like a difference dialect of SAP. Then to make matters even more complex, I also had to learn the language of the Web world as well - something which was a lot harder and by no means complete, I reckon I am talking and reading WebDev stuff at a 5 year old level :-). I have been ably assisted in this journey by a lot of friends, DJ Adams, Ethan Jewett, Steve Rumsby, Matthias Steiner and others (you know who you are)

Many administrators I have come across have no idea about developer practices, they know the rudiments of how developers work in the ABAP stack, but very little about Java, ADS or WebDynpro. I am nearly sure that some administrators, especially those who are not co-located with their developers, think that there are sacrifices made at the full moon to create the code or the code is produced through Ouija boards. So as I have said above this a miss-mash of thoughts to try and kick start closer collaboration and also start to alter some practices to make life easier.

1. I need you to help me speak your language and I need you to learn mine.

Especially non-ABAP developers - you know who you are, you have ignored us for long enough, we have let you get away with it and it stops now! We all spend time working on projects, and our managers make us sit in different areas so we can be with our teams. Is it any wonder we have lost the language of the birds, now I am not talking about being fluent or fully understanding how things are done but as a minimum I think we should have a common understanding.

2. I need to be a part of your change process.

Between us we must be able to agree on how we get code into the Production system. There are people who set down rigid rules, there are people who use 3rd party tools to enforce a process. There are those who just fly by the seat of their pants. Bottom line - there HAS to be a process and we all have to abide by it, live with it. Stop trying to go around it in order to get your 'little' fix into production because someone did not test it right! Before the integration of many of the SAP products into CTS+, I wonder how many Basis people actually understood or could support moving changes through the landscape of NWDI, CE and Business Objects. I propose that between developers and Basis people, we begin to understand the following - and yes this is very simple stuff, but if we do not understand the basics, then we cannot build good lean processes.

What does a change look like in each type of system
How does that change get migrated through the system
How do those changes get applied
How do those changes get tested
How do we ensure the quality of the changes that enter the process

Someone recently asked me - why do Basis even do transports surely our time could be better spent on other things. Something else to ponder as you discuss the points above together.

3. An extract of the transport history IS NOT a transport build list.

Let me say it again, just in case I have not made myself clear - the next developer who tells me that I should use the Transport history of a system as the release build list, will be punished in the most severe way possible. You and your team are the developers, it is your development - do your job and track your changes, I will help you - I will even provide some tools or tricks which will make life easier. Do not treat me like your mother picking up after you - you are not a rock star and I do not work for you, I want to work with you.

4. Object Management and conflict resolution

If you are working in a BAU environment, please, please, please - release your tasks quickly and often, not your transports (although this would be nice). This ensures that the object locks get released and other people can use the objects. Of course this creates dependencies between transports with overtakes and undertakes. You know what, if we have worked together and have a solid process, we can mitigate that through both tools and processes. I have refereed enough bun fights between developers who need the same object but one has it locked - bored of doing that and I want to do sexy fun work.

5. Integrate your code quickly, the job is not done until the system works.

Often as a Basis guy, I am supporting the development work of multiple vendors - and everyone is doing their own development in their own environments. The nightmare starts when Integration testing starts, I will admit that we in SAP have a major deficiency in testing. We often do not use automated testing, and that is a travesty in it's own right. So testing is a pain, when dealing with multiple code streams with multiple vendors, it has always appeared to me - that all developers keep their code streams as separate as possible and then at the last second merge them. This has 3 effects

Development have to scramble like mad to develop fixes, increasing the number of changes
Transport sequencing becomes ultra important, and someone decides to use the import history as the sequencing method
The flurry of change can derail the change process as priorities get escalated.

I have been thinking for a long time of two potential ways to improve this situation.

Everyone can have a development system, but there is a single QAS, Pre-Prod

A dual track landscape, one BAU and one Project. All code co-exists within the landscape

The bottom line is this - your development job is not done until the code works properly in my Production system. The sooner you get your code integrated with everything else, the sooner it can be tested and reduce the last minute panics. Of course that does assume that all the developers from all the parties play nicely with each other.

