On the previous posts that I share with you, we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of being a SAP Freelancer. That started a great discussion around healthcare and what you needed for it. That is one of the things we are fortunate not to have a big issue with in Denmark. I wanted to share some of my suggestions how to a successful freelancer

Networking

When you are working as a SAP freelancer, obviously you create and build connections from different companies to long time clients this makes a SAP freelancer more popular of his profession. In order to establish the trust and confidence of your clients, you need to have a blog or have a social platform like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin so that the people that will be working with you will know where to contact you and see your portfolios.

Recruiters

As you go along on your journey as a freelancer doing SAP projects, the challenges for looking projects will be difficult which is why online recruiters that are in need of SAP freelancers whether a short term or long term collaboration should be prepared with the interview. You need to remember that each client and recruiter are looking for that skills that will meet their needs and you as a SAP freelancer should be able to deliver the necessary product.  Make a list of your portfolios and recent projects you have accomplished so that once a recruiter would need a sample of your work, you have something to present and remember also make a list of those references where the project was successful.

Get Help

With the various projects you would be dealing as a SAP freelancer, you will come across with the easy down to the difficult ones. Sometimes, you want to implement something but don’t know where to start. This is the time your connections works. Say if you’re just starting as a SAP freelancer, it is recommended that you get advice to Senior SAP freelancers for an advice of a particular project. You’ll gain something that will help you finished your project or solve the problem.

Have 6 Months Buffer

As a SAP freelancer, projects can stay for long or end in a breeze. A timeline for a specific project that you chose is very important before accepting so that you have everything organized. If there is a big project that needs to be work on in fast manner, then basically that translates to big money. You should manage to save some of those funds. It is always best to save for the rainy days. This scenario is to prepare yourself when you get sick or you need to have medication.

Know Your Rates

When you work on particular project may it be as freelance SAP Consultant or moderator, you should be able to gauge your rates competitively. If the client is negotiate on your rate perhaps you could give them some leeway but if the project is too tedious and the budget of the client is small then don’t be hesitant to ask for an additional but just make sure you’ll deliver.

New Skills

As a SAP Freelancer, you will faced a number of project some may require you to learn new skills or study new software. It is important that you keep yourself updated so that if a client questions you on the SAP Project you are working, you’ll be able to provide a definite answer or a solution to their query. New skills also translate more revenue. The more complex a project is the more money you can ask on your client.

Blog your Contributions

With all the hard work you have accomplished in completing those SAP projects for different clients, you should be able to share these things to your audience. This will allow you to be recognizing as an expert on SAP and be able to help other aspiring SAP freelancers.

Whether you’re just starting as a novice or already an expert in SAP Freelancing, with the right attitude, dedication and effort, you can never go wrong with your career.

What is your suggestion to coming freelancers wither her or on my own blog of the same topic

When we talked about SAP PI architecture, there is a lot of different areas to be confused about. You need to take note that the SAP PI contains multiple component which only means, those components worked together as a group for various integration instances. The components are usually applied in design time, configuration time and during run time.

In this video, you will get the full explanation about SAP PI,

On the video I discuss into detail about System Landscape Directory (SLD) by showing three different models which means 2 systems working together on one SLD. In every Process integration there can be one or two SLD systems to which information are in stored.  In every SLD, there is are components installed to which every person can view on your landscape.

When you are working on SLD, you will go through a process which means a   number of actions. First thing that you would do is to provide brief information about yourself as the owner of the system which will recognize you as the administrator. This is commonly done in systems like the “RZ70” which allows you to disseminate information from one system to the other like for instance, you want to transfer a file from a client, or assign in to a specific data base or allow access to a client to your system.

Actions can be replicated every 10 hours. You can actually duplicate all kind of systems in the “SLD Production” this contains a number of business systems. It is advisable that if you want to replicate your systems on “SLD Production” you can do it through the “SLD Production” right away to update it but you can also transport information coming from SLD through SLD Production.

