Let me give you an update on my journey onto pastures greener that are the SAP Netweaver Composition Environment (CE). If you’ve missed the first part of this series, go, go, go and catch up now!

“I find your lack of faith disturbing.”, Darth Vader (Star Wars)

Over the past 2 weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time in SAP’s own Enterprise Services Workplace on SDN, which is a pretty good resource to look through SAP’s latest enterprise service offerings. It’s actually more than that: it’s THE place where you can find up-to-date info on documentation for services which you deem appropriate for consumption or exposure in your own landscapes. On their SDN website, the ESW is described as follows: “The ES Workplace is the central place to view consolidated information about all available Enterprise Services delivered by SAP.”. Fair dos.

You can install an ES Repository yourself, but chances are you’re not always on the latest release, so checking the ESW is always a good way to see what’s around the corner.

Now you would think that the ESW gives you an easy overview of the services on offer, describing to you exactly what each service does (especially when you compare them to each other). You would probably also think that the ESW gives you a nifty little search engine which enables you to sieve through the 2000+ services and get what you want quickly.

Well, things have definitely improved and especially the testing part of the service (against SAP’s own Discovery System, ie an ECC app stack) is much better now. However much is still left to be desired as far as documentation, search facilities and test harness is concerned. Oh, and while I’m at it: don’t even think about opening up the ESW in browsers such as Firefox, Safari or Opera.

It simply looks to me as if these services have been arranged in such a way so they fit well together with SAP’s module documentation and education plans. This doesn’t always sit in line how other consultants look for services.

In contrast, here is the way how I approach a service from a developer’s perspective: I know I want to create a sales order in a backend system. From my old BAPI days I remember that I need a few parameters to feed the service in order to get order processing going without those elusive error messages. You can find the “Sales Orders Create” service easily enough, but of course that’s only part of what’s needed. If you’re looking around for services to find sales organisations, sales groups, divisions et cetera, you’ll be surprised how difficult it can be to get the information out of the backend that you’re looking for. Bottom line for me is: finding the services you require and testing them is still far from easy.

“Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny”, Yoda (Star Wars)

Now as a developer there is an underlying danger in all this. Let me tell you what this is: The more time you spend looking for those services and collecting your data, the more you’re inclined to log into the backend using SAP GUI, enter the letters “S-E-8-0″ into the top left of the screen and create a little remote-enabled function module, expose it as a web service (using a wizard) and get those pesky sales order related details out of the ERP system. Even worse, you’re even contemplating copying a SAP standard function module to extend it so it does what you want it to do. Do not give in to the powers of the dark side….

Now can I just say one thing here: I bet there are other ways to retrieve data out of the backend system. Whilst I love to hear about them, all I want to illustrate here is that I’m currently on a long journey during which I will learn how to find the services I require quicker and get the backend to do what I want it to do. The benefits will be that the customer I work for have systems that need less support and testing after an upgrade, because services to external systems are provided via standard services which are constantly updated and maintained by SAP.

However a little help from SAP by making the ESW easier to use wouldn’t go amiss!

TO BE CONTINUED!

ABAP, SAP Blogosphere, SAP Netweaver ABAP, CE, CompriseIT, SOA

here’s my weekly rundown of all that’s been happening in SAP Land over the last 7 days

• Alvaro Tejada (aka Blag) announces SAP Inside Track Lima, Peru. For known geographical reasons I won’t be able to make it, Blag.
• a good install guide for ABAP & Java stacks on Amazon Web Sevices (part 1).
• Oracle buys IP assets of SAP-funded Conformia: “SAP funds them, Oracle picks up the assets on the cheap. Nice system.”
• “So we will get it right, and we will take our time. Yeah, it took a little bit longer than we thought, but we can afford to.” – SAP’s CTO Vishal Sikka talking to CIO.com’s Thomas Wailgum on Timeless Software, Saas, The Cloud and BusinessByDesign. I do miss a little bit of bite in the questions, but Vishal seems an eloquent talker. I think though it is a little rich to say that SAP’s been in the cloud for 15 years though.
• SAP Mentor Dennis Howlett with another worthwhile contribution on ZDNet: What really happened with SAP Business bydesign? – ZDNet Blogs

here’s my Twitterverse take… some funny ones on the eternal Walldorf <-> Heidelberg debate (where shall you stay when visiting the SAP mothership?)

