yariv.zur

    15 Posts

    Visual Composer has been around for many years, has thousands of productive customers and has been used UI screens all over the world. A few years ago, we we announced that the Visual Composer roadmap is complete and that we will not be investing heavily anymore in its development, a lot of people deemed it (and its underlying UI technology, Web Dynpro Java) dead. Not quite.

    Kobi Sasson and the gang which runs Visual Composer Support & Development have been kind enough to share with me a sneak preview of an amazing feature in the upcoming version of NetWeaver. Enhancement Pack 1 of NetWeaver 7.30 (a.k.a. 7.31), which is supposed to start ramp up end of November, will contain the ability of Visual Composer to Model UI's against a HANA based Database. As can be seen below :

     

     

    (Notice that this isnt only querying HANA but also updating the data as well)

    As you may have noticed, this looks exactly like modeling regular UIs in Visual Composer. The only difference is that you are choosing a different data source. This comes to show the power of abstraction Visual Composer gives you - Modeling is the same regardless of whether its the cutting edge columnar data everyone is raving about or the trusted warhorse of 10 years - R/3. And here comes the real power - What if you could write applications which get data from both HANA and R/3? In the same screen? Using the same UI modeling tool? Well - Look no further.

     

    Once again - this demonstrates the strenght of NetWeaver as an integraiton platform - the ability to integrate a new paradigm with the old, to leverage existing tools and more imporantly - skillsets. 

    I will be attending TechEd Madrid / SAPPHIRE EMEA this week. Feel free to ping me with questions, feedback.

    Yariv Zur

    NetWeaver UI @ SAPPHIRE

    Posted by Yariv Zur May 8, 2011

    SAPPHIRE NOW 2011 is just a week away (I know!) and its time for the hardest part of them all - creating your agenda. Sure, you need to prepare sessions and wrestle with shaky developer machines but at least thats a linear task. Choosing from so many different sessions is a daunting task. Personally, I try to create a mixture of SAP sessions from my good friends in product management and ASUG customer sessions showing real live customer success stories. 

    Again - these are my personal choices, but I think that if you are interested in User Interface, this is a good starting point.

     

    MondayLessons Learned at P&G: Employee Self-Service - What You Need to Know about Custom Portal and SAP Home Page Framework Implementations As i've said before - Customer sessions are always a good way to learn about new developments.
    MondaySAP NetWeaver Portal Component Road Map and Future Directions 
    MondayConsumer Challenges to Enterprise SoftwareA sesion with Ike Nassi, Chief Scientist of SAP is never dull...
    MondayA New, Intuitive, and Integrated User Experience with SAP Business All-in-OneIf you want to see what the Business Suite will eventually look like, taking a look at BAiO is usually a pretty good indicator. A very innovaitive team.
    MondaySAP NetWeaver Portal 7.3—Make the Best Out of Your Portal! 
    TuesdayASUG SAP NetWeaver User Interface Influence Council UpdateHeaded by Karin ("The BITI Hammer") Tillotson of Valero, ASUG and SAP Mentor fame and myself.
    TuesdayHCM Innovation Highlights: SAP's HCM Road Map for the FutureA place where very interesting things are happening.
    TuesdaySAP NetWeaver Portal 7.3 On-Device - Sneak preview into the latest developments in area of SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.3This is just a sneak preview, but a very interesting one. Leveraging existing portal content for mobile applications.
    TuesdayAn Introduction to SAP Travel OnDemandThis one is cool. Seriously. 
    TuesdayImplementing Business-Owned Communication with SAP Enterprise Portal     Another customer story which looks promising.
    TuesdaySAP Workspaces: Evolving Today's Portal to Personal User Productivity SolutioSAP Worskpaces for portals is one of the the newest solutions around UI for Portal customers. 
    TuesdayA Closer Look at All the Greatest and Latest Features of NetWeaver Portal 7.3 
    TuesdayContent Management and Web Content Management with SAP NetWeaver Portal 
    TuesdayPOWL (Power Work List) and FPM (Floorplan Manager) - Extending the Power of ABAP UisAny session by Thomas Jung is usually a full house session. Dont miss it.
    TuesdaySAP Software for Everyone: Workspaces, Mobility, and BeyondIf you are interested in a quick and thourough overview of everything SAP has to offer in the UI area, this session by Andrew is what you need.
    WednesdayProject “uPods”: Renovating User Productivity for Your Professional Users in 2011More details below
    WednesdaySAP Portal Influence Council 
    WednesdayDiscuss, Decide, Deliver: Collaborate with SAP StreamWorkWith more and more applications integrating StreamWork into the business processes, you should be aware how you can leverage this tool for your organization.