Now we moved on to development in PI and how do we keep our systems organized. First thing we need to do is update our system and integrate incremental export functionality. Basically we need to back up information in the QA area then transport and import the data and systems.

But before you take this process, make sure you test them; this suits best when you are making changes in quality or production. When the changes you made in the QA, then you can transfer it production. But if you’re doing a configuration it can really be difficult. Hence when it comes to SI bridge building and other set ups make sure you to replicate your information and have a back up.

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I have accepted to be facilitating the Danish IT organisation’s SAP network group. I am really looking forward to our first meeting especially meeting all the members. I hope that I can share some insights how I see SAP and the mentor program.

It is great to meet your local fellow SAP people, to share expertise and have a good time.  I had not heard about the Danish IT organization (Dansk IT) before they contacted me and asked whether I would facilitate the group.

As I don’t know the members it gave me a couple of challenges to plan the first meeting. What should I put on the agenda, that everybody will find interesting.

One of the big themes at SAP is Mobility. I selected it because it is something that everybody needs to learn,  myself included. So far I have never had the opportunity to work on any SAP mobile projects.

I have been fortunate to convince fellow Australian SAP Mentor John Moy to give a SAP Mobility presentation via Skype. Our non existing travel budget just doesn’t allow us to fly him over.  Check out John’s latest blog post around Charting SAP's mobile apps to get a feeling for what he is going to cover. Ample opportunity to ask questions will be provided too.

I just got informed that a former colleague Bjarke Brandt, will also be giving a presentation on his view on mobility. It hope that those two presentations will give a good background for discussions.

My good friend and networking expert Carina Heckscher, will close out the event. She will help us become better at networking. Can’t wait to hear her presentation and the exercises she has promised to facilitate. They will come in handy for the upcoming meetings.

If you are in Denmark and you want to be part of this SAP professionel network group check out the site http://dit.dk/Netvaerk/SAP_professionel.aspx. The first meeting this year will be on the 8th of March.

In late December 2011 I performed a survey to learn how people see their skills in the SAP PI space. There were 40 respondents on the survey, which gave a good indication of some trends. But I don't think it has statistical significance, it is way too long time I have had statistics to remember how to calculate it.  Watch the video to get a commentary on the results.

I wanted to learn what people found most important, and also where they saw they needed to improve in 2012. I did have some areas that I expected to be interesting. I got the following responses.

   I have highlighted those areas that I find most interesting and people voted for.  I have a video showing my comments to the survey.

I had a task where I was working on creating some webservice for a client. One of my issues was that I needed to have authentication so it was only users running as administrators. We had implemented a webservice solution on Netweaver 7.0. On NW70 there were no problems in setting up the security settings. But on NW 7.3 I ran into problems. I decided to share this part with you, so you don't have to find the solution yourself.

I was under the impression that it was possible to use the following statements to make sure that only administrators can call the webservice.

@RolesAllowed("Administrator")                     

@AuthenticationDT(authenticationLevel=AuthenticationEnumsAuthenticationLevel.BASIC)                     

public                    class AuthlogonBean implements AuthlogonLocal {

The allowed roles statement worked. Just remember to fill in the ejb-j2ee-engine with the security-permission and the role map.

But the authenticationDT does not work on the systems that I have tested. This part could not work, and destroyed the endpoints. I just removed the line as seen in the video.

Then I created a new end point in the NWA.

Watch the video to see more on how this works.

I know that this is just a work around and that the problem should be fixed, but I could manage to find a solution for it.

I hope that this helps you.

In this post I’ll share my thoughts on the last days of #SAPTECHED and #SAPPHIRENOW in Madrid. Sorry that it took a little longer to publish them.

Keynotes:

Jim Snabes keynote: It was impressive to hear about how the company is working and they are getting a lot of new clients and projects. There was a consistent message with previous and that there was support for the ERP stack until 2020. It would be fun to see what is coming as the next generation solution or if SAP can continue to upgrade to ERP for the next 6-8 years. Made me think, what will be the next version of ERP system? Will it require a major project.

