Snap Judgment – St. Louis SAP Inside Track, July 15, 2011

After putting on a successful SAP Inside Track The specified item was not found., fellow SAP Mentor Stephen Johannes and I decided to deliver a second installment, only this time we were going to add MORE out of town speakers, MORE SAP Mentor Initiative, and a whole ‘nother damned city.

Keynote – SAP Technology Roadmap – Peter McNulty, SAP 

Peter is a bit of a legend in the SAP world. Not sure why, I’m new to the world, but he gets to be a keynote in two totally different cities than the one he is currently in. That’s a lot of juice. And he really delivered a great state of the industry presentation in terms of strategy and trends. SAP is clearly very committed to innovation in a thoughtful way. Peter also did a great job discussing the orchestration between the classic SAP stack, BusinessObjects solutions, and the new Sybase toolset.

Leveraging SAP BW in a Classic SAP BusinessObjects Deployment – Eric Vallo, EV Technologies

My Diversified Semantic Layer cohort gave a great presentation that showed exactly what BusinessObjects can provide to the classic SAP customer. Loved the full workflow from BEx query to Universe layer, back to BEx, forward to QaaWS, out to the dashboard, and now we’re doing the cha-cha. Lots of good discussion at the end about what BWA is and when/how HANA will kill it.

Security Weaver – Password Management and License Management – Isaac Kimmel, Security Weaver

If these guys have a tool that means I don’t have to go to Service Marketplace to get a license key, I’m pretty happy. Great job answering questions and showing the tool’s value.

Sneak Peak Of New ABAP Functionality in NetWeaver 7.31/7.03 – Thomas Jung, SAP

You know, I’ll bet Tom doesn’t even like bacon. I’ll bet one day he was just regaling people with that bit that Jim Gaffigan bit on it, and it just kind of stuck, and now he can’t tell people he doesn’t like bacon or he’d be the a-hole. Sorry for possibly outing you, Tom.

As for his presentation, it was engaging as always. Few people can talk tech for 90 straight minutes without losing a single audience member, but Tom pulls it off (of course, flashing pictures of SAP Mentors doesn’t hurt). Still claiming to be ignorant of all things ABAP, I will say that I do think the SAP GUI has come a long way since I first saw spots of it. People magazine feeds next to transaction processes on my home page? I like the potential.

Effective strategies for risk based testing and change management for SAP organizations – Shoeb Javed, Worksoft

Apparently testing and change management are big deals for developers. In BI world, we are more grip it and rip it. OK, maybe that isn’t true, but depending on the culture of your company, BI is a little more cowboy than your enterprise applications should probably be. If you want rules, this would have been the presentation for you.

SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Security Essentials – Dallas Marks, Kalvin Consulting

Snap Judgment – St. Louis BusinessObjects User Group Meeting July 14, 2011? I must have died and gone to BOBJ free education heaven? Seriously, you can tell Dallas has been providing good training forever, because once he starts showing something he is thorough, complete, and interesting (even for security, folks). If you have BOBJ security questions, I really recommend you look for the recorded sessions which should be located on the wiki page highlighted at the top of this post. The best news (depending on how you feel about the current Central Management Console paradigm) is that it is largely the same in BI4. So at least that’s one thing you won’t have to totally relearn.

Networking

Get with it people, I never, EVER blog about that. Would like to also thank SAP and Security Weaver again for sponsoring the day, as well as the speakers (and their companies) who lent us their expertise.