The Innovative Community Day organized at SAP Labs Bangalore this year, a day just before SAP TechEd i.e. 30th November, 2010 was special in many ways. Right from its name which signifies an unique mix of community day we used to have in Bangalore a day before SAP TechEd till 2008, and the Innovation Weekend we had in Las Vegas and Berlin this year along with SAP TechEd, the Innovative Community Day brought many new surprises and fun all through it. Though it was not officially planned initially as in Berlin & Las Vegas, it was due to the community enthusiasm and initiative especially from Somnath Manna, mrinal.wadhwa/blog and Marilyn Pratt it happened finally.
The day was full-filled and action-packed with ample opportunities to network with people from the SAP community and learn about new technologies and solutions. The day started with a very inspiring welcome note by V. R. Ferose, MD of SAP Labs India on CSR, sustainability and social innovations.
After a session on Code Exchange update by rui.nogueira/blog we had a session on SAP River after lunch by Benjamin Wesson, VP, Solution Management of SAP River. It was a great experience to sit with Ben after the the session and do some hands-on to understand SAP River, which is a new application development platform hosted on the cloud to rapidly develop edge applications which may not have a specific backend system. It provides a code-free graphical development environment where data models and user interfaces can be developed just by simple drag-and-drop. Moreover, the applications developed on SAP River can be accessed by REST services as well to make it easily accessible from any frontend applications. Meanwhile there were sessions on ByD SDK, BOBJ which were also highly informative and interesting as I come to know from others who have attended them. Just before the wrap-up of the sessions in the evening we had the very interesting session with live system demo on SAP Gateway, which provides REST service enablement of SAP BAPI/RFC and even transaction screens. We were among the very lucky few outside SAP who got the first time view of the system as it has not been released yet. Surely it looks promising to open the huge and complex SAP world to the outside universe, bypassing the complex SOAP /Enterprise Service way, just by few clicks.
The most interesting part of the day was the evening when the Innovation Challenge was announced and we formed two teams through the dinner and started on the solution design just after that to deliver a ready solution in 3 hours by 11 pm. The idea was to use SAP River and SAP Gateway to implement the solutions and thus understanding the strengths and usefulness of the new technologies and ofcourse gain a rapid learning experience. It was real fun to decide and design the solution by team discussions and right away start implementing it with the technologies we just learned few hours back. I was part of the team which took up the challenge to deliver a solution on social campaign management by using SAP River integrated with social media like Twitter and Facebook as well as BOBJ on cloud for analysis. The other team worked on a solution to collect product feedback from social media using SAP Gateway integrated with Facebook. The videos below provide glimpses of the enthusiasm and actions on Innovation Challenge by the teams.
The final presentation was given by the two teams at 11:15 pm and the team working on CSR campaign management solution using SAP River actually showed a running application where campaigns created using the SAP River application got tweeted automatically for users to sign-up by replying to the tweets and finally using BOBJ on cloud to analyze the campaign sign-ups. It was an awesome experience for me to be part of the team and work with so many enthusiastic community members to deliver an innovative solution by working with fun.
Last but not the least I was honored to participate in a SAP TechEd Live interview with Benjamin Wesson and other community members with whom I worked in the same team for the Innovation Challenge : SAP River Platform : SAP's New Cloud Platform That's Helping Developers Build Application Faster
I hope that every year we'll have the community day and extended Innovation Challenge in Bangalore before SAP TechEd, because this is an event no enthusiastic SAP community member will want to miss.
[P.S. Innovative Community Day video courtsey : Marilyn Pratt]