     

    Another session worth noting is the SAP User Interface Strategy session. For those of you who dont know what a strategy session is - these are small meetings, usually between 5-10 people to discuss specific topics. It is a session where we (NetWeaver Product Management / Solution Management) want to hear from you about your pain points. There is a very limited number of seats for such session, so if this is a topic which you care about and would like to discuss with us - here is the link to register.

    Also important to note - many SAP UI colleagues will be attending SAPPHIRE. If you would like to meet us to discuss your UI needs and questions, understand better the SAP roadmap around UI, etc. Just drop me a mail or a message through twitter and we will do our best to set it up.

    Last but not least - As some of you know, I have been working (together with a dedicated team of engineers) on a project codenamed "uPods" for the past two years. This project (usually referred to as "#evilplans") is not yet ready for production, but we have been making large progress, especially with several dedicated pilot customers. During SAPPHIRE, we will be showing some of the extremely cool innovations involved in this project, where the NetWeaver Business Client, NetWeaver Gateway, HTML5, On-Demand and good ole' Dynpros get together. Below is a sneak preview of the new login screen. Dont miss it!

    image

    The Video below demonstrates how we can take an existing SAP ERP 4.6c system (based on an IDES system) and using the technology from a new project coming out of our labs (Project "uPods") enrich it with additional content and productivity services coming from an on-demand infrastructure. In plain english - We are bootstrapping the SAP GUI users to a whole new level of User Productivity.

    Want to learn more? Come talk to us in TechEd Berlin / Vegas - We have educational sessions (CD101), Expert networking sessions and Customer Strategy sessions.

    Yesterday I went to the Google Chrome Event (Chrome D3vF3st, a.k.a. #ChromeIL). It was a very geeky event, aimed at chrome developers and Google aficionados. It wasnt as high profiled as the Google GarageGeeks event which had the country's twiterrati flock to (barely) hear Marissa Mayer, but it was crowded, fast paced and educating. More than that - it was free. Besides from being free, you had a lot of high-school(?) students, college kids and people who generally have not seriously began shaving jotting down notes. 

    image

    I looked around and told myself - this is how you win the hearts and minds of young developers to flock around *your* products, *your* technology.  Ballmer got it first, with his famous "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers". Is SAP getting it? I mean, TechEd is an amazing event, not to mention SAP Inside Track (soon in Israel). But are we doing enough to reach high-school kids? University Alliances Program Overview? 

    Israel has the largest percentage of engineers and scientist per capita. It has the most companies registered at NASDAQ (after the US itself). How many of these startups are around enterprise products? very few.

    I dont have any conclusions (except that the Google cupcakes look great but taste awful) yet. I do think its the responsibility of the SAP community in general and especially in the the 972 dial code to start addressing these issues.

    User Productivity is always a hot topic. How can SAP enable you to 'face-lift' the UI and UP of your SAP based applications in a short term quick fix solution? We believe the answer is by delivering User Productivity in an on-demand paradigm on top of existing On-Premise transactions and assets. This will enable SAP to innovate faster while maintaining the existing investment customers have made *and* keeping your transactional data safe behind your firewall.

