SAP CRM the saviour for Development Consultants?

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SearchSAP’s Matt Danielson makes some interesting points here – although CRM has been hailed as the SAP Dev Consultant’s saviour for some years now, it seems to be an alternative that’s growing slowly but surely.

However there is little to suggest that a move into SAP CRM would be that beneficial. From a SAP Development Consultant’s perspective, it rather prolongs the inevitable. Moving into new(ish) areas such WD4A and especially XI would be far more profitable and gives you better career longevity – if there is such a thing these days. A lot of SAP CRM customers are experienced R/3 users and therefore might stay clear off any custom developments within their CRM module once it has been implemented.

Having said that – it can only be an advantage to have CRM under your belt.

Learning WebDynpro for ABAP…

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WebDynpro for ABAP (WD4A) is the latest addition to the client-independent UI technolgies for SAP applications. WD4A was introduced with SAP Netweaver 2004s and complements their range of web user interfaces – together with SAP’s own Business Server Pages (BSP) – and of course shares the rendering engine with a (potential) Java Stack, ie its older brother WebDynpro for Java.

With about 18 months of age, WD4A is still a very fresh area, but will gain momentum quickly due to the large dissemination of ABAP skills.

What can you do and where can you look for help should you decide for yourself to lern more about WebDynpro for ABAP? Some link recommendation are below:

to be continued !

Please feel free to post/comment any other links you think should appear here !

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Ways to develop with SAP

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An interesting post on UI strategies and SAP development by Craig Cmehil. Over the last few years SAP opened up several routes for development environments and UIs. Most important message I think is that SAP offers a portfolio of means of development that gives choice back to the customer. For example, too many people still believe that WebDynpro for ABAP replaced BSP. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as both are aimed at different development scenarios.

PHP Development in SAP

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PHP logoThink SAP Netweaver and PHP don’t mix? Think commercial development platforms don’t need any Open-Source, free and community-driven dynnamic web development scripting language? And you think why SAP should embrace an environment that stands in direct competition to its own BSP (Business Server Pages) solution?

Think again, because for a while now PHP has a small but thriving community on the SDN forum. Surely one of the big advantages of tasting the mix between SAP and PHP is PHP’s simplicity and the dissemination of PHP programming skills due to the way how it is distributed. Especially customers who have already invested into home-grown or off-the-shelf PHP solutions might appreciate this when SAP is to be considered. Netweaver/PHP collaborations could be one of the many doors that enable SAP to get deeper into the SME market.

Useful links and entry points into this area are: