QUARTERLY 1

SAP NetWeaver re-lease levels and num-bering has been the cause of confusion now for a little while. The last few years has seen split-ting of code lines and the introduction of par-allel delivery paths for software which runs on top of NetWeaver, some-times even resulting in situations where a lower numeric release level has more functionality than a higher numeric one.

Therefore the purpose of this article is to look back at recent history and identify the reasons for this complexity and in doing so hopefully clarify the numbering for everyone.

Explanation by Thomas Jung continues on

page 10

NetWeaver Releases

TOPIC OF THIS ISSUE:The Power of Pull, SAP StyleArticle by Jon Reed

About this issueI am proud to present

you the Q1 2011 Quarterly. This time we have many more Mentors on board, new logo and amazing com-ic strips by Alvaro Tejada - the Blagbert. I hope you will like this issue as much as we do - let us know.

Otto Gold, editor-in-chief

The Stream that Led to AtlantisARTICLE BY MATT HARDING

Mentors´ MentorsBY GREG MYERS

Student BI ClubARTICLE BY TAMMY POWLAS

NOT TO BE MISSED

Sometimes a catchy phrase can put flesh to an idea. In my case, I had been telling anyone who would listen that we are broad-casting too much and not listening well enough (yes I see the hypocrisy there).

When we talk social media, we tend to think about pushing information and gain-ing visibility. We’re missing the point. A blog by Mark Yolton brought the phrase “The Power of Pull” into my headlights in an SCN blog post (http://www.sdn.sap.

com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/19590) and that was the concept I was looking for. As it turns out, Mark was writing about a book called the Power of Pull that is interesting, but focuses mostly on the future of enterprises. However, a reviewer noted that anyone could use these concepts to become self-created experts in their field, and that caught my eye – and it should yours as well.

Continue reading on page 12

Working from home…does it “work”?Do you work from home? And how is that? Or maybe you would like to work from

home but don´t have the right argument to convince your boss? Read the article by Michelle Crapo in Q2 2011!

SAP Student Congress Updates…did you know?Look for the report by Tammy Powlas. We plan to continue to cover educational

events and activities in future.

IN THE NEXT ISSUE

QUARTERLY2

It’s not been too long since I discovered Regular Expres-sions…but the funny thing is that the first I used them was on an ABAP program…and I found it funny, because hav-ing worked with Ruby, PHP and other scripting languages I should have used it before.

Some people hate Regular Expressions, some people love them…I’m one that loves them and try to use them every time I can.

So, what’s this big buzz about RegEx (Kind way of call-ing them)? What benefits could we get from them? Why should we care for them? I can answer that with one easy example:

DATA: SCN_NUMBER TYPE STRING, LENGTH TYPE I, NUMBERS TYPE STRING.

SCN_NUMBER = ‚P075400‘.LENGTH = STRLEN( SCN_NUMBER ).NUMBERS = SCN_NUMBER+1(6).

IF SCN_NUMBER+0(1) EQ ‚P‘ AND LENGTH EQ ‚7‘ AND NUMBERS NA SY-ABCDE. WRITE:/ ‚Welcome to SCN!‘.ELSE. WRITE:/ ‚Can‘t find your SCN number‘.ENDIF.

This is the regular code we could use to validate an SCN Number. Now let’s look at the RegEx way:

Expressing Yourself the Regular WayDATA: SCN_NUMBER TYPE STRING.SCN_NUMBER = ‚P075400‘.FIND REGEX ‚[P][0-9]{6}‘ IN SCN_NUMBER.IF SY-SUBRC EQ 0. WRITE:/ ‚Welcome to SCN!‘.ELSE. WRITE:/ ‚Can‘t find your SCN number‘.ENDIF.

We just save 3 lines of codes and only used one variable. Isn’t that nice? For sure, in a world of super computers with extremely fast processors, that it’s not a big achievement, but let’s face it. The less you code, the faster you finish your work.

So for what else could use RegEx? Well…I have use it to format dates, validate entries, parse XML files and most important, have fun. Still not convinced? Let’s look at this example. We have a text, where some words had been repeated by mistake…we need to fix it:

DATA: TEXT TYPE STRING.TEXT = ‚RegEx RegEx are cool. ABAP can use use Regex.‘.WRITE:/ TEXT.REPLACE ALL OCCURRENCES OF REGEX ‚[ ]+(\w+)[ ]\1‘ IN TEXT WITH ‚ $1‘.WRITE:/ TEXT.

Try to achieve the same using ABAP. Hard isn’t it?Alvaro Tejada Galindo

The 6th Annual SAP Inside Track (formerly SAP Community Day) is be-ing held on Sunday 20th March 2011 at the Sofitel Wentworth Hotel in Sydney.

SAP Inside Track Sydney is open to all SAP Community Network members and is free of charge. If you are not a SCN member yet (why not?) just turn up and we will help you register and welcome you with open arms.

SAP Inside Track sessions in Austra-lia are scheduled to coincide with the Mastering SAP Technologies (http://www.masteringsap.com/tech) conference each year to allow the over-seas speakers to attend. This year we will have eleven SAP Mentors attending along with several other influential visi-tors. They are all keen to meet fellow SCN members to share experiences and opinions.

Graham Robinson

Massive Mentor Muster Happening in Sydney

Meet the Mentors and all your favorite Community members at Inside Track Sydney 2011

TIPS & TRICKS #SAPMQ1 2011

QUARTERLY 3

„Not Quite Supported“ Eric ValloA personal story by Greg Myers

Eric Vallo, valuable member of the Community and true BusinessObjects guru.

When I took Karate as a teenager, I remember a story my sensei told me af-ter I earned my first belt. The story roughly went like this; A young Karate student earned his yellow belt, and went out loudly in the streets to proclaim his accomplish-ment. He had a celebration and told all of his friends and family. A few years lat-er, when that same student earned his black belt, he left the school quietly by the back door and told no one. The moral that I took away from this story was that the more you know, the more you understand how much you still have to learn, and that no matter what, there is always someone out there who knows more.

For me, becoming an SAP Mentor last fall was like earning my black belt. It was a pinnacle achievement for me to be recognized in such a way, and also very humbling. Upon being ush-ered into this group, how-ever, I quickly realized how much I don’t know. The collective knowledge of this group is really amazing. I also noticed that among the Mentors who are experts in BI and BusinessObjects that I’m a little unique. There’s

Dave Rathbun who’s the Se-mantic Layer ninja, there’s Jamie Oswald who’s great with Crystal Reports and Xcelsius, Mico Yuk whose name is synonymous with Xcelsius, and the list goes on. But I’m not a developer like them. I’m an adminis-trator and system architect. What’s more is that I don’t use the product on Win-dows, which places me in an even smaller minority.

I’m sure there are plenty of other BOBJ administra-tors out there that use the product in a non-Windows environment, but then fac-tor in if they actually par-ticipate in the SAP Commu-nity Network or ASUG, and you’re left with a very short list. On that list, there is one person in particular who I go to regularly to help me figure things out, and who I consider my own Mentor. His name is Eric Vallo. Eric is the Owner and Chief Archi-tect of EV Technologies, who produce applications that interface with SAP Busines-sObjects. But unlike other people I have met who sell products, Eric freely gives of his time and knowledge, and contributes to the com-munity he serves.

A true sign of the times, I

met Eric originally on Twit-ter. He has a blog on his company site where he shares information about BusinessObjects. One post in particular, where he de-tailed how to install BOBJ on a “not quite supported” distribution of Linux was the first I read. I decided to try the project myself, and when I ran into problems, Eric helped me through and I was able to get it work-ing. Since then, he’s always available to help me sort out

my ideas, bounce theories off of, and refresh my mem-ory when I’m being stupid.

Our relationship has evolved over the past year, and now, along with Jamie Oswald, the three of us reg-ularly produce a Busines-sObjects podcast called the “Diversified Semantic Lay-er”, where we cover all sorts of topics about the product, how to use it, and get opin-ions from guest speakers who are experts in areas we are not. We learn from one another, help the commu-nity together, and have a lot of fun doing it.

Now that I’m an SAP Men-tor, and walk quietly with little fanfare, humbled for where I am, I am glad to have the opportunity to rec-ognize someone who has helped me be here. My sin-cerest of thanks to Mr. Eric Vallo for all he has done for me, and what he does for our SAP Community.

Greg Myers

Blagbert

MENTORS´ MENTORS#SAPMQ1 2011

QUARTERLY4

The Stream that Led to Atlantis

Before directly telling you his point, I want to highlight what we’ve seen over the last decade in Software De-velopment. Software Development/Engineering is continually being en-hanced. From Requirements all the way through to Support (not to for-get Enterprise Architecture); there is no single area that I can think of that has settled on the perfect ap-proach to how to get it done, keep it going or make it better. No lon-ger is the simple Waterfall approach of the 1990’s (with fantastic detailed consulting contracts to capture scope creep through change requests) fol-lowed by best efforts by developers and support staff, even close to ac-ceptable in today’s enterprises.

You could be thinking that we’re talking about the buzz terms like:

● Agile Methodologies ● OO Analysis and Design● Design Patterns● Separation of concerns● Test Driven Development● ITIL● Enterprise Architect and TOGAF● SOA● BPM● Requirements Traceability● Usabilty

And you would partially be right. But “are we there yet” in terms of any of these being our final destination? Well to quote Homer...”No”.

Effectively, he (Al that is, not Hom-er) asked me to raise the aware-ness of the growing gap between development best practices and the knowledge of these practices within SAP with the idea to get more focus from the SAP community on provid-

ing more direction on this subject. Now for reference, entering Demo-

Jam and being an SAP Mentor at TechEd doesn’t give you much time to attend sessions, but in addition to above, on the last day of TechEd I was lucky enough to see an advanced lecture from Matthias Steiner and was pleased to see content that not only explained some concepts within the JAVA world of SAP, but he introduced some concepts that, apart from Al and a few others; I rarely hear dis-cussed on SCN. My tweet at the time highlighted both my surprise of see-ing such a good presentation, plus the disappointment that the turn out was not great (though it was Friday morning):

“Great advanced preso from @steinermatt. Would be great to see him in Sydney next year (hint, hint). Low turn out but we need more of this.”