    Back in August we started with a stealth project only referred to as "#evilplans" at the time. During last TechEd we showed it to a select group of the SAP Mentors and Influencers and the feedback was so good we actually decided to go ahead and develop it.

    image

    While we are in the height of development, we would like to meet with customers who are interested in the topic during the upcoming SAPPHIRE in Orlando. For that purpose we have two strategy round-tables set up:

    May 18 2010 - 8:00 - 9:30

    May 19 2010 - 2:30 - 4:00

    In these sessions we would like to present possible future directions coming out of SAP in this area and understand from you the business case, scenarios and viability of such solutions. Please register in the following link - https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TNDGGHS

    See you in Orlando!

    The ASUG NetWeaver UI Influence council has two primary goals:

    • Influence the path SAP takes in this area with requirements, use-cases and feedback
    • Enable members of the council to learn from each others' experiences, best practices and insights into these tools and their proper usage

    As part of these ongoing activities, the council has been working on an encompassing survey trying to map out but the actual usage and planned usage of the NetWeaver UI technologies at customer development projects. Such information on use-cases, extent of custom development projects etc. could be extremely useful to fulfill both of the council's goals.

    The survey has been released to members of the ASUG technology SIGs a few weeks ago with a very good response rate.

    We are now opening up the survey to all SDN members following the firm belief that "the more the merrier" - the more customers and developers chime in and respond to the survey, the more meaningful the data becomes.

    We intend to unveil the results in the ASUG Annual Conference in May (Held in Conjunction with SAPPHIRE).

     

    So - without further ado - here is the link to the Survey. It will take you more than two minutes, but its important. 

    Yariv Zur

    Oh, the pretty colors!

    Posted by Yariv Zur Feb 17, 2010

    As part of the upcoming release of NetWeaver 7.3 (End of this year) we will be releasing a new version of Visual Composer (surprisingly named Visual Composer 7.3). One of the major developments in 7.3 has been to replace the Visual Composer drawing board underlying technology.

     [technical part, skip if you just want to see the colors]

    Visual Composer's drawing board, ever since its inception (originally from a startup called GUIMachine) has been based on the Adobe SVG plugin. The plugin enabled creating neat graphics in a very efficient way and gave the VC drawing board a very slick user-experience and look and feel. As important is the fact that the Adobe SVG plugin is highly performant - you could have a model with many many objects without getting a performance penalty.

    However, a few years ago Adobe announced that it was discontinuing its support to the SVG plugin and it was time to find a replacement to the old workhorse. We've looked into several alternatives, and eventually chose to re-implement the board using Microsoft Silverlight. Basically (with the help of the friends at Microsoft) we wrote the thing from scratch with a few key guidelines:

    1. We dont need to re-write the enveloping code (The VC client is written in highly performant AJAX)
    2. We reach the same performance as we had with Adobe SVG

    Initially, we weren't intending to get any 'additional' benefits from using Silverlight instead of SVG. This was supposed to be just a technical replacement of one underlying technology with antoher ('Just' turned out to be a considerable effort). However - once we finished development it was time to start playing around and making it look way nicer than it did...

    [/technical part. welcome back higher management]

    Here is the before and after images:

    Before:

    image

    After:

    After 

     

    Some notes:

    1. We've just replaced the board, the generated UI is still Web Dynpro Java (HTML/Flex)
    2. Initially we will be releasing the board as part of VC 7.3, but we will later downport this to 7.2, 7.11 and of course - 7.0. Although the nice colors will only exist in the 7.3 version. Yet another reason to upgrade :)
    3. Colors are not Final... Our UX wizards are still working on this.

    In the upcoming release of NetWeaver CE 7.20 (which has gone to ramp-up last month), we will be releasing for productive use the ability to embed Microsoft Silverlight islands inside Web Dynpro Java. Similar to the Adobe Flash islands released in previous versions, integrating Silverlight islands enables the Web Dynpro developer to have 'islands' of high interactivity inside the standard Web Dynpro application. This enables enjoying both worlds - having a standards compliant, performant, Web Dynpro application while having a very rich, 'cool' interaction where it really matters.

    We will be releasing tutorials and guides for this features together with the CE 7.20 release notes, but for now, you can take a look at these two videos, prepared by Vincent Mendicino, demonstrating how the new capabilities will look. The first video shows that actual integration of a Silverlight Island in the NetWeaver Developer Studio (NWDS):

     

     

    The second Video is showing the capabilities of Silverlight islands during run-time. Notice the ability to interact between 'classic' Web Dynpro tables and the silverlight components and the ability to 'block' the silverlight component when a Web Dynpro popup appears:

     

    As mentioned - this is just the appetizer. Expect many new features coming from WDJ in CE 7.20.

    When most of you hear the term "SS20" you immediately have a connotation of a cold-war soviet missile hiding in the woods for a super spy to come and blow it up while still managing to stay witty and not wrinkle his white tux.

     

    SS20 

    In a week from now, SS20 is going to mean something different - That would be "Strategy Session 20". Strategy sessions are a long tradition in TechEd and SAPPHIRE. Its your chance to come and talk to the NetWeaver Product Definition (the current name is "Technology Solution Management", but the idea is the same). We are the people who have one of the most interesting jobs I could imagine - Defining the next generation of SAP's products. Strategy sessions are a super important tool for doing just that. Its a place where you can come and voice your pain points, thoughts and wishes around specific topics.

    This year, I will be hosting SS20 - A strategy session about "UI Flexibility and Enterprise Mashups". Its all about empowering the end-user, reducing the load on IT and bringing a modern look and feel to our existing SAP UIs. 

    So - if you're an SAP customer, partner, analyst, blogger or generally a person who is enthusiastic about the subject - go ahead and register. Usually - these sessions fill up pretty quickly and we need to turn people down.  

    The full list of  sessions (and the registration link) can be found here - http://www.sapteched.com/usa/activities/strategy.htm

    See you there. I'll bring the white tux.

    Yariv Zur

    Desktop? Why?

    Posted by Yariv Zur Oct 3, 2009

    So, the Hard-disk on my http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/SAP_AG_%28SAP%29SAP laptop died. For the third time in 6 months. I have a small suspicionthat the Good Ole’ T42 is about to reach the big scrapyard in the sky,but with the current offerings from our IT department, I’ll stick to my IBM workhorse as long as I can. The one on my personal desktop died a weekago, so I’m finding myself re-installing two machines at the same time.

    Re-installing all the different software which I need for my daily work (full list below), I found myself asking – Why do I bother? Why don’t Ihave everything browser based, or VM based. My laptop dies? Who care. Its just hardware. I hear this sentiment more and more reflected whenspeaking to customers. One of them just told me this week: “Product xxx shouldgo to the browser. Why do we need a desktop? why should we incur the cost of supporting a desktop (following the Vista fiasco)?. Our roadmap is inclined towards browser only, looking into virtualization (esp.with HTML 5 coming out). We don’t believe in RIA – the plug-in conceptvs. the HTML5 vision”.

    I do believe in RIA, but I see the point. As HTML gets better andbetter (See how Firefox 3.5 handles Video) and the desktop OS’s notbecoming any more stable (yeah, yeah,Apple and Linux fan boys), I am trying more and more to keep my informationat the cloud. Instead of backing up to an external hard-drive, I’musing Mozy. Instead of jotting things to little notebooks, I’m using Evernote. Remember The Milk. Slowly but surely – I’m going to the cloud. And if this is happening for my personal productivity, what willthis mean to Enterprise software? Can we break down the monolith Enterprise apps to small pieces/services which run somewhere else? Moreto come.

    (The full list can be found in my peronal blog - http://www.enterprise-ui.com/2009/09/24/desktop-why/)

    Last week we saw the release of version 2.7 of the popular blogging platform Wordpress (which is powering this blog as well). Much has been said and written about the new release (see some links below) and I think that Robert Scoble was the most eloquent by simply saying: “It Rocks“. I tried to take a look at the new system through my day job glasses - i.e. What Enterprise Software should learn from Wordpress in General and from its 2.7 version in particular. Top three things are these:

       1. Lifecycle Management
       2. UI Flexibility
       3. Listen to your users

    Trivial? Hah.

