somya.kapoor

SAP Train Race - Day 2

Somya Kapoor — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 16:59:10 GMT

After most people staying at the training venue well after 11PM the previous night, Saturday morning came all too quickly. However, no sleep deprivation or jetlag would keep our industrious developers from getting right back to work on their NetWeaver Gateway applications promptly at 7AM.

Coffee and energy drinks were flowing as the competition began to seriously heat up. Some teams went as far as to head into private rooms and hidden corners to discuss their top secret projects away from prying eyes and curious race counterparts.

We took a break from developing just before lunch to watch Matt Burnett present a Microsoft session covering HTML5, JavaScript, Windows Phone 7, Metro, and UI controls.

We wrapped the work day with recording some team video blogs, introducing our racers and giving you a sneak peek at some of the creative and ambitious solutions currently in development. We will be posting those shortly, so watch this space.

Tweeting and blogging around the event also continued at a steady pace, with the best headline of the day going to CompriseIT's Owen Pettiford for this gem: "Sneek Peek at Influenza on the SAP Train Race."

While some teams are feeling confident enough about their progress to take the night off and visit some famous Parisian landmarks, for many participants work continues into the night on this last evening in Paris. Tomorrow we pack our bags and board the train to Madrid.

Many SAP Train Racers we spoke to agree that if you are not here, then you are missing out on some grade "A" geek fun. If you are currently at SAP TechEd or SAPPHIRE in Madrid, we look forward to seeing you soon and invite you to join in on the fun in the interim by posting your pictures on our Facebook or Tweeting with the #SAPTrainRace hashtag.

Koffee with Gurus - Teched (Las Vegas)

Somya Kapoor — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 07:54:47 GMT

Do you want to meet the coders behind SAP Products – get to know them! Understand what they are working on? Then join us for “Koffee with Gurus” @ TechED – Las Vegas…an An informal, yet innovative platform to meet the coders behinds the product, hear key insights on what they are working on and brainstorm on ideas collectively.

Setup: Developer style setup with whiteboards, IDE enviornments & coffee

Timings: Wednesday [2 to 5p.m], Thursday [ 3:30 to 5p.m]

Location: Veronese 2406 (second floor), Venetian

Schedule:

Topic	Gurus
BYOB!: Come take a walk with me inside the SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 platform infrastructure.	Peter Tippett
Structured Chaos: Overwhelmed with information, information overloaded? Gain Insights on information management strategy around unstructured data	Hemant Puranik
Walk in the Clouds: Public and hybrid clouds for running SAP applications	Manish Garg
Cloudy with a chance of Standards: let’s talk about open source, open standards , and government regulations when it comes to cloud computing	Steve Winkler
ABAP, Java and beyond: Languages and their runtimes at SAP, a love story? Explanation and comparison on different language execution runtimes and a look into the future.	Daniel Vocke
New Roads: SAP NetWeaver On-Demand platform, Lean Java Server, On-Demand Form Builder, River Domain Language and application lifecycle management tools	Benjamin Wesson, Ariel Bentolila, Yoram Hod
HANA DataServices easy – learn how to load data into HANA very easily and very quickly	David Cao, Monfor Yee, Freda Xu
Model in the world of HANA - Learn tips on HANA modeling and content development. Also learn how to build ABAP based application	Juergen Hagedorn, Eric Westenberger

Duet at TechEd 2009

Somya Kapoor — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:34:20 GMT

At Teched this year you will have a chance to learn more about Duet 1.5 release – a joint software product between SAP and Microsoft, which enables information workers to improve decision-making, increase process compliance and decrease costs by taking full advantage of SAP business processes and business intelligence through the Microsoft Office environment. In Phoenix, Vienna and Bangalore we will host sessions, influence councils and expert networking sessions which will give you insight in the current offering as well as an opportunity to provide us with feedback that can influence the future direction of Duet.

Please bookmark the dates and time for the following sessions at TechEd this year 2009.

UP204: Duet Best Practices: Fast – Track your Duet 1.5 Operations with Duet Admin Tools, here we walk you thru different supportability and monitoring tools that are available in the Duet 1.5 release and how they can be used for end-to-end troubleshooting during the deployment.

UP150: ASUG Influence council: Duet, in this influence council we will share our current vision of Duet and would be interested in hearing your feedback. This session would primarily be an open discussion round.

Link to Duet session at Teched Phoenix:

http://www.sapteched.com/usa/edu_sessions/topicview.htm?id=118

Link to Duet sessions at Teched Vienna:

http://www.sapteched.com/emea/edu_sessions/session.htm?id=294

In addition to these “official” sessions you can directly meet with the Duet experts at the Expert Networking Lounge where we have scheduled Duet expert sessions. Also the Duet experts will be available at the user productivity pod in the exhibition area, drop by to check the latest Duet demo, or have customer-specific discussions or even to share you Duet implementation experience. We will be there waiting for you!

Please check the Expert Networking Lounge for schedule of the Duet sessions or drop by the pod to sign up for one.

Looking forward to meeting you at TechEd………..

Bon voyage!

Somya Kapoor

Resource Requirement for Duet implementation

Somya Kapoor — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:16:28 GMT

Well there is a question that resonates among our customers or when I am pulled into meetings as to what skillset is required to implement Duet, who should I pull into this project? Resource requirement and so on. In this blog I will concentrate mainly on the skillset required and discuss some success factors.

As the landscape justifies, Duet is primarily a router between the two giants SAP and Microsoft, which encompasses the architecture and principles of eSOA. Hence it leverages the existing skillset in any given customer environment.

Resource Requirement:

Customer Project Manager: who is the owner of the project planning phase, monitors the progress and facilitates the coordination among the project team members. Experience: SAP Project Management Experience.

Project Team Members Comprises of the following leads:

Duet/ Netweaver Expert: Is someone who has Netweaver knowledge or SAP J2ee knowledge. This person is going to be responsible for the implementation and configuration of Duet landscape; we don’t need a separate Netweaver expert for project involving POC.

Experience: As netwevear expert can pick up the knowledge required to install Duet. It would be good if he/she is well-versed with Netweaver Java system expert with knowledge in netweaver security protocols, j2ee installation and SAP backend system patching/transports.

Business Expert: Varies from Application to Application, if you are installing Sales Management then experience with SAP CRM 5.0 is required and so on.

Skills / Experience	Duet Scenario
SAP ERP 2004 or SAP ERP 6.0 ESS/MSS FICO (BUMO) CATS (TIMA/ LEMA) Workflow	Time Management Team Management Organizational Management Leave Management Travel Management Meeting Planning Reporting and Analytics
BI 3.5 or 7.0	Reporting and Analytics
SAP SRM 6.0 and SRM MDM Catalog 2.0	Purchasing Management Contract Lifecycle Management
SAP CRM 5.0	Sales Management
SAP SCM 5.0	Demand Planning
SAP e-Recruiting 6.0	E-Recruiting

Technical Expert: Ranges from large companies to mid-size companies. The tasks for this role revolve around expertise in Microsoft ADS, Exchange server, SMS software deployment on the client and domain Administration. Basically a system administrator that manages the mailbox accounts.

Best Practice for successful completion of the project:

Coordination and communication is the key success factor which is utmost required among team members and groups involved for successful completion.
Check on pre-requisite prior to the implementation is helpful in accessing the project timelines
Executive sponsor helps in overcoming difficulties related to strategic decision making.
Involvement of all groups during the planning phase is important.
Involvement of the business community in testing cycles helps in faster adoption cycle.