A long time in the making, this blog I mean, but finally I've decided to force myself to complete the series and post it for everyone to get a good look at. The series I am talking about will come in a few different parts with videos, code, and clarifications attached.
Making sure your NW04s Preview system is ready and "open"
Making sure you have an account with Zoho
Creating the ABAP code (or better installing it with SAPLink)
Sending the data and viewing it
Receiving the data
Zoho API, taking a closer look
So first what are all these about. Well these are about an experiment I did back in October when attending the Office 2.0 convention in San Francisco. Oh another new term perhaps? Office 2.0 is more of a thought that a thing although there is a wonderful description by Ismael Ghalimi
Imagine a computer that never crashes, or gets infected by a virus. Imagine a computer onto which you never have to install any application. Imagine a computer that follows you wherever you go, be it at school, at work, abroad, or back home. This computer does not exist today, but it will in the future, and this future might be much closer than you think.
Now SAP attended this conference, actually we were a large sponsor of the conference as well and I believe we had the most people in attendence having around 10 of us there. A force to be reckoned with if you will - nothing like 10 Enterprise guys hungry to know something show up at a conference showcasing some of the most innovative technologies and applications out in the Web 2.0 space at the moment. The biggest question I got asked (was at our little "booth" most of the time) was "Why is SAP here?" A valid question and one that some of you may be wondering yourselves right now. Well the standard one liner I said to everyone was "because we have a clue". The answer which most (all but one guy who had to go to the bathroom) stayed to hear (the guy came back later in case you wondering) was along the lines of the following: "Well first SAP is here because we are interested, curious and we understand that this is certainly an area making waves and will continue into the future. We'd like to see who's here, what they are offering and what might or might not relate to us. SAP whether you know or not has been hot on the Web 2.0 space for years - yep years before the term was coined but we've been doing many of the things happening now - no not to "toot" our own horn but it's just a fact nothing more. But we're not here for that we are here though to see and interact we want to collaborate and communicate just like we do on SDN." "SDN, oh SDN is our developer community" "Yes it's well over 600,000 people and deals with all the varying technologies around SAP" "No, anyone can join it's free membership with forums, blogs, articles, downloads, the works - we are even adding a Wiki - wait we added it this morning - so it's all live now" Normally at this point I would go off into SDN and show everyone all around and explain what we do how the community interacts with each other and brings added value. How people made changes and work around's in BSP to later find similar aspects added into the next service packs. How SAP is embracing Scripting Languages and now the new [then] Business Process Expert Community. As well as how we are standardizing on services and making our platform more available - the podcasts, video blogs, etc. At this point I would normally have a captive audience of 3 or 4 people so I could spin off into a little experiment I had put together. The main idea of what I did was to demonstrate how easy it was to connect my NW04s system (the one running on my laptop - that blew some minds in itself) to Zoho. Now Zoho is the leading online office suite company who were the first to launch the complete package of office style applications as well as the first to offer full Sign on and now they've also launched an API. Zoho were at the conference as well so I finally got to put a face to the voice/email and was able to walk them through parts of the demo I made up - the hotel Wireless was not as "open" as we all hoped so I could not show everything unfortunately. I promised them and a multitude of others I would do the demo up and blog it, this is the first of those blogs.
