My Community Day Highlights

I’m here in Las Vegas attending the Community Day and having a great time meeting all of the SDN/BPX powerhouses. This morning, Mark Finnern and Mark Yolton gave the general session, outlining the state of the community.  The community has certainly grown over the past couple years, and there are certainly some impressive numbers.

In the morning,  I attended a session on RIA applications sponsored by Dan McWeeney and Thomas Jung.  Dan showed his latest masterpiece,  the AJS(ABAP Javascript) framework which he built within the ABAP Workbench.  Very cool stuff.  Thomas then came up and showed off his framework around Adobe Flex.  It follows the same lines as Dan’s framework but leverages the Flex technology instead.   Again, very cool stuff.

After lunch, I checked out the session given by Leonardo De Araujo and Alexandre Giguère on the ABAP Report Wizard tool.  I had the pleasure of working on this project with them and I had a great time doing so.  These guys worked very hard on this solution and they are giving it to the community to build upon. 

In the afternoon, I attended the RIA Adobe Flex hands-on session hosted by Matthias Zeller and Ed Herrmann.  I went in having absolutely no experience with Flex, but yet left with my very first working Flex application, and a free Flex book.

Tim O’Reilly took some time to answer questions from the SDN/BPX community before his keynote later in the day.  It was the first time that I’ve heard him speak and I was very impressed.

Next, I attended the Townhall Q&A session with Elvira Wallis, SVP NetWeaver Product Management, Zia Yusuf, Executive VP SAP Ecosystem Management, Peter Graf, Excecutive VP of SAP Solution Marketing, and Mark Yolton, VP Community Networks.  Some very good questions from the audience and great answers as well.

Tim O’Reilly gave his keynote in front of a sea of people.  I understand that a record number 6000 people are attending this year, and I believe that all were at the keynote. 

Boom Chicago performed for the SDN/BPX community that night.  I’ve never laughed so hard in my life.  If you have an opportunity to see the show sometime, I would highly recommend it.  It was a great Community Day evening event.  Thanks to the SDN/BPX for that.

I am trying to post a blog about each day of the event, but finding it very frustrating to be in 4 places at one time, and hence, finding time to blog as well, but I will try to update throughout the week.

Unfortunately, I managed to run out of the house on Sunday without a digital camera, so no photos from me.  Sorry 🙁