Vishal Sikka: Here HANA was the main topic as well as Netweaver information. Think that HANA was able to give a 100.000 improvement on some reports for the Japanese camera distributer Yodobashi.

It was impressive that Redbull was able to migrate way BI to HANA in just 2 weeks, with 1.7 TB of data. If they are able to do it, then lots of other smaller companies do not have that excuse. Maybe Redbull had an unfair advantage in that perspective being able to have people work all night.

Nice to see that it was not just big enterprise companies in suits presenting their use cases.

I guess that a lot of other people have made comments and analysis of how the talks were and what they mean. This is just my ideas about them.

Sessions:

PMC 166 combining sap Netweaver BRM and SAP PI.

This was my only hands on session for this Teched. It seems fairly simple to use some of the Business Rules from BRM in the PI and the BPMs. It does make everything to let the business make the rules themselves. The developer will start with the initial rules and then the business has a portal to manage and update the rules. It will be really helpful if it is possible to move away from having business rules created in message mappings.

BPMN modeling

There was a nice lecture around BPMN and how it works. From what I saw it is not something that can easily be dealt with. From a modeling perspective it looks quite easy. There does seem be some areas where you have to think more about what is going on in the process. An issue to take into consideration is how splits are performed and made back to one process. Another issue is exception handling different then in BPEL and what should be done if something happens. It would be a good recommendation to read more into how BPMN works before making too many mistakes.

I learned that it is possible to convert BPEL to BPMN, but BPMN can be made much simpler, because of the nonlinear approach it have. So it will be a good thing to move to a smaller setting.

My documentation session     

I hosted an expert lounge session. There was something like 30 people in the beginning, which was quite overwhelming. It was on documentation, just documentation nothing fancy. It was nice to know that people found the topic interesting. There was a PI session that started after 15 minutes, where the number of participants disappeared.

Information

One good thing about the single stack it that it requires about half of the resources as the dual stack. Since PI is licensed per number of CPUs it can slash the license cost in half. That must be a pretty good business case for migrating to the single stack.

I also heard that the SFTP adapter would be included in the basis license for PI. The other adapters like AS2 will require a separate license.

Modeling in solution manager will also take place in BPMN, so the business side will also need to get their hands into some modeling. It means that they will be better at understanding our code for BPMs. The BPM code will probably end up looking a bit more complex than what is used in Solution Manager, because of the requirement for exception handling.

Around      

I did find it interesting to have the SAPTeched and SAPPHIRE co-located. Though I did not go see many SAPPHIRE sessions, I don’t know if they were not in my agenda or if they was not too interesting.

I was impressed with the number of Danes attending the event. I was told that there were 400 Danes at the events. It does looks promising for the state of the projects in Denmark.

Last week I was at a JCI Conference where I learned a bit about small talk that I have been using since then.

I’m a developer and it does not fall natural to start a conversation with anybody. It gets a too big task for me so I tend not to wanting to do it.

I wanted to share some of these ideas in a video, so watch the video below. It will hopefully be useful for you.

• The basic points that I point out in the video is
• The mindset for the small talk. Changing the mindset of a conversation did make a large change for me.
• Asking open ended questions
• Be there to create a relationship, not just share business cards.

But be sure to watch the video, since it does contain some extra insights.

I have been using SAP Process Integration for the last 7 years. And one of the biggest lessons that I have learned in the process is that naming conventions really matters.

I have created a video where I talk about how the naming conventions work and what you can use them to in your business.

I have been going thru quite a number of projects and I have learned something everything. I hope that you can learn something on this.

Get the video at

http://www.piarchitecture.com/sap-pi-naming/naming-conventions/     

ps. You need to optin with  your name and email. I’ll not be selling your email address.