shweta.kesarwani

    8 Posts

    While eagerly waiting for the 2010 SAP TechEd events at Berlin and Vegas, we still have some time left for the event at Bangalore. This year the custom development capabilities on SAP's on-demand solution Business ByDesign will be presented for the first time to the developer's community.

    There are three sessions planned at all the locations.

    Two lecture sessions:

    1) SAP Business ByDesign: Easy to Implement, Easy to Extend

    2) Developing SAP Business ByDesign Applications Using Partner Development Infrastructure

    and one hands-on session:

    3) SAP Business ByDesign E2E Application Development Using Partner Development Infrastructure and SAP Business ByDesign Studio

    These sessions are going to be very helpful in understanding the ByDesign architecture and the development tools, which is important and especially for those participants who plan to create applications on top of ByDesign in future.

    Working with the team preparing for these sessions at Bangalore, I am also interested in collecting inputs from the attendees at Bangalore regarding their expectations from the ByDesign sessions, apart from the application development tools.

    TechEd is the place where we share information and of course, not all participants would be developing apps on top of ByDesign. So what is that second set of participants looking forward to knowing about ByDesign at the TechEd? 

    It'd be great if both sets of participants could share their thoughts on this topic as that would help make the sessions (lectures, hands-on, demo pods, networking lounges) as informative as possible.

    So here's your chance to break the mystery around ByDesign - but it's upto you to ask for the information that you want.

    Looking forward to your comments. 

    The first ever SAP Inside Track at Bangalore was successfully held yesterday, 14th of August 2010.
                    To be very frank, I had absolutely no idea what it was about when I was approached sometime in May, to help in hosting the event at SAP Labs Bangalore.
    Slowly the idea started shaping up, with major efforts from three of the SAP mentors at Bangalore - Mrinal Wadhwa, Somnath Manna and Abesh Bhattacharjee.
    The event was planned to be as informal as possible as it was mainly about SCN community members coming together and sharing their ideas and expertise around technology and SAP.
    Accordingly, sessions were planned around topics which the mentors thought would be interesting for the attendees and about which they don't get to hear about much from other sources.

    So on the day, we got to a smooth start by first having the introductions (Craig Cmehil got people on "speed networking" which was a new and interesting idea for most of the attendees :-)). There were about 40 people in the room - so it took about half an hour for every one to get introduced to each other. Besides the people in the room, we had about 18 people attending it virtually via adobe connect.

    Thereafter, we started with the sessions. The opening session by Craig on Open Innovation at SAP was well presented and inspiring. Thereafter, Vaibhav Valecha and Karthik SJ from SAP introduced the audience to Business Blueprinting. Then Somnath took the stage by giving an informative session on SAP SNC. Thereafter, Anne Kathrine joined Mrinal and Craig via adobe connect to join the discussion on the state of Enterprise UIs. Each of these sessions was very interactive and the audience was as entusiastic to participate as the speakers were to answer their queries.

    At this juncture, we had the lunch break for which we had ordered Pizzas - which proved to be a good idea as people took slices in their hands and took the opportunity to talk with each other, instead of getting distracted by lunch!

    When we started after lunch, a few of the people had to leave - which is understandable it being a Saturday. Nonetheless, we still had a good number to attend the sessions by Michael Koch, Jon Reed, Dennis Howlett and Leonardo De Araujo , who joined the session virtually.  The sessions led to the discussion on the usefullness/not of SAP certifications and the audience shared their experiences with the certification process and how it was good/not so good for them.

    Thereafter, the event was concluded with some tea and cookies.

    All in all, the participants seemed to agree that it was a Saturday well spent in the company of fellow professionals sharing their ideas.There were suggestions of having something similar more often and may be more casually.

    The sessions were recorded and would be available soon. Until then, you can see the pictures from the event here:

    Set 1

    Set 2

    Shweta Kesarwani

    Blog versus Article

    Posted by Shweta Kesarwani Jul 22, 2010

    Recently I have seen a spurt of blogs that describe step by step process of doing some technical task - e.g. how to set up a system for xyz task, configuration settings and so on. Now, ideally that belongs to documentation. But as we all know, documentations seldom describe the practical aspects that we face in our day to day work. The documentation is more about standard behaviour of software rather than the tricky things that we encounter almost everyday. But thanks to the enthusiastic community members who like to share their experiences, one search on the community lists out several solutions for the trickiest of problems. You can get the answers on forums, articles, wikis and sometimes blogs.

