SAP Inside Track Chicago: It’s a Wrap!

On July 15th a very successful SAP Inside Track took place featuring the top Code Exchange Project, BusinessObjects Analysis, EIM, Workflow, Information Governance, ABAP and more!

First and foremost, I want to thank SAP Mentors Bhanu Gupta and Michelle Crapo for organizing this great event, and thank Molex and SAP for all they did.  I want to thank Ivan Femia for traveling 24 hours to speak on his successful code exchange project.  Thank you Ginger Gatling for supporting me during my presentation.

The day started off with a great keynote by SAP Mentor Peter McNulty.  Peter weaved together several technologies and what the future is.  Peter is always a great speaker and I liked Stephen Johannes’ idea of having Peter repeat this in a public SAP Mentor webinar.

Then I was up to speak.  I spoke about BusinessObjects Analysis, MS Edition for Office, and the associated use cases of the report developer, power user, and consumer.  I also showed how to use it with the Transient Provider functionality in ECC Enhancement Package 5.  Interestingly, this is where the audience had the most questions – surrounding security, performance, and no need to load the data to BW. I apologize for forgetting the online audience as the Adobe Connect screens kept shifting on me.

Ginger spoke about SAP BusinessObjects Data Migration and how she was able to learn and install it in half a day.  Ginger explained how there are many of the best practices for data migration contained in the help.  She also spoke about Workflow and BPM and a great conversation took place – how many people do you need to manage Workflow?

It was great to see Ina Mutschelknaus, SAP, who is also an ASUG SAP Point of Contact.  I missed her presentation but since she used Timo Elliott’s free PowerPoint twitter tools (thank you Natascha Thompson for this great suggestion) I could follow what she was presenting.  I thought about trying it but ran out of time.

Gary Matula, CIO of Molex, spoke about their use of SAP at Molex, and what is on the horizon.  His talk made me think of what challenges CIO’s today face: should we replace all our laptops with iPads?  What about cloud and on-premise options?  How should we use dashboards and scorecards to manage the business?  How should the company respond to the tsunami in Japan?

Lastly, Ivan Femia spoke about the #1 SCN blog in 2010, abap2xlsx – I’m no longer a baby, I grow up and now I’m a fully featured tool.  Ivan traveled all the way from Italy, with unscheduled stopovers in Amsterdam.  He provided an overview of the project, the use cases (“happy users”) and the collaboration involved.  What I appreciated during his presentation was the online participation of community – great conversation, questions, and tweets.  Ivan’s enthusiasm was contagious.  I hope we can have a public Mentor webinar with Ivan as well. If you missed Ivan you can see him at SAP Inside Track Milan in October.

Why speak at SAP Inside Track?

I had a great conversation with fellow speaker Bala Prabahar.  We decided that it was great practice in preparation for speaking at an event such as SAP TechED.  A benefit is your abstract is always accepted!  At least that has been my experience.

Additionally you do not need to submit your slides ahead of time.  I made slight adjustments to my presentation that morning.  The informality of the event relaxed me as a speaker.

The Value of Community

The above video features Bhanu Gupta and icebreaker networking session devised by Michelle Crapo.  You can see the networking taking place.  Bhanu talks about the value of face-to-face events, her passion for the SAP community, and how this was the first SAP event at Molex. 

Thank you again Bhanu, Michelle, Molex and SAP for a great day of learning and networking.