• @yojibee: @vlvl I usually prefer Heidelberg too, but think I might stay in WDF this time – just for the fun of it
• @vlvl: @yojibee it is rare to find “Fun” and “Walldorf” in the same sentence

This week in SAP SAP News

Well in SAP News terms last week certainly was “John Wookey Week”. A lot of SAP relevant content came out of the SIIA On-Demand Europe conference:

• “It’s a problem that only we at SAP can solve”. Interesting FT piece on John Wookey, SAP EVP, and SAP’s future in the on-demand space.
• ZDnet followed the FT piece up with some solid analysis from Phil Wainewright and SAP Mentor Dennis Howlett.
• Here is also an interesting interview from Dennis Howlett talking to John Wookey on the fringes of said SIIA conference in Amsterdam.
• SAP Mentor Jon Reed with a good piece on the PAC website about SAP and its Social Media strategy.

And this week’s Twitter-Picks:

• @jonerp: Short but interesting: “Merril cuts SAP from ‘buy’ to ‘neutral’, sees no IT spending recovery in 2009.” www.marketwatch.com

• @rmtiwari @mrinal: just when on-demand should be their *present* they think SAP’s *future* is on-demand blogs.zdnet.com

This week in SAP SAP News

SAP Mentor Yoda

“You must unlearn what you have learned.”, Yoda (Star Wars)

Heeding Yoda’s advice, I’m currently in the process of unlearning some (but by far not all!) of the skills I’ve acquired over the years as SAP Development Consultant. During the past 11+ years, I’ve developed a lot of my applications within the ABAP stack, mostly for use within SAP GUI, sometimes within a browser.

Now, to some of you this might sound a bit pretentious, but I wanted to do something new and different! SAP ERP products are great but not perfect. I spent over a decade performing ABAP and config work in order to mold SAP ERP systems into a shape so they do exactly what a business wants. Make no mistake, these years were very valuable for me and my backend expertise is going to come in very handy in my new job. But I wanted to get out and explore, see what’s beyond and discover pastures new.

Over the years I’ve brought a lot of help and value to businesses with my ABAPs and web apps, but it always entailed changes or enhancements within the ERP core system. Sometimes these changes were not easy to make, as end users wanted to keep their system as free of customisation as possible, fearing problems and endless regression tests further down the line.

Moreover, before ABAP OO came along, reusability of development components (DCs) was merely restricted to INCLUDEs and Function Modules. Thankfully this has all changed now. But let’s face it: adoption of ABAP OO based development principles is still not a reality in every SAP development team. Things have definitely improved, but it’s far from being fully adopted.

Enter Composition Environment, Netweaver Developer Studio, Composite Application Framework, Visual Composer, Guided Procedures, Enterprise Services Builder and all these other tools & repositories of a new service-oriented world that is Enterprise SOA. My new world. “The other side of the pond”, as I call it.


“Rest, Neo. The answers are coming.”, Morpheus (The Matrix)

However all these new tools can be quite daunting for a SAP Development Consultant who in the past usually spent most of his time using one single development workbench: SE80. In addition to new tooling and code syntax (Java), a CE development consultant also needs to understand the landscape far better than an ABAPer. It comes with the territory: if you want to build apps that link systems and leverage services then you surely have to know your backend from your Java stack from your Dev Studio. Simple as that.

If you’re an experienced ABAPer then you must expect to be out of your comfort zone (aka ABAP Development Workbench) once in a while. Books, TechEd videos, Tutorials, SAP help and helpful colleagues are hopefully at the ready to make the transition easier for you. Benefits you can reap from the learning process are more DC reusability, agile and flexible development, modern development tools and many, many more  (at least that’s what I hope for!). Imagine to cut down development time and deliver solutions to end users at a much faster pace than what you’re used to in SAP Land. Isn’t that worth the effort?

At this point I would also like to divert your attention to my CompriseIT colleague Tom Scaysbrook’s blog “Journey into SAP”, another great read in the CE arena and beyond.


So what are my observations so far?

• I think that my background in SAP’s web app offerings and ALE/IDOC are a distinct advantage when it comes to understanding services, protocols, MVC paradigm, Object Orientation and parts of the new tooling. So if that’s your background, great.
• Here’s the frustrating bit: most CE tutorials on SDN are out of date. Details in the tooling have changed in CE, disadvantage being that screenshots and descriptions have you got your head scratching more than once. It sometimes happens to me that I spend more time looking for a button or a tab than I actually need to complete the tutorial. CE consultant Thorsten Franz has also emphasized this on SDN some time back in 2008 in more detail.
• diggin deeper: I was curious and had a look at the ABAP coding behind a web service for “sales order management” and was surprised. I guess my expectation was to see a lot of wrapped BAPI calls, but instead I found a lot of usage of the MV45A screen modules (even FCODEs). Very interesting to see how it was done though. Learning how to use BAdIs to enance web services is high on my agenda.
• another perspective: another thing that I find fascinating is the Composite Application Framework. It is integrated into the NW Developer Studio and enables you to write your own CAF services but also define your own structures and data tables. Storage of data (or “persistence” as it is called) is all dealt with by the framework (which is nice!). The topic of “data storage in backend or CAF – pros and cons” will surely tempt me to a blog post in the future.

