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former_member374
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Mentor Moments at Sapphire/ASUG 08 in Orlando

   

It was the first time that we organized some events for the SAP Mentors being present at Sapphire/ASUG Conference in Orlando. 

We met Senior Vice President Zia Yusuf on Wednesday morning, it was tough to get space in his calendar. Unfortunately there were also ASUG sessions happening at the same time, so some of the more active ASUG members that are also SAP Mentors were not able to participate, or came late like Jim Spath.

   

One of the great outcomes from this meeting was, the O.K. from Zia to comp all SAP Mentors for SAP TechEd this year, as an experiment. If you are an SAP Mentor, you pay your own travel, but get the SAP TechEd Ticket for free. Hurray. 

When we went around the room and ask the Mentors what we can do better, they said that the program is not enough known yet, neither within SAP now to their own company or the SAP Ecosystem. Such an awareness campaign will be the focus of our team in the next months and I have the commitment from some great people with large megaphones to make that happen. Suggestions on what to do are greatly appreciated.

   

Another thing that came up was, I don't really know what it means to be an SAP Mentor. What are the expectations? 

Here some examples that I came across where I thought these were SAP Mentor moments at Sapphire:

Paul Taylor using his moment with Peter Zenke to thank him for being part of the SAP Mentor program and then later talking with VP CRM Product Management volker.hildebrand/blog about what from a Kraft food perspective can be improved with our CRM solution were some SAP Mentor moments.

   

Richard Hirsch having a session with a GardnerOvum Analyst Warren Wilson and wowing him with the collaborative activities in the BPX area was a Mentor moment. 

Jim Spath always active and making sure that the different ASUG sessions are running smoothly, especially welcomed in Marilyn's and Marco's Social Enterprise session. I love his attitude of always thinking about, what he can do now to make this a bigger success?

   

My all time favorite Mentor moment was, when Dan McWeeney, Rich Heilman, Thomas Jung, Brian Bischof, Ed Herrmann  and I were sitting around late on Tuesday at the Global Communication party. We talked about the upcoming Community Day at TechEd and how sad it is, that our favorite part of TechEd is missed by most participants. 

We tossed around some ideas to make it more prominent, may even change the name to SAP Camp. We quickly came to the conclusion, that hands-on is the biggest draw for people. Last year's hands-on sessions where too far away from the rest of the community day. Also the 4 hours workshop doesn't leave enough flexibility to participate in other sessions.

   

Thomas Jung has tried it out before and suggested to use our Laptops as servers. They are now so powerful, that up to 20 people can log in and code, he has tried that before. 

If we are setting the parameters right aka, you bring your own laptop with SAP Gui installed, we can show and code on some cutting edge all within an hour. All of the SAP Mentors that evening have promised to come up with one of these sessions. We will call it the SAP Mentor track.

   

Thomas Jung offered his help to anyone that would like to do a hands-on too and doesn't know how to prep his Laptop for to be a server. 

We got so excited, that a leg of the designer couch gave out and we landed on the ground.

 

This event is going to be so cool. I am counting the days until SAP Camp already.  

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