Did you know that “Project gateway” and “River” platforms were unveiled for the first time at Innovative Community Day at Bangalore? This is part-2 of “my-notes” of the Innovative Community Day at Bangalore. Part -1 is here: Innovative Community day at Bangalore - my notes
Benjamin Wesson & Sowmya Kapoor (& team) gave 2 back-to-back overview *** demo sessions on “River” and “Project Gateway” during which wheels already started churning in the minds of the awesome techies present there.
The Hybrid Model
Here’s how it went: 2 teams were formed (as a result of networking earlier in the day) and both teams selected their business cases (http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/events/Innovation+Weekend+Business+Cases). The teams got roughly 3 hours to get together, think, define the problem, divide the task and present the solution. Team #1 used “River” platform and Team #2 used “Project Gateway”. The River Team was mentored and helped by Benjamin Wesson and his team and the “Project Gateway” team was mentored by Sowmya Kapoor and her team.
It was only after 9 pm that things start to make sense for me. I learnt that both teams are working on similar business cases which in turn is a hybrid of 1 & 6 from the list of business cases: http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/events/Innovation+Weekend+Business+Cases
I’ve tried to briefly outline what the teams worked on below:
Team #1 : On River Platform
Business Case Overview: Hybrid of business cases #1 and #6. Build an application that helps in promoting campaigns through three media – facebook, twitter & human interaction; gets feedback and helps a person using a mobile application track response and recruit volunteers through these three media; and generate analytics that are accessible via mobile device. Ex. Blood Donation event. Announcement goes through various channels (Twitter, Facebook, Mobile). A certain # of people “volunteer” for the blood donation drive by replying via twitter, facebook or other mobile applications. Then an administrator(in this case person with the mobile device) is able to collect all the replies coming in from the various channels, compare and sign off the people against a pre-existing database. Also assess the effectiveness/response rate of replies per channel.
The team divided this business case into three main components and the following people worked on it.
- Database design group: creating the database where data is stored. Dynamically creating the data model. (Dipankar Saha, Reema & Priyanka with Benjamin Wesson as a mentor)
- There are three sub-groups which worked on three different interaction ports to capture data and send to the river platform: twitter, facebook and mobile(i.e. to create connection between River and twitter/facebook/mobile device). (Abesh on mobile, Himanshu & Arvind on facebook, Shobith & Arvind Bala on twitter with help from Juergen – ben’s team)
- The last part/team is to generate analytics on the mobile platform. (Madhusudan + Ram + Satheesh + Abhishek) used the schema from river and designed analytics using business objects explorer. The output is reports & analytics using BOE. They also prepared templates to handle data.
**I was helped by Pratik Talwar in drafting the summary for team#1. Pratik was at the community day in the capacity of a “Business process Expert” to help outline the business processes for the teams to work on.
**Benjamin Wesson, VP Solution Management of River Platform helped the team all through & his team also pitched in “remotely” to support the team in platform related issues.
Here’s the final presentation video of team #1
Team #2: On Project Gateway
Business Case Overview: Simply put they tried to connect two different worlds – one having structured data like SAP data and the other having unstructured data like Twitter, Facebook etc. have. Take the perspective of a company that is trying to build a product to help a customer do something like a “product survey campaign” through various unstructured channels such as facebook, twitter etc and then collect feedback through these channels. This feedback is sent to an ERP system out of which reports are generated to help different groups make informed decisions. This is made possible thanks to Project Gateway that works on REST based services and facilitates data in simple and easy to consume format which even the social media channels can take.
The following workflow is just an example of how the final solution will work:
- Company X wants to introduce a new product and gather feedback
- Company X uses “Project gateway” to push product catalogue to the unstructured world (like facebook)
- Company X’s facebook page (imagine one) is updated with new product information and fans/viewers are able to like and/or comment about the product
- This information is then collected and passed to an ERP system
- Forms and reports are generated that help inform different groups like marketing, sales etc.at company X about the product.
For this challenge project gateway provided 5 services to be used by the team. Here’s how the task was divided:
- Application server to interact with facebook and gateway (i.e. Connection between gateway and facebook) [ Mrinal Wadhwa, Amer and Ravi]
- An ABAP application that exposes a service to collect comments and other feedback from the central application server and trigger a workflow for ex: send an email [Durairaj Athavan Raja, Mithun Kumar, Gopi krishnan ]
- A client in Xcelcius to report and analyze product launch feedback data[Vishnu Jakhoria]
Somya & Yaad Oren helped in the ideation phase and defining the business problem.
**I was helped by Sowmya Kapoor, Solution Management Project Gateway, in drafting the summary for team#2. Sowmya & Yaad Oren helped team#2 all through in platform & business workflow related issues.
Here’s the final presentation video of team#2
Takeaways for me:
By now it must’ve been clear that I’m not a techie wiz but still I enjoyed being part of the community day because:
- Learnt about 2 new platforms and what they do – River & Project gateway
- I could appreciate just how quickly innovation can happen when a bunch of passionate, smart community members are around J
- I learnt a bit about the business cases which enhanced my understanding of the direction we are heading in technology today – mobile, faster, simpler etc
- Lastly, I enjoyed the community day because I could meet people I interacted with virtually. It’s always fun to do that.
Concluding Notes:
Here’s the link to part-1 of my blog on Innovative Community Day: Innovative Community day at Bangalore - my notes
marilyn.pratt/blog Blog: Innovative Community Day Live from Bangalore
Here's a brief snapshot of the things people were talking about throughout the day.
Thanks for reading!
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