TO BE CONTINUED !

ABAP, SAP Blogosphere, SAP Netweaver ABAP, CE, CompriseIT, SOA

This week obviously saw the start and end of Sapphire 2009 in Orlando, which is reflected in this week’s news items.

• news just out before the start of Sapphire 2009: SAP aquires Clear Standards
• Sapphire 2009: Dennis Howlett with an apt first-day-keynotes-summary – this also includes the “Sapphire 2009 press conference that never was”.
• CIO.com ’s Sapphire 2009 round up
• Vinnie Mirchandani with some interesting insights from Sapphire here, on sustainability here and here.
• “Even SAP can be cool”. CNN.com with a report on Leo Apotheker who is soon taking over the reigns at SAP.

I’ve decided to include this week’s Tweet picks courtesy of Thomas Wailgum (CIO.com), who’s posted some great Tweet pickings from Sapphire 2009, Orlando.

This week in SAP SAP News

Back in October 2008 I attended Owen Pettiford’s (Co-CEO of CompriseIT and fellow SAP Mentor) presentation during Community Day at SAP TechEd Berlin. Owen spoke about SOA and Composite Applications. In my TechEd Roundup afterwards I wrote:

During Community Day I attended Owen Pettiford’s (founding member of BPX network) interesting SOA session. He talked about the framework and approach he uses in his daily work. I like his approach to deal with small “pains” first, keeping it simple and making use of existing, perfect systems by bringing them together with SAP Composition Environment, for example. Inspired by this, I decided to learn more about CE on Community Day. I might be way off here and there is lots more to get into, but especially in the current economic climate CE might play a larger role in the short to mid term.

Since then, Owen and I remained in touch and during March 2009 he approached me asking if I would be interested in joining Comprise to work as Composite Application Consultant. I’ve been thinking about a slight change of direction for a while and have to admit that I find composites and SAP CE a very exciting area.

I’m therefore delighted and excited to report that I’ve decided to join the Comprise team from the beginning of June 2009 onwards. It will be a big learning curve for an ABAP/Web Development Consultant like me, as the tooling is different in some areas (BPM, BRM, Composite Application Framework, Webdynpro Java, etc), but I am confident and more than looking forward to the challenge. I’m planning to blog about my “path to CE” on here, so keep your ears and RSS readers pierced.

Apart from Owen and CompriseIT I would also like to thank SAP, SDN, SAP Community Day and the SAP Mentorship Programme in particular. Without the latter SAP initiatives and programmes none of this would have not been easily possible. It is another proof what SDN and the SAP mentor programme is capable of achieving.

Last year, other Community Day participants convinced me to come a day earlier to join in and meet peers in Berlin. Now I know for sure what they meant !

SAP Blogosphere, SAP Netweaver CompriseIT, Owen Pettiford

Whoops! What happened over the last few weeks? Because of a recent change in direction for me my “This week in SAP” column suffered a little bit. More to be announced soon!

So let’s get this SAP News Show back on track…

• Forbes’ Dan Woods sees SAP taking revenge as Oracle customers will face an implementation headache further down the line. Nothing really new in this article (the integration headache argument is already 4-5 years old). Woods added some Business Suite 7 sprinkles worthwhile a read though.
• SAP aquires High Deal, a private France telecom spin-off which especialises in real-time billing.
• “There’s not going to be a lot to report.”, that’s what SAP’s Bill McDermott said when asked about the status of Business By Design (BBD) prior to its annual Sapphire conference. My guess is that SAP is keeping cards close to its chest whilst fumbling their way into a SaaS world.
• SAP Business Suite 7 has now come out of ramp-up is available to customers worldwide. I’d like to know what all the companies mentioned use BS7 for and for which processes. Heavyweights such as Colgate Palmolive surely have not implemented BS7 across their enterprise. And: are they’re still using it now? Hopefully Sapphire will tell us more.
• and finally an interesting CNBC interview with SAP’s Bill McDermott once again. As a journalist, how badly prepared can you be? They have a big gun in front of their cameras and then mess it up like this. Funy to watch though. (via Vinnie Mirchandani and Jon Reed)

TwitterSAPLand:

• @erwintenhumberg : “BTW, we’re now at 68 non-SAP registrations for the Eclipse DemoCamp in Walldorf. Pretty cool I think!”