    The full article is here

    In a very crowded room, Community Day '08 was kicked off. The gift for each participant was an Harmonica, which meant that this was probably one of the most noisy TechEd session ever (wait for those Harmonicas in DemoJam..).
    The amazing news for me in this was that looking at the sessions, recognizing all the people I have met in the last two TechEd's I attended (does SAPPHIRE count?) Its almost impossible to choose a session. For each hour I see at least two sessions which I would like to attend.

    I really think SAP should invest more in cloning.

    Last but not least - SDN'ers and BPX'ers broke the 2.5M contribution points. Which means that 100K Euro is being donated to feeding kids in schools in developing sites.

    More to come as the day progresses.

    What happens when you take 11 Web Dynpro customers and ask them to rank 14 possible features for the future of Web Dynpro? Well, you get a ranking.

    This is exactly what we have been doing over the past year - as part of writing the MRD (Market Requirements Documentation) for the next generation of Web Dynpro we have been asking select customers to rank 14 different features, helping us prioritize them.

    Here are the preliminary results:

    image 

     

    A week from now, in TechEd '08 Las Vegas we will be having a session called "Future Directions of Web Dynpro @ SAP". This session will be all about this - setting the future directions of SAP NetWeaver Web Dynpro. Should WD expand to the RIA space? Should it pretty much continue doing what is currently doing? What are the pain points of using Web Dynpro today? And of course - What is cooler - Web Dynpro ABAP or Web Dynpro Java?!

     Community Day Sessions
    AbstractFuture Directions of Collaboration @ SAP
    AbstractFuture Directions of Web Dynpro @ SAP
    SAP Community Day Las Vegas Agenda at a GlanceVisual Composer for the BPX

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Full Community Day Schedule - SAP Community Day Las Vegas Agenda at a Glance

     

      
    Session ID Educational Sessions & Influence Councils
    UP200 SAP NetWeaver UI Strategy and Roadmap
    UP257 ASUG Influence Update: SAP NetWeaver User Interaction Strategy and UI Technology
    UP100 SAP NetWeaver Portal: Roadmap for the Next 12 Months
    UP256 ASUG Influence Council: SAP NetWeaver Portal: Roadmap and Future Directions
    UP104 SAP NetWeaver Business Client: An Introduction
    UP160 Forums and Wikis in SAP NetWeaver Portal (Hands-on)
    UP205 Rich Internet Applications and Rich Client Applications
    COMP102 What's New in the SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer Tool for SAP NetWeaver CE
    COMP103 Web Dynpro and SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer – Which Tool Should I Use?
    COMP161 Modeling with Visual Composer for SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment 7.1.1 (Hands-on)
    COMP262 Advanced modeling with Visual Composer for SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment 7.1.1 (Hands-on)
    COMP255 ASUG Influence Council: SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer: Connecting Business and IT
    SOA155 ASUG Influence Council: Composite Applications With SAP NetWeaver CE
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     



    Session ID Strategy Sessions
    SS12SAP NetWeaver Portal
    SS04Discussing the Different SAP Clients – Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and Rich Client Applications (RCA)
    SS16Contextualized Business Collaboration
    SS15Visual Composer@LOBs: The role of solution managers and business process experts in process and composite application development projects
     

    Yariv Zur

    Choosing the Right Car

    Posted by Yariv Zur Aug 18, 2008
    Everyone in the High-Tech industry in Israel knows the drill - every three or so years you need to choose a new company car. Either your leasing period expires or your switch companies (on your own volition, one would hope). Due the the complex Israeli taxation system, your limited to a small subset of cars which meet a specific price criteria. These days, you can choose between the following - Mazda 3, Ford Focus, Renault Megane and Toyota Corolla. The debates between the four different models can fuel endless lunches and never reach any resolution. Why? Because for each participant in the debate, the needs from the company car are different. How is this related to UI and/or to enterprise software? Allow me to demonstrate...

    Filter Blog

    By date: