Duet Enterprise – Velocity Event

I am writing these lines while the last customers and their partners are leaving the Duet Enterprise Velocity Event that we held this week in Walldorf.

It was a great event and I want to share some insights and amazing things that I learned. But first let me get started.

What is the Velocity Even?

Last year we had our first such event: we asked customers and their partners to come to Walldorf where they would be joined by Duet Enterprise experts from both Microsoft and SAP. Then in one week time they could really concentrate and work on their Duet Enterprise projects, reach out to the experts whenever needed and speed up their Duet Enterprise implementations.

This year it was the same: although it was on very short notice we got several customers to come join the event.

Training

We started last week with a two day online training where we talked about how to develop with Duet Enterprise both on the SAP and the Microsoft side and also highlighted some “beautification” ideas on the SharePoint side.

Getting started

Then on Monday this week we all came together and started our work. The teams (consiting mainly of SAP and Microsoft developers, but also some architects and project managers) got to their rooms and started to work. We were quite busy to go from room to room and engage with the customers and their partners and learned what great scenarios they had in mind and what challanges their were facing.

Some customers were almost all the time also connected via VOIP / screen sharing to their colleagues (who had to stay at home…) so that they were supported by an even bigger staff remotely.

Results

Then on Thursday we had a first presentation of what was achived: in short, it was simply amazing. We had really beautiful looking, innovative scenarios that not only exposed SAP processes to SharePoint, but that really leveraged SharePoint functionality.

Some customers concentrated mainly on the foundation features like the Single Sign On or Supportability possibilities and build their application on top of that. All this “technical stuff” came out of the box with Duet Enterprise and they could simply concentrate on developing their application.

Others liked the fact, that they were really sitting together (their Microsoft and SAP colleagues) and whenever there was an issue they could simply reach out to the experts and get an answer (almost) right away: no writing an email or creating a ticket and waiting for a response.

We even had one team where the customer did not have any prior Duet Enterprise experience. They had brought developers who knew SharePoint and SAP, but they had never done a Duet Enterprise development project. Within this one week they got fully up to speed and — leveraging the building blocks of Duet Enterprise — created an already amazing looking SharePoint CRM integration that used SAP CRM data as a basis, but enriched this data in SharePoint with team-discussions, wiki, feeds, … Just great.

All in all it was an amazing event. The customer and their partners were great and I am really looking forward to working with them together in the future.

Looking forward for the next event 🙂