This week in SAP SAP News

Just to let everyone know that Craig Cmehil’s “24h Friday Morning Report Marathon” is due to start in less that one hour. Craig is raising money for Doctor’s Without Borders, “Doctors Without Borders is at work right now saving the lives of women, men and children in more than 60 countries where people would otherwise not have access to medical care.”.

Please tune in, participate in this event and most importantly: DONATE. Craig will surely do a fantastic job and I’d like to wish him all the best for this tour de force.

Link to the event program is here.

SAP Blogosphere Craig Cmehil

I really enjoyed presenting the findings of my online survey about “Contractors and SAP Certifications” here at SAP Inside Track London this morning. The unconference is still in full swing, but I wanted to share the presentation and survey results spreadsheet with you right now. The original slides were created with Apple’s Keynote so I hope the converted file displays ok in Powerpoint. Any problems please give me a shout.

Dennis Howlett has also recorded the presentation, so more video goodness later.

Update: Here is also a link to the zipped Keynote presentation file.

SAP Education, SAP Market, SAP Netweaver

Once again I’ve been scraping the bottom of the SAP News barrel for you this week:

• SAP redundancies: it emerged that “natural fluctuation”, as mentioned in its letter to employees back in Jan 09,  was not enough. Chris Kanaracus at IDG News Service / Frank Scavo: “One laid-off SAP worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said SAP’s move “wasn’t unexpected, given how slow business has been. Everybody’s been sitting around for a few months waiting for the other shoe to drop.” “
• Sign of the times: SAP cans Community Day at its TechEd conferences.
• As SAP’s global Marketing VP Steve Mann blogged about his resignation, CIO reports on the “uncertain future of SAP’s Social Media Strategy“
• “The body can not live without the mind” (The Matrix): a good article why SAP is losing out “how to capture the new brain”. Linking back to Steve Mann’s departure, describing his departure as loss of a “huge asset”. My question: Why is Social Media supposed to be so marketing-driven?

and check out my Twitter produce:

• se38: “SAP beginnt mit Entlassungen in Palo Alto” (”SAP starts layoffs in Palo Alto”)
• SpinAct: Folks from SAP layoffs can now sign-up on SpinAct and monetize their knowledge and expertise
• thorstenster: @Blag What an absolute shame! No more Community Day –> TechEd loses at least 50% of its value.

This week in SAP SAP, SAP News

Hacking Scala & Lift at SAP Community Day 08 (photo courtesy of Nigel James)

When Darren Hague and Nigel James spread the news that there will be another SAP Inside Track (SIT) held in London this year on April 4th, I was very quick in signing up. Especially after SAP’s announcement this week that the next wave of SAP TechEd conferences will be without Community Day, there is an even better reason to come and join SIT this year. And as Nigel put it on his blog:

One of the great benefits of these days is the networking and conversations with people in trenches.  In credit crunched times such as today these can be even more valuable than official training sessions and (dare I say it) certification.

For further details on the people involved, topics discussed and the usual logistics, go and visit the SIT Wiki page. In addition, you can also follow for updates: @SAPInsideTrack

If you have a closer look, you’ll spot a discussion about SAP Certification. I am hoping to provide some results of my ongoing online survey during this session. If you’re a SAP contractor and you haven’t taken part in the survey yet, please do so. If you know some SAP contractors, please forward the link on to them. We have a great opportunity here to provide SAP and the Community Network with some valuable data and the more people take part in this independent survey the better.

Hope to meet you there !

SAP Blogosphere, SAP Education

My top SAP news picks of the last 7 days:

• big SAP announcement of the week: SAP and Sybase’s cooperation on bringing Business Suite apps to all mobile devices. Good take on it (as usual) from Dennis here. I just can’t see the iPhone (yet) breaking into the corporate market on a scale similar to Nokia and RIM. There is also something inside of me that simply refuses to believe that a device that is upgraded and synced with a music management software (iTunes) is going to make it in the business world.
• Computing UK interviews SAP Europe Chief Exec Jose Duarte. An honest, short and sharp interview.

Anyone for SAP Tweets?

• chiprodgers: “Well done @mepmarcelo on Community Day Brazil last week! Super job of documenting the event too.”
• njames: “I have got to say this is a great Press conf for playing enterprise buzzword bingo.” (on the SAP Sybase webcast)
• fiskerton: “I am done with you ABAP Debugger, begone! And yet… you remain. And mock me with your unresponsiveness. Don’t make me log out of SAP”
• jonerp: “Had interesting talk with major T1 SAP BI player today. They do offshore some SAP BI work but keep some onsite – needed for user buy-in.”

This week in SAP