Recap TechEd Las Vegas and SAP Portal news, part 1

This blog got a little bit longer than expected so I split it into two blogs. Recap TechEd Las Vegas and SAP Portal news, part 2

After taking a short vacation after TechEd, here is now my blog and view at TechEd in general and what it offered for professionals working with SAP Portal.

The event took place in Las Vegas, at the Venetian (picture above). I attended TechEd once as an SAP Mentor and as a speaker in the ASUG track. Being an SAP Mentor gives you a unique inside view as Mark and Aslann do their best to offer special sessions to us Mentors. We have a special meeting room for a welcome receptions and can meet with senior executives from SAP.

This is really great, but also means that Mentors have even less time to go to sessions, the exhibitor hall, the networking sessions, demo stations and so on. I also volunteered to help out at the hands-on session PMC260. Doesn’t sound like a big task? It’s a 2 hours session that was held 3 times. Makes 6 hours, plus the two one-hour ASUG sessions I was involved in. Makes 8 hours presenting, counting also the 3 expert networking sessions (only 1 was planned, helped out in the other two), sums up for a total of 9 ½ hours. This should explain why I cannot give a complete overview of all the SAP Portal related sessions.

Full house with SAP TechEd, Sybase Tech Wave and InterBike going on at the same time.

Social media was everywhere at TechEd. The screensavers of the laptops were configured to show a twitter stream, knowledge quest going on, QR codes helped, TechEd apps for your smartphone of choice.

Sybase TechWave

In parallel to TechEd happened Sybase TechWave. As a registered TechEd participant you gained access to the lecture session. This wasn’t well advertised, but you only had to go down one floor and check the session schedule.

Expert networking sessions

The Expert sessions are a nice way to share and interact with experts in an informal way. The problem is the sound and the number of attendees. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time at this kind of session and learned a lot. Looking closely you can even attend a session held by important people.

The SAP Mentors had their own lounge (lounge 5), so if you wanted to see an SAP Mentor in action, this was an excellent opportunity! As blogged earlier, I gave a session about mobile user management for the SAP Portal. Didn’t really work out as planned (lesson learned: don’t do a demo on a new laptop).

John Moy giving his expert session on how to develop mobile applications with jQuery mobile

The other 2 expert sessions I was involved into weren’t planned: they just happened. I waited together with fellow SAP Mentor Butch NcNally for Yariv Zur to give his session about the new UI at SAP. He didn’t show up, so Butch and I took the opportunity to host a spontaneous session. Directly after this session Butch gave a session about SAP Portal at ASUG. As Harald Reiter joined the session I couldn’t resist. Even won a nice ASUG bag.

Midnight mobile madness

Google, Motorola and SAP presented this evening event on Wednesday (only by registration). Motorola used it to present their mobile portfolio, SAP to show how to develop mobile applications with Sybase. Lots of good food, free drinks (+wine +beer), lots of good questions (solution given by drinking more beer), lots of angry birds and of course: gifts (smartphones, angry birds and even a tablet).

The Sybase developer studio is Eclipse based, so prepare yourself to one more Eclipse installation on your computer.

HANA

SAP HANA was everywhere, mobility not so. Less HANA won’t hurt as many attendees won’t be able to get their hands on HANA for quite some time. Specially here in Brazil HANA will be unreachable for some time. The import tax urges companies to have their HANA installation abroad.

Mobility is a huge topic, but besides the hyped apps for normal end-users it was hard to find industry specific solutions (you know: these ugly Windows Mobile 6.x handhelds made to work in the field).

Keynote 

The keynote was given by Vishal. As SAP Mentor you get special seating, right in front of the stage. And there was an impressive number of SAP Mentors!

During the keynote nothing really new was announced, the focus laid on how to implement and integrate new software like HANA.

In the keynote project orange was announced. This is the code name for running BW on top of HANA.

Also announced during the keynote was the site experiencehana.com. Take a look at fellow SAP Mentor Vijay Vijayasankar Experience HANA – the wish list. On Thursday there was even a free concert for TechEd attendees.

Brazil

All (100%) Brazilian SAP Mentors were in Las Vegas.