SAP Inside Track India 2011 – We have made it large!

It has been a long time since many of us were waiting eagerly for the D-day of December 3, 2011 – the second SAP Inside Track event happening in India. And this time we did a unique thing – the event was simultaneously webcasted between Bangalore and Kolkata – where the event was co-hosted parallely, which I think is one of the first time for SIT events.

I coordinated the SIT event at Kolkata which took place at IBM India office and was attended by mostly IBMers but few freelance SAP consultants as well. The day started with a welcome un-keynote video by Jim Spath and Marilyn Pratt, which Jim specifically made for SIT India, followed by a brief welcome and introduction of the event and day’s agenda to Kolkata participants and then the Design Thinking workshop which I conducted locally only for participants in Kolkata (when Kumud presented a session on community participation in Bangalore). In this session the teams were given a design challenge of building the Spaghetti marshmallow tower within 15 minutes. Out of the three teams, one completed the task much ahead of time and used a quick and clever method of making the tallest tower, who clearly made to the winning spot, showing how you can utilize the resources at hand to the maximum to make the quickest solution.

The sessions thereafter were shared between Bangalore and Kolkata via webcast and conference call using SAPConnect which are as below. The amazing and most interesting ones are SAP career and skill discussions by Jon Reed, Martin Gillet and Leonardo De Araujo, Enterprise Mobility by Nilay Ghosh and Smarter Business Rules Management using BRF+ by Sangeeth Parvatam, NextGen NetWeaver Business Client and HTML5 Chips by Thomas Jung deserve special mentions.

Session	URL
Un-keynote keynote (Jim Spath)	https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/p45104610/
Have We Made It Large? (Kumud Singh)	https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/p70147114/
Smarter Business Rule Management using BRF+ (Sangeeth Parvatam)	https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/p21682268/
Beyond the Buzzwords- What is there for you? (Leonardo De Araujo Jon Reed Martin Gillet Moderated by Somnath Manna )	https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/p68222655/
SAP Code Exchange Projects (Gregor Wolf )	https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/p28757708/
Mobilizing an Enterprise using SAP Mobility Solution (Nilay Ghosh)	https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/p80743907/
Next Generation ABAP, HTML5 Chips (Thomas Jung)	https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/p42739106/
Facts on QGM and ChaRM integration (Jansi Rani Murugesan)	https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/p94725305/

The day ended with a wrap-up session where the local community members shared what they like about SIT and what we can improve next year. One of the first-time participants Koustav Biswas already written a SAP Inside Track India 2011 – What an Experience! nicely summing up the events and his takeaways. Finally the event ended with presenting SAP Press books to the presenters, one lucky participant and some the participants who helped in organizing the event. One of the participants Prahlad Chowdhury has shared his Picasa album with the SIT Kolkata photos.

Every one of us agreed that next year we can make it even larger and better and more SAP community members locally should present the sessions in SIT. As a result we have created a Facebook group SAP Inside Track Indiato connect and share among the local community members in India.

As many of the participants may agree with me, I feel SIT provides a great platform for local SAP community members as well as global SAP Mentors and community members to network, share and learn from each other. It may also be a substitute to some extent atleast, for some who may not be able to attend SAP TechEd due to travel or budget constraints. Though it is just the second Inside Track Event organized in India I think we can say that indeed to made it large as tweeted by one of the participants in Bangalore.