Many may have overlooked the important milestone achieved during the SAPTechEd'06 Vegas for the SDN Community developments and Open Source. We were faced with 2 main new ideas: 1 - A real ABAP project that has already started to put the SDN community together 2 - A tool is being created that will allow very smooth code sharing amongst SDNers... I came to this SAPTechEd and SDN Day events with one particular interest: I wanted to know how we as a community could get more involved in the development of SAP code. I always believed that at one point SDN development would one day complement SAP standard code. Tobias Trapp - Open Source @ SDN? But how to get there? Which initiatives could we get involved on immediately? I don't know if it is clear for everyone else, but for me these two points got possible answers during the SAPTechEd. Thanks to the great demo winner of the Demo Jam presented by Dan McWeeney and Ed Herrmann (SAPlink @ Demo Jam - TechEd 2006 Vegas) we have the following possibilities: 1 - The SAPlink allows ABAP code to be downloaded and uploaded back to SAP. This program works with object types (plug-ins?) so it can download code and ABAP global classes, for example. Another developer got interested in the idea and created his own plug in to extend the download/upload capabilities of SAPlink to BSP applications. As you know, there are may possible objects to be uploaded and downloaded from SAP. This requires additional development. A few SDN members have shown interest in creating solutions for data dictionary objects and screens (Rich Heilman , you are the one here my friend!). What we are seeing here is one of the first times when the SDN community gets together to build a product that all will benefit from. I know there are other initiatives out there but this one has a broader scope than anything else I've seen to date.2 - How can we make this interaction smoother? SAPlink is a tool that allows much easier code sharing within SDN. As you may know upload ABAP code manually is a slow and very manual process. This tool makes an import of SDN content almost instantaneously. I think the potential is great and the possibilities vast. Thanks to all involved. We'll have a great year ahead for the SDN community! Reference Blogs: SAPLink: ABAP Source Code Distribution https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/pub/wlg/4110https[original link is broken][original link is broken][original link is broken][original link is broken][original link is broken][original link is broken][original link is broken]The Enterprise and the Bazaar