    Now, though everyone has a right to choose the medium of sharing the expertise - blogs/forums/wiki/article, but there are certain protocols that if followed by everyone, then life becomes a little easier for those looking for answers. Just for a moment imagine if there were no defined words/grammar for a language and each one tried to form his own words and grammar, then what a chaotic situation would it have been!

    So similarly in the community, it would be great if all of us understand what content would be appropriate to be an article or even part of a wiki, versus what comes as a blog. Wouldn't that make things a little structured in the collosal amounts of information that we have on SCN?

    Blogging as we all know, started as a way of keeping a journal, or some opinion or information that one would like to share on the web. So why should it be any different in the community? Why not keep the "how to" stuff in the articles or wiki sections of the SCN and use the blogs to express our ideas and opinions. Following the protocol, anyone looking for answers to technical questions, for example, would know where to find the solution directly instead of having to search between several asset types (blogs/wikis/articles/forums....).
    Well, that's my opinion so I blogged about it. Hope that other community members also feel the same way and those who don't, can at least give it some thought!
    Shweta Kesarwani

    SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3

    Posted by Shweta Kesarwani Apr 23, 2010

    Found this article on the Features List of SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3. So thought of sharing it with the community members who might have not spotted it already.

    The article provides a fairly comprehensive list of features and it's interesting to see the capabilities planned for the solution's latest release.

    I'd recommend that you go through the article yourself. The information is well presented there.

    Here's some really good news for those who were in need of a good analytical solution but didn't have the capacity or the bandwidth to set up and maintain a full fledged solution by themselves. The SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand has been launched and is available for free trial at http://www.ondemand.com. There is a live webcast scheduled for 31st of March 2010, the registration link for which is provided in the same webpage.

    This solution has been created keeping the SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises)in mind, therefore it has been designed to support data from SAP Business ByDesign, SAP Business One, and SAP Business All-in-One - the SME solution offerings by SAP. It is also capable of interacting with SAP BusinessObjects software for CRM.

    As of now it is available only in English. Few other languages are planned for later releases.

    There are three options - free Personal Edition (10MB & 2000 data rows), Essential Edition (2GB data) and Advanced Editions (5GB data and of course more fatures).

    You can get some more details here.

    Some of the features that the solution offers, are:

    1) It has a capability to combine data from different sources.

    2) It has industry and business-specific offerings - through partners.

    3) Provides pre-configured but customizable templates.

    4) Has an intuitive interface.

    Sounds good but the wise ones have said - "the proof of the pie is in the eating". So I think attending the webcast could be a first step towards that. 

    Shweta Kesarwani

    CeBIT 2010

    Posted by Shweta Kesarwani Mar 3, 2010

    The CeBIT conference in Hannover is a well known forum where international software and hardware manufacturers come together. It is also a kind of pulse-check for the IT industry. As per the latest news, the mood at the conference is quite optimistic :-). Good for us.

    While I was going through the details on the CeBIT official website http://www.cebit.de/homepage_e , I was impressed by the list of speakers at the conference, all of whom are highly accomplished individuals in their respective spaces. Some of them are - Diane M. Bryant, Vice President and CIO of Intel ; Dr. Werner Vogels, Vice President of Worldwide Architecture and CTO of amazon.com ; Anand Agarawala, founder of Bump Technologies and inventor of the first 3D desktop; Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr.com and 26 other experts.

    The theme this year is "Connected Worlds" with the spotlight on IT solutions for all areas of life and work.

    Now coming to what is SAP showcasing at CeBIT this year. 

    • Business One Version 8.8 (release planned for end of April, 2010) with focus on demonstrating the integration with mobile devices like blackberry & iPhone, cloud based apps and mashups.
    • Business ByDesign FP 2.5 (release planned for july 2010) - the integration with iPhone (which was also demonstrated in the Influencer's summit at Boston last year) along with the capability of accessing the applications like Groupeware, Microsoft Office, and Lotus Sametime through the browser plug-in.
    • SAP NetWeaver Business Client 3.0 - Rich Desktop Client specifically for SAP Business All-in-One.
    • SAP Business Suite on iPhone & Windows Mobile with the partner Sybase.

    More details at:

    http://www.sap.com/about/newsroom/topic-rooms/events/cebit2010/index.epx

    www.sap.de/cebit

    www.sap.de/worldtour

    http://bit.ly/c0JzRY

    SAP on Twitter: @sapcebit.

