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.

13 Comments

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Gregory Misiorek July 17, 2011 at 2:59 am

Tammy,

nice wrap-up. even though i missed most presentations mainly due to other work, i caught bits and pieces about the workflow. i hope to see abap2xlsx & xlsx2abap maybe from Milan?

Thx,

greg_not_so

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1. Tammy Powlas Post authorJuly 17, 2011 at 3:02 am
  
  I hope to catch it via Adobe Connect myself, but I will be traveling that day.
  
  Thank you for taking the time to read and comment.
  
  Tammy
  
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Bala Prabahar July 17, 2011 at 3:53 am

Hi Tammy,

“…The informality of the event relaxed me as a speaker…”.

Well said. I didn’t feel any pressure at all. I spoke for the first time. I’m glad I spoke on two topics. Great experience. I would do it again for several reasons. I’m going to blog my experiences as you suggested.

Bhanu/Michelle, Thank you very much for the opportunity. I had great experience. Almost everyone who attended my first session attended the second session. That spoke volumes about the quality of my presentation. I’m not mentioning this to brag but to suggest my speaking skills are not that bad. And I learnt this for free.

Thanks again,
Bala

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1. Tammy Powlas Post authorJuly 17, 2011 at 4:49 am
  
  Well done, Bala. I am glad you spoke at this event and I am sorry I missed your presentation (and you missed mine since we spoke at the same time).
  
  It is great practice.
  
  Thank you for attending, speaking and commenting.
  
  Tammy
  
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  1. Bala Prabahar July 17, 2011 at 5:25 am
    
    My customer is implementing BOBJ and so I missed a lot by not attending your session Tammy. I’m sorry as well. Actually I didn’t attend any other session because I was either busy preparing for my session(s) or talking to people such as SAP Mentor Arun V on BW(my favorite topic), other participants etc. Frankly I’m still feeling great about Friday event.
    In addition, I spoke to Ivan for a few minutes in the parking lot. Yes, his enthusiasm was contagious. I wish he joined us in the morning.
    
    Regards,
    Bala
    
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    1. Tammy Powlas Post authorJuly 17, 2011 at 10:15 am
      
      I forgot about Arun V – it was great meeting him too. I can’t wait to see the pictures he took.
      
      Tammy
      
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2. Michelle Crapo July 21, 2011 at 1:41 am
  
  Excellent! It was a great presentation. I missed the second one. BUT even I – not a basis person – understood the first one. Your speaking skills are excellent.
  
  It was great to have you there presenting! Thank you for volunteering.
  
  Michelle
  
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  1. Bala Prabahar July 21, 2011 at 11:24 am
    
    Hi Michelle,
    
    Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. I appreciate this.Sincerely. I’m still feeling great about Chicago experience. I’m hoping to blog my experiences soon. I have a lot to tell so I don’t want to rush.
    
    Best regards,
    Bala
    
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Ginger Gatling July 17, 2011 at 6:53 am

Hi Tammy – what a great recap of a super beneficial take. Thanks to awesome volunteers that put this together and took time away from their normal responsibilities to make this happen!
-ginger

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1. Tammy Powlas Post authorJuly 17, 2011 at 10:16 am
  
  Ginger – thanks.
  It was great seeing you and Ina and I will never forget that one person attending just to meet you!!
  
  Great job on your presentations – you did three of them.
  
  Agreed – thanks to Bhanu and Michelle for doing this.
  
  Tammy
  
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Ina Felsheim July 18, 2011 at 5:20 am

Nice summary, Tammy. Thanks to all of the volunteers, and to the people who time from their work schedule to attend. Great networking event, too.

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1. Tammy Powlas Post authorJuly 18, 2011 at 6:23 am
  
  Thanks Ina – thank you for driving 5 hours to be there. It is always great spending time with the “Data Quality Queen” as Ginger says.
  
  Tammy
  
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Michelle Crapo July 21, 2011 at 1:42 am

Thank you for the recap!

Michelle

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