Finally, the last straw that tipped me over the edge to do something serious about this was a colleague from a company that I contracted with mentioning to

me that the two developers I worked with for 9 months were now leading the way in the area of usability that I mentored them in (Note - They were already great developers, though had never been exposed to usability and how to work with customers defining UI’s before so it was really awesome to hear how I’d made a difference there).

The search for Atlantis Begins

So it was with this momentum that I knew:

● The Software Industry is not sit-ting still and we all need help making heads or tails of it.

● There are a few out there that are living and breathing these new tech-niques including learning the hard

way when they don’t work out like the text books says they will.

● People with the right attitude are always looking for

guidance and will embrace change if they see the light.

At SAP’s Las Vegas TechEd I was discussing the SAP Mentorship program with Al Templeton (my DemoJam partner) and how I should use my new SAP Mentor status while there to influence the SAP community further. A key point really resonated with me; so much so that it only started to resonate more the further I thought about it, and well beyond the end of the event.

“Are we there yet?...to quote Homer...’No’.”

Decisions in groups are typically one-sided but with StreamWorks, anarchy rules!

42 and other answers one can get using StreamWorks

VISIONS #SAPMQ1 2011

QUARTERLY 5

But what could I or anyone else do about this from the SAP perspec-tive? Where could we find this Utopia where we could all be enlightened by our experiences in a constructive way to collaborate, come to a decision and help the greater community.

So a month later, a discussion broke out on the private mentor fo-rum around REST and Web Services; and this was my perfect opportunity to launch my campaign to find this Utopia. So I immediately put up the idea of forming a small group of like minded, passionate types who were interested in debating the direction of the software industry (where bet-ter to start this search than within the Mentors). Michelle Crappo, To-bias Trapp and Matthias Steiner im-mediately were on board with Al and myself, and the stream I choose to start the search for this Utopia was SAP’s StreamWorks.

So first cab off the ranks was what to call this initiative and the group’s purpose. So a StreamWork activity (for reference, this is effectively the highest level grouping within Stream-Work where you organise informa-tion and participants) was created, founding members were invited and a “Decision” action was put up al-

lowing participants to comment and come to agreement while receiving alerts as information was updated.

Matthias starting with the idea of code names and since we were deep-diving into topics; sea related names started to surface (pun intended). Hence, the most obvious mythical Utopian society came to mind and the search for Atlantis began.

So How do we Find Atlantis?

Next came “the how” and Stream-Works had the perfect solution. Ba-sically, the first step was to come up with a list of topics to discuss, and get everyone to rank these topics so we got consensus on what to discuss. The solution, which is one of my fa-vourite tools within StreamWorks, is the Ranking tool. You effectively use

the activities participants to come up with a list to rank; close the list for ranking where everyone submits their ranking and then once every-one has ranked the list; you lock the ranking down.

So Matthias did a little advertis-ing on the Mentor Forum, we had enough members to get going and the list was built over a week. We locked down the list and then let everyone rank it. For reference, af-ter you personally rank the list (by dragging them into your preferred order and submitting), you get to watch the overall ranking continually change as everyone else ranks after you. As you can see below, I was totally outranked with the first topic!

So next step was to discuss the #1 topic - “How and when Gateway should be used?”. Unfortunately, this is where we discovered that it’s

How did we get the idea about

this article?Time ago Richard Hirsch start-

ed a wiki page called "List of blog or SAP Mentor Monday re-quests" where one can request a blog from the Mentors. He also introduced the idea through a blog on SCN, the blog is called "Request-A-Blog" from a SAP Mentor (number 22 075). The request about Atlantis already disappeared from the list (not sure why), but this is where the idea come from. If you would like to read about a particular topic, ask the Mentors to write about it for you!

The Ranking Tool - One of StreamWork's best tool in my opinion

VISIONS #SAPMQ1 2011

QUARTERLY6

a little pointless to discuss an unre-leased product. After another week or two (I didn’t say the stream that leads to Atlantis was a fast moving stream); a few of us reached the con-sensus to can this subject and move onto the #2 topic instead.

So a couple of weeks ago, we kicked off the discussion on “When to use BPM vs PI vs Workflow?” and we’ve taken a different approach again (continuous improvement is clearly one of our KPI’s). I figure that to get the best discussion, someone needs to lead the discussion with their opinion; especially useful if it’s an extreme opinion. Hence, since I raised this topic originally, I wrote a discussion piece to get us going and we were away again. I also added a couple of SWOT StreamWorks diagrams to potentially highlight strengths and weaknesses of BPM and Business Workflow (though this may have been done more to experi-ment with StreamWorks). This topic will remain open for another week for discussion, then after that; I’ll summarise the topic into a Blog on SCN and then it will be time to start the selection process to determine the next topic for discussion.

Can you Build a Utopia with StreamWorks?

So if you’re wondering was Stream-Work a perfect fit for this? Definitely not. For example:

● I didn’t play around too much with security, but having a completely open community does lead to some accidents being made by participants. For example, at one stage the rank-ing got reopened, which lost all rank-ings that were submitted previously (ouch). The full Enterprise flavour of StreamWorks has more functionality here but I have no exposure to that.

● Similarly, trying to get the email alerts just right seems to be an art. If there was a way to make mass changes but block updates; that would definitely help things.