    In my previous blog Overview on Business ByDesign and My Journey at SAP so far, while decribing about ByDesign, I'd mentioned that the product uses the version 7.1 of SAP NW BI.

    Now that raised quite some questions on what's there in 7.1 - which was a special codeline for ByD and is not available in the market. I'd mentioned some features like hybridproviders and real time data acquisition. But there's a lot more to it and the good news is that all of it is going to be available in 7.2 (Q1/2010).

    It has features like: 

    • Tighter integration with BOBJ tools
    • Accelerated Dataloads in Data Store Objects
    • Flexibilities offered in data staging
    • Enhanced administrative capabilities
    • New features in BW Integrated Planning

    I came across an article on what is going to be there in 7.2, so I thought I'd spread the good word :-). You can get the details of all that I have mentioned above, in the article that I came across - What's new with SAP Netweaver BW 7.2 and in 2010.

    Have fun!

    Having recently completed five years with SAP appears to me as some plot out of a fast paced movie!
                    In retrospect, all I knew about SAP, when I'd come here for the first time, was that it developed ERP products. The closest that I had come to experience it - was through my pay-slip that was generated and sent every month in my previous company.

                 I was looking for a change back then, after having worked for about two years in the architecture team of FinacleTM at Infosys Technologies.

    So when an ex-colleague from Infosys, who had moved to SAP, asked me if I would be interested in a change, I thought of giving it a shot.

    And then here I was at SAP - without a clue on what I was going to work on. While going through the usual training (ABAP), I came to know that I would be part of a new team that is being setup for the development of a new product - Business ByDesignTM [ByD](the name was not decided at that time and it was known by the name of A1S). 

                     Now for those of you who do not know what is ByD - allow me to enlighten you. It's the latest product offering from SAP and targets the SME segment. It is an on-demand solution (hosted by SAP) and therefore quite attractive for a small and medium sized company which needs to focus more on its core business instead of having to spend on IT.
    All they need is a browser and a subscription to ByD and - voila! they have a complete ERP solution at their desks - without having had to maintain any infrastructure themselves.

              I must admit that it's been a tremendous learning experience for me. Working on and enhancing an existing product is one thing and creating a new product, from scratch, is a completely different ballgame.


                    I wouldn't say that I didn't have my share of doubts when I started but then the concept was good and we were working with the latest technologies from Netweaver. So it was sometimes frustrating but most of the time quite exciting to work on this product.

                     I have been working with Netweaver BI 7.x for the development of the reporting content of ByD and there were quite many innovations in BI, quite many of which were done as as feature requests from ByD.
    e.g. Hybridproviders (that combines the dimensioning features of cubes and the fast data load capabilities of data store objects). This gives the capability of near-real time data as the data latency between OLTP and OLAP can be set to as low as 5 minutes! Quite crucial for Financials.

    There are so many innovations in ByDTM that it would be difficult to say what is its best feature. I will list some of the things that I like about it:

    • Pattern based development - to maintain uniformity across screens within one application as well as across applications (FIN/SCM/SRM/CRM..)
    • Workcenter concept - the application areas have been structured in workcenters - which are based on the typical business processes in the day to day work of an organization. E.g. Financials will have workcenters like Cost and Revenue, General Ledger, Inventory Management etc.
      Similarly, CRM will have workcenters like Sales Orders, Customer Invoicing, Marketing, Product and Service Portfolio etc.
    • A role based access management system - the workcenters would be assigned to a user based on his/her role in the organization. The data that would be visible in the same workcenter to one user may be different from the data visible to another user who is assigned the same workcenter - depending upon their authorizations.
    • Embedded BI content - there are standard reports created which cover most of the reporting requirements that users typically have. Exhaustive reports for accounting, operations, managers - everything has been pre-delivered. The technology as I mentioned above, is NW BI 7.1. Crystal reports and Xcelsius are also used for some formatted reports.

    I guess I have generated enough curiosity in your minds about this product. So why don't you take a look at a video which gives a demo of the ByD.

    What do the customers have to say about it:
    Tmg Telecom
    Bendpak
    Skullcandy


    Want some more? The detailed product information is available at:

    SME at SAP

    At present, I am on a six-months fellowship programme with SCN. So looking forward to learning a lot of new things while collaborating with the community. I am sure it's going to be another great experience, as it has been working on Business ByDesignTM.