6. You are not always getting your own environment

This is an extension of the item above, I do not have limitless hardware or resources. I have to make a judgement call on what resources you get to run your project. This means that you may not get your own environment to work in. That does not mean I hate you, or do not value your project enough - often it means I actually can't do it, or it means I am not going to stretch my team further in supporting another set of environments so you do not have to be nice to other developers (or so it looks to us) Work with me, educate me on your requirements - do not try to pull the wool over my eyes and try to get more than you need. Let me help to support you with a brilliant service, rather than stretched to within an inch of my life and providing a crap service to everyone

7. Stop complaining to me that there is no test data in Development

This is an old one, but it is one of the most frustrating for both of us - I know you guys need good data to test with but it is not acceptable to do your unit testing in QAS. I want to help you get decent test data, I know that generating it is a nightmare and often belongs to the functional consultants as a task. Lets stop fighting with each other and gang up on the functional people to get them to actually do their job in supporting us for a change!

8. You manage to turn around code fixes in no time flat

I am always amazed by how developers know their systems and can turn around fixes to problems in no time. In fact if the truth be told, it makes me a little jealous sometimes.

9. You guys have bigger teams than we do

Often on projects or in BAU, developers outnumber the Basis guys - there are times, I am the only Basis guy assigned to a project. You have development colleagues you can bounce ideas off if you get stuck. I like the way you do stick together and support each other - a sweeping generalization I know but it is more often true than false.

From reading above, it looks like I find developers do more things wrong than right - nothing could be further from the truth, but the things above are mostly things that drive me nuts because we could be doing things much better. I look forward to reading your comments whether they be positive or negative.

Confused with different SAP Business Suite Releases ?? Read it !!

Sunny Pahuja — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:25:18 GMT

Are you confused with different releases of SAP Netweaver and how to relate them with SAP Business Suite products? Are you also confused while upgrading one product in your landscape while others are on old version?

In this blog, I tried to relate different releases of SAP Business Suite products with SAP Netweaver release.

This blog will also give you an idea about compatibility between different releases while we upgrade one product in our landscape and other products remains on previous release.

SAP Business Suite 7 Innovations 2011

SAP Business Suite 7 innovations 2011 is the latest release of SAP Business Suite offering. This version includes SAP Enhancement Package 6 for SAP ERP 6.0, SAP Enhancement Package 2 for SAP CRM 7.0 and SAP Enhancement Package 2 for SAP ERM 7.0 and so on.

SAP Enhancement Package 3 for SAP Netweaver 7.0 is the basis for this release of SAP Business Suite.

Below is the list of release of different components for different SAP Business suite products.

SAP EHP2 for SAP CRM 7.0

SAP EHP6 for SAP ERP 6.0

SAP EHP2 for SAP SRM 7.0

SAP Enhancement Package 1 for SAP Netweaver 7.3

SAP NETWEAVER 7.3 for Sybase ASE

SAP NetWeaver 7.3

Below table will give you an overview of which products can be combined with which version in the system landscape as part of Technology Innovation:

SAP Business Suite 7 Innovations 2010

SAP Business Suite 7 Innovations 2010 includes SAP Enhancement Package 5 for SAP ERP 6.0, SAP Enhancement Package 1 for SAP CRM 7.0 and SAP Enhancement Package 1 for SAP ERM 7.0 and so on.

SAP Enhancement Package 2 for SAP Netweaver 7.0 is the basis for this release of SAP Business Suite.

Below is the list of release of different components for different SAP Business suite products.

SAP EHP1 for SAP CRM 7.0

SAP Enhancement Package 1 for SAP CRM 7.0 for Sybase ASE

ii. SAP Enhancement Package 1 for SAP CRM 7.0

Kernel version: 720 patch number 46

SAP EHP5 for SAP ERP 6.0 for Cross Industries

SAP EHP1 for SAP SRM 7.0

i. SAP Enhancement Package 1 for SAP Supplier Relationship Management 7.0 for Sybase ASE:

ii. SAP Enhancement Package 1 for SAP Supplier Relationship Management 7.0

SAP Enhancement Package 2 for SAP NetWeaver 7.0

SAP Enhancement Package 1 for SAP NetWeaver Application Server for ABAP 7.1

Below table will give you an overview of which products can be combined with which version in the system landscape as part of Technology Innovation:

For more information, please refer to below SAP notes or guide.

774615- Support Package levels of ERP/ECC installations/upgrades

789220- Support Package levels for SAP NetWeaver installations/upgrades

819722- Support Package levels for SRM installations/upgrades

837413- Support Package levels for CRM installations/upgrades

Planning Guide- SAP Business Suite- https://websmp208.sap-ag.de/~sapidb/011000358700001397742010E.PDF