The Stream that Led to Atlantiscontinuation of the article by Matt Harding from pages 4-5

● Managing the layout of every-thing also wasn’t ideal for me. The design is for everything to just scroll down as new items are added, but this gets a little messy in my mind when you’re trying to make this as easy as possible for everyone.

● Lastly, while manageable for small groups; if we want to grow At-lantis into hundreds, or even thou-sands; I’m pretty sure that if a good percentage become participants and not just observers, then it won’t have the control required to manage that level of interaction.

But this all said, was StreamWork the best collaboration tool in the SAP toolbag to try create this Utopian so-ciety for the near future? Absolutely; and as more functionality gets intro-duced into StreamWork, it’s sure to only get better.

More StreamWork Tools - The SWOT Analysis Tool

Never Stop Searching for Atlantis

So where are we going with this? Well, the community is deliberately small at the moment, but we’re still in experimental mode trying to get the formula right. Will it grow, will we continue to use StreamWork, or will it just be lost again and become just legend again? Who knows but we will try to make this group more open as soon as possible, and I hope out of this search, we can at least inspire a few to question the old and to always want to understand the new.

So with the story of Atlan-tis still unfolding, I’ll leave you with the matrix inspired motto for Atlantis...”Unfortunately, no one can be told what good development is, you need to see it for yourself”.

Matt Harding

VISIONS #SAPMQ1 2011

QUARTERLY 7

SAP Mentors: The early daysHow this all started by the man, who started it

GOOD OLD DAYS

Harald Reiter once got asked: “When did you become an SAP Men-tor?”. “I think in 2005, when I got my first mentor shirt.” he replied.

But if you check my blogs you will realize, that I only introduced the SAP Mentor initiative in November 2007.

As in the Talking Heads song Once In A Lifetime:

You may ask yourself:How did he get that?And you may ask yourself:How did we get here?And you may tell yourself:This is not my old SAP.This is not the same as it ever was.

Harald’s memory isn’t off by 2 years, but there wasn’t an Illuminate like underground mentor society with secret handshake and all before the official announcement either.

Two letters are the clue that solves the mystery: DN versus AP. But be-fore I tell you that story I first have to tell you this story*:

Passion: The fundament that the SAP Mentor initiative is built on: In search of passion.

I often talk and write about the mentor magic. Passionate people are magical and their passion is conta-gious, you want to be around them, want to be part of the action, they bring out the best in you, it gets your energy flowing.

When we started SDN I was respon-sible for growing the community. I re-alized early on, that it is the passion of their members that makes a commu-nity gel. I set out to find and nurture passionate community members and give them the exposure they deserve. I made them accessible to everyone on SDN. The boundaries between customers, partners and SAP started to blur to a certain extend.

There is no better way to let pas-sionate people shine than to let them present and interact during face to face meetings like SAP TechEd. Re-

member SAP TechEd before SDN? I do, it was an incredible well run event a weeklong smooth knowledge trans-fer machinery. You took your 2 hands on sessions and filled the rest of your schedule with lectures and hung out with your work buddies in the eve-ning. If you didn’t like one of the lec-tures, you would aimlessly walk the convention center halls like a zombie, there was no place for you to go and just hang out. That’s why we created the SDN Club House at TechEd with little theaters for un-conference style sessions. We encouraged the more active passionate participants of SDN to give sessions, share their expertise and engage with their fellow TechEd participants.

The SDN team at TechEd would wear shirts that had SDN Crew writ-ten on it. I loved it, as like roadies on a tour it would signifying that we are the ones rolling up our sleeves and do the heavy community lifting. We wanted to give these passionate SDN community members that stepped up to share their expertise a little token

of our appreciation. Therefore we created the SDN Mentor shirts that resembled the SDN Crew shirts.

Harald Reiter was one of these pas-sionate users drawing a huge crowed when he presented in 2005.

Now back to the other story about the two letter difference. At that time when SCN was still the SAP Developer Network, we were the SDN Crew and the shirts we gave to our most active community members would say SDN Mentor. When we got serious about creating an initiative around our most passionate community influencers, we also realized that this is bigger than just developers. From the start we called them the SAP Mentors. From (S)DN to (S)AP. Mystery solved.

The potential of the SAP Mentor ini-tiative is to have 2 mentors per SAP product or solution and region.

Not the same as it ever was.Not the same as it ever was.Not the same as it ever was.

Once in a lifetime ;-)Mark Finnern

The story about old times need proofs... like this picture... that it really happened that way and it is not an urban legend.

* That line is straight out of my current favorite Children's Book: Captain Underpants ;-)

#SAPMQ1 2011

QUARTERLY8

Student BI Club – Past, Present and Future

How I Got RecruitedA few selected schools in North

America and China are participating in the pilot program for the Student Business Intelligence Club sponsored by SAP and the SAP University Alli-ance. As one student posted in her blog, the purpose of this club is for university students to “learn valuable data visualization skills for an aca-demic and professional edge.” Stu-dents are teamed with Mentors to exchange and share knowledge.

Last September, Mico Yuk recruited me to get involved with what was known at the time the Student Dash-boarding Club. This was a pilot pro-gram sponsored by the SAP Univer-sity Alliance. I explained to her that I was new at the time to Xcelsius, but to not let that stop me.

The SAP University Alliance pro-vided slides and exercises, all built around the Global Bike Case Study model. Mico Yuk provided an intro-duction to Xcelsius, and then I was asked to lecture on Basic Concepts.

About the lectures

I was the first lecture up to pres-ent on Basic Con-cepts, providing an overview on how to create and run a simple dash-board with Xcelsius and explain the spreadsheet models used as basis for

dashboards as well as different types of components, including chart com-ponents, single value components

and selector com-ponents. While I liked the University-Alliance slides pro-vided, I added my own as well to it:

• Stephen Few principles of dash-boarding

• Do’s and don’ts to reduce your Excel overhead when creating Dashboards

When a demo is worth tousand words: Grades, Mangoes and more

Kumar Subramanian provided the next lecture on What-If Sce-narios while Kalyan Verma lectured on Xcelsius Advanced techniques. Kumar provided a nice bonus ses-sion as well where he demonstrated how he used dynamic visibility, color binding, a multiple toggle button, drilldowns using charts, images for backgrounds, and using HTML tags to build the „Mangoes“ dashboard (see bottom left of this page).

Students were encouraged to do

the homework and blog on SCN about their experience. To exchange ideas we used SAP StreamWork.

At the end of the semester students participated in a small dashboarding contest – see below for winning en-try from Lalit "Leo" Ramchandani, who built a “what-if” scenario in his „Performance“ dashboard for grades (see top of this page).

„No Need to be Saved by The Bell“ by Tammy Powlas

Student quote:“This session really worked

for me. I have learned about the reporting tool. The on-line session and demo lecture were really organized well. “

Lalit "Leo" Ramchandani built a “what-if” scenario in his „Performance“ dashboard for grades. Learn more about the dashboard on SCN in the author´s blog.

Kumar Subramanian built the „Mangoes“ dashboard

UNIVERSITY ALLIANCES #SAPMQ1 2011

QUARTERLY 9

Related LinksReportapalooza: http://www.reportapalooza.comIngo Hilgefort: http://www.mastering-sap-and-

businessobjects.com/University Alliance Student Dashboarding Club:http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/uac/index?rid=/

webcontent/uuid/00288ac5-698c-2d10-b3ad-f396cd3816f4

Professor Lou Thompson, University

of Texas - Dallas: I want to thank you for

allowing UTD (University of Texas-Dallas) in the first offering of the SAP

Student Dashboard Club. I have ran into several

of the selected students and they all are very

excited and say that they are learning a lot!

Plans for the futureFor this semester’s Student BI Club,

SAP Mentor Ingo Hilgefort is pro-viding webinars on SAP Crystal Reports on SAP ERP or BW, Dashboard Design on ERP or BW, WebIntelligence on BW, BusinessObjects Analysis on BW, Busi-nessObjects Explorer on ERP or BW.

Ingo will be covering SAP Busines-sObjects BI Client tools and how they can be integrated into SAP ERP or SAP NetWeaver BW.

Through America’s SAP User Group, we also have guest speakers including Reportapalooza winner Brian Durn-ing from Pepsico speaking on Crys-tal Reports, Derek Loranca of Aetna speaking about Uni-verse Design on large databases, and Yatkwai Kee of New-ell Rubbermaid on BusinessObjects Explorer.

How did we do last semester?

We all hope the students like what we do. Here are some student quotes that make us happy:

“I am very grateful to have an op-portunity to work under such experi-enced people and create dashboards.

We are going into a world for structuring data at the end of the day to discover hidden relationships and learn to differen-tiate the wheat from the chaff, hence, the program, the idea, excellent!”

“During this experience, I have had an opportunity to hear from some very helpful folks during the dashboard pi-lot program for Crystal Dashboard and Design (formerly Xcelsius) and would like to thank (in order of first expo-sure) Kirby Leong, Mico Yuk, Tam-my Powlas, Kumar Subramanian and finally my mentor Kalyan Verma who assisted me in troubleshooting the above query. These names are entirely from memory, hence if I have missed anyone, please accept my apologies and please feel free to point them out. I am looking forward to a design session with Ingo Hilgefort in the Spring.”

Tammy Powlas

Last October a two man team from Australia won DemoJam North America at SAP TechEd Las Vegas. Matt Harding and Al Templeton totally blew away the crowd with their "Super-Generic Mobile App".

The next day during a pod-cast with the Enterprise Geeks http://enterprisegeeks.com/blog/2010/10/21/day-2-las-vegas-sap-teched-2010/ Matt and Al challenged Thomas Jung and Ed Herrmann to a DemoJam shootout when the two SAP Mentors visit Sydney for the Mastering SAP Technologies http://www.mastering-sap.com/tech conference in March.

DemoJam DownunderDemoJam Australia

(see http://www.mas-teringsap.com/tech/demojam) will take place on the evening of 20th March as part of the kick-off for the conference. There will be six teams competing for a prize of infinitesimal value but high prestige. En-tries will showcase technol-ogies that cover the leading edge, bleeding edge and plain common sense.

It promises to be an eve-ning of great fun and en-tertainment followed by a careful and considered review of all submissions into the early hours.

Graham Robinson

Matt Harding and Al Templeton won the DemoJam at TechEd Las Vegas 2010 with their „Super-Generic Mobile App“

UNIVERSITY ALLIANCES

CHALLENGE

#SAPMQ1 2011

QUARTERLY10

A Look BackOur story begins in the primordi-

al ages of 2006. A unified stack of NetWeaver solutions (BW, Portal, PI, etc) had just shipped based upon NetWeaver 7.0. At nearly the same time, ERP 6.0 had shipped running on the same NetWeaver release lev-el. All the major application offerings from SAP were shipping or on track to soon ship based upon NetWeaver 7.0. The unified NetWeaver release strategy was a success and all was right with the world.

Meanwhile developers at SAP were hard at work on the next major re-lease of NetWeaver – NetWeaver 7.10. At its inception, the development as-sumption was that this release would also be unified. In other words, it was expected that NetWeaver 7.10 would be the basis release for the next major version of the Business Suite as well as NetWeaver 7.10 be-ing the next standalone NetWeaver release (BW, Portal and PI). However there were several approaching deci-sions that would impact NetWeaver shipments for the next few years.

The Advent of the Composition Environment

The first was the introduction of NetWeaver CE – or Composition Envi-ronment. The concept is fairly simple. You have core applications which business don’t want to change all that

often. These are largely represented by the Business Suite itself. You then have Edge or Composite applications where faster innovation can take place. The idea of NetWeaver CE was to free up a set of Composite appli-cation development tools based upon NetWeaver Java by having a sepa-rate and accelerated release cycle. Therefore a branch of the Java side of NetWeaver was taken that only in-cluded a subset of the usage types of the full Java release. While the main NetWeaver 7.10 release would de-velop based upon the requirements of the Business Suite, BW, Portal, and PI; NetWeaver CE would focus only on re-quirements around Web Dynpro Java, Visual Composer, CAF, and eventually Business Process Management.

The Suite Changes Course – Enhancement Packages

The other decision that impacted NetWeaver had to do with the fu-ture of the Business Suite. You see, NetWeaver 7.0 ABAP had introduced a powerful new technology with the Enhancement and Switch Framework. Originally intended to allow customer and partners to more easily and safely make extensions to SAP development objects, it turned out that this technol-ogy was also very useful to Business Suite development. They were able to use this technology to deliver new business functionality in an optional and deactivated state. This in turn allowed customers to selectively acti-vate new functionality within isolated business processes instead of the tra-ditional big-bang upgrade approach.

This change in direction proposed a significant challenge to the NetWeav-er development however. While NetWeaver had been laboring on new ABAP engine functionality to support the Business Suite, they now faced the situation that there would be no major upgrades for the Business Suite for the foreseeable future. Instead the Business Suite would remain upon NetWeaver 7.0 and offer new busi-ness functionality only via optional En-hancement Packages.

SAP NetWeaver Releases: A Tale of Two (Or More) CodelinesSAP NetWeaver release levels and numbering has been the cause of confusion now for a little while. The last few years has seen splitting of code lines and the introduction of parallel delivery paths for software which runs on top of NetWeaver, sometimes even resulting in situations where a lower numeric release level has more functionality than a higher numeric one. Therefore the purpose of this article is to look back at recent history and identify the reasons for this complexity and in doing so hopefully clarify the numbering for everyone.

Enhancement Packages = Innovation + Stability

NETWEAVER CORNER #SAPMQ1 2011

QUARTERLY 11

Support Packages to the Rescue?

Although the NetWeaver release level couldn’t change, additional func-tionality was still needed by the Busi-ness Suite; especially in the new areas of Web Dynpro ABAP and ABAP based Web Services. At first NetWeaver at-tempted to meet these requirements by shipping new functionality within Support Packages. For NetWeaver 7.0 between SP 9 and 14, approximately every other SP contained some new functionality.

On the surface, using Support Packages to deliver new functional-ity seems like a timely and effective delivery method. However, it meant that customers who only wanted le-gal changes and bug fixes would be receiving new functionality as well. It also meant there was an increased chance that new bugs (within the new functionality) might accidentally be delivered as well.

Therefore SAP switched to the ap-proach of NetWeaver Enhancement Packages. Although not utilizing the same Switch Framework technology as the Business Suite Enhancement Packages, the NetWeaver ones fol-lowed a similar concept. NetWeaver Enhancement Packages allow for the

optional introduction of new function-ality which corresponds directly to a particular Business Suite Release or Enhancement Package. This means that ERP 6.0 Enhancement 4, CRM 7.0, and SRM 7.0 all run on NetWeaver 7.0 Enhancement Package 1.

With the introduction of NetWeaver Enhancement Packages, there were now three separate delivery lines of NetWeaver functionality developed in parallel. We have NetWeaver 7.0 Enhancement Packages for the Busi-ness Suite, NetWeaver 7.10/7.11 for standalone NetWeaver (largely used by NetWeaver PI) and NetWeaver CE 7.10 and 7.11 for composition develop-ment. Internally SAP manages these separate code line makes sure that the most important new functionality makes into each of them.

Now and the Near FutureIn a large part this multi-prong ap-

proach in order to meet different de-velopment needs and timelines con-tinues today. NetWeaver CE has now been merged back into the mainline NetWeaver as of NetWeaver 7.30. It contains all the usage types support-ed by NetWeaver in addition to the accelerated development for compo-sition and BPM tooling.

We also have the recent release of Business Suite 7 Innovations 2010 (ERP 6.0 Enhancement Package 5, CRM 7.0 Enhancement Package 1, and SRM 7.0 Enhancement Pack-age 1) which runs upon NetWeaver 7.0 Enhancement Package 2. This NetWeaver release level largely con-tains the same ABAP based technical functionality that was created and re-leased for NetWeaver 7.30. So as an example you might be planning to up-grade your BW system to NetWeaver 7.30 and your ERP system to 6.0 En-hancement Package 5/NetWeaver 7.0 Enhancement Package 2. You would find that even though these two ap-plications have different release num-bering that the ABAP technology foun-dation of each is nearly identical.

I can’t discuss in too much detail the plans for the future, but it is safe to say that SAP will continue to sync the functionality as closely as possible yet retain timelines and the ability to meet the requirements of various stakeholds (IE the Business Suite and Standalone NetWeaver usage cases).

Thomas Jung

Innovation Delivery: Past and Present

Enhancement Packages As Part Of Your Maintenance Cycle

NETWEAVER CORNER#SAPMQ1 2011

QUARTERLY12

In my case, I use the “power of pull” to help me be the best SAP analyst and content creator I can be. An SAP pro-fessional can use the same techniques to develop their skills and monitor key trends. An SAP manager or consult-ing director could put another spin on the same tools and use them for lead generation, brand monitoring, and expanding their professional network. For the rest of this piece, I’ll talk about some of these tools and the miscon-ceptions that prevent us from taking advantage of them.

Misconception number one: “I get all the information I need from Twitter…Twitter brings the best stuff to light.

I’ve been on Twitter for almost three years now. The notion that dipping into Twitter from time to time gets you the best blogs and the best in-formation is utter b.s. Twitter is not a content meritocracy. Some of the best content that gets posted each week doesn’t get tweeted, or never gains

The Power of Pull, SAP StyleHow I changed my professional life through networked “listening”

retweet momentum. It gets lost in the retweeting frenzy. Yes, Twitter is great for finding out about breaking SAP news, like a major acquisition or a big court verdict. You won’t miss the biggest stories if you dip in a couple times a day, but you will miss some of the best analysis, especially in niche areas of interest within SAP.

A corrected viewTwitter is most powerful when you

combine its conversational aspects with searches that track the content you are most interested in – even when you are far from your com-puter. With the right search terms in place, you can get far more out of Twitter than if you simply hop online and hope for the best. Those search terms take some experimentation. One quick example: one of my run-ning twitter searches is “SAP replay” (not as an exact phrase, but two words appearing in the tweet). This search term generates a nice amount of instantly viewable SAP content. “SAP podcast” also accomplishes this. Here’s a view of the “SAP podcast” search from Twitter – note the “feed for this query” and RSS symbol in the top right to subscribe to the search (see picture on the right).

I learned the hard way that “SAP webinar” is not as helpful, given that you’ll get a ton of marketing tweets for webinars that haven’t occurred yet. I still run that search but don’t check the RSS results as often. Which brings us to...

Misconception number two: RSS is dead.

Steve Gillmor of the Gillmor Gang has been banging on this one, and he’s right about this much: for many, RSS is not a technology they will have

not have to deal with directly. Those who “like” Facebook pages or join Linkedin groups likely won’t be aware that the content coming into those groups might come by way of feeds, or feed aggregators. So the feeds may be invisible to the viewer, but RSS is hardly dead. In Steve Gillmor’s case, it turns out he uses his email as an incoming content receptacle, exactly the opposite of my preferred

article by Jon Reed, continuation from the front page

Obvious fact: some keywords offer better search results than others. „Sap podcast“ is one of the good ones.

BEST PRACTICE #SAPMQ1 2011

QUARTERLY 13

approach. That’s why RSS means little to him, he is pulling based on email alerts. But it doesn’t matter, it still comes down to the power of pull-ing customized information into one place. And for those interested in the power of pull, RSS is your best pal.

This brings us to the question of tools

I’m partial to Google Reader be-cause of its speed and, ahem, cloud-based location. But any RSS reader can work well. As mentioned, you can also use email for most of these kinds

of alerts and content notifications, especially with a good filter routing emails into folders. I like my email inbox clean so RSS is far preferable in my case. Some folks have active keyword searches running in Twitter

appliances like Tweetdeck. This works well for Twitter searches but not as well for pulling other content in from the outside. Still others like Delicious and other web tagging sites for this purpose. I like Google Reader better but the tool is not the point.

The power of a good RSS reader is I have all my custom content routed to the same place: Streamwork and SCN forums updates, Twitter keyword searches, podcasts and video updates, Youtube video uploads, keyword anal-ysis I run for clients to track mentions of their products and brands, Google keyword alerts, SAP news and stock

price alerts, the list goes on. Top of that list: the most important blogs I follow. Some bloggers are vitally im-portant to my own thinking. I can’t risk missing their posts because I miss a tweet about it. RSS searches on “jonerp” and variations like “jon reed sap” help me to quickly reply to those who have a question or comment about my work, even if they don’t use the @mention protocol.

As important as Twitter is to me, Google Reader, which I fine tune and fuss over like a car collector would do with an old Mustang, is now my most powerful industry monitoring tool. It’s allowed me to turn myself into an in-dependent analyst; it’s helped me to understand the context of the issues I am blogging about before I blog about them, right up to the minute. It’s helped me to realize that there is underrated power in listening before you speak, especially with these filter-ing tools.

Misconception number three: it’s impossible to use an RSS reader because we quickly get overwhelmed with incomingcontent and give up.

That’s true to a point. My cur-rent Google Reader is my fourth RSS reader setup. The other ones I had to abandon because too much informa-tion was flowing in and it made me crazy. This time I started slowly, add-ing the most important feeds first. I have organized topics into folders and prioritized them based all on their im-mediacy. If we don’t learn to ruthlessly prioritize for today’s speed of incoming information, we’re at a big disadvan-tage. Applying that prioritization skill to subscribed feeds is not hard once the essential decisions on priorities have been made.

For example, I track social media trends and advise clients on social media strategy, but I don’t need to see every blog post from social me-dia experts every time they come out. “Tips for getting the most out of Twit-ter” is just not an immediate concern – I can catch up on that topic

BEST PRACTICE#SAPMQ1 2011

QUARTERLY14

Contributors for this issue in order of appearance:

Get SAP Inside Track graphic for any time/

location you can think ofNigel James created a useful tool for all the Inside

Track events organizers. It is the unified graphics cre-ator. Anybody can create the needed graphics using this URL: http://www.sapinsidetrack.org.

The way it works is simple: Enter a year e.g. 2011 and a location e.g. Sydney to get: http://www.sapinsidetrack.org/img/sapitlogo.php?year=2011&loc=sydney

Some folks already use the tool for long term event planning and we all hope you will for sure attend the 2020 Inside track Dark Side of the Moon.

Nigel James, Mark Finnern

Jon Reed, Thomas Jung, Alvaro Tejada Galindo,

Graham Robinson, Greg Myers, Matt Harding, Mark Finnern, Tammy Powlas, Matthias Steiner

With Blagbert by Alvaro "Blag" Tejada Galindo

every couple of weeks if needed. I’m also very in-terested in topics like sus-tainability and consumer IT, but again, I don’t need to be reading every post as soon as it comes out. But what guys like Dennis Howlett, Ray Wang and Vinnie Mirchandani are say-ing about the ERP space – I need that info ASAP. What my fellow SAP Mentors are saying and reporting – I need to know that in real-time. They could be writing about an event I am actu-ally at, or providing a fresh perspective on SAP on-de-mand that I am trying to make sense of for a com-ing podcast or white paper or who knows what. They might even be criticizing one of my own blog posts. When an Enterprise Geeks podcast comes out, I want to know about that right away too. That’s enterprise entertainment which might spice up my morning walk or what have you.

I could go on about the

BEST PRACTICE #SAPMQ1 2011

power of pull for the individual, but I think I’ve said about enough. Listening is power-ful, casting a wide net of information is powerful, espe-cially when you can reel it in while prioritizing its rel-evance. You may have to tweak searches to fit your needs. Some searches gener-ate too much content (searches on “SAP” tend to generate two kinds of “unintentional search spam” – “I’m such a SAP” or “Tree SAP is smell-ier than usual this year”). Some searches generate too much job posting filler. But with trial and error, you can find the right phrases and the right volume of in-bound information.

I have done an infor-mal video series on “the power of pull” that shares some of the concepts and

some of the tips I have for Google Reader in particular. Here’s a screen shot from the most recent video in the series:

With a bit of effort, you’ll start pulling in the right mix of information for your per-sonal needs. It’s an exciting time to be an SAP profes-sional because so many of the resources that used to be behind firewalls can be found out in the open. But they aren’t always easy to

The Power of Pull, SAP Style

track or find – unless you have a handle on the pow-er of pull. Which brings me to my next rant: then you have to aborb the informa-tion, unplug, and form a creative response and skills development plan of your own. Then you you are ready to share something that will truly advance the conversation. But that’s an-other article.

Jon Reed

If you missed the first Mentors Quarterly (out before Christmas 2010), look for it on SDN or check the Men-tors homepage on SDN.

Don´t forget to provide any feedback!! Tell us what can we do better the next time, what article you would like to read, anything that comes to your mind about Quarterly.

SAP COMMUNITY NETWORK SDN - sdn.sap.com | BPX - bpx.sap.com | BOC - boc.sap.com | UAC - uac.sap.com

© 2011 SAP AG

Disclaimer and Liability Notice

This document may discuss sample coding or other information that does not include SAP official interfaces and therefore is not supported by SAP. Changes made based on this information are not supported and can be overwritten during an upgrade.

SAP will not be held liable for any damages caused by using or misusing the information, code or methods suggested in this document, and anyone using these methods does so at his/her own risk.

SAP offers no guarantees and assumes no responsibility or liability of any type with respect to the content of this technical article or code sample, including any liability resulting from incompatibility between the content within this document and the materials and services offered by SAP. You agree that you will not hold, or seek to hold, SAP responsible or liable with respect to the content of this document.