Technology Blogs by Members
Explore a vibrant mix of technical expertise, industry insights, and tech buzz in member blogs covering SAP products, technology, and events. Get in the mix!
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
DG
Active Contributor

SAP Teched is always one of the things that I always look forward to. Meeting with the other SAP Mentors and hear what is coming. It is a good place to learn about new features. 

I wanted to share a wrap of what my experience in Las Vegas with a special focus on how SAP PI will change.

SAP PI news

Compared to previous years, where it was possible to show a lot of new features, it was not the case this year. I learned that SP5 will be coming, but it will mostly be a bug fixing. In the spring SP6 will come with more focus on the some new things.

I was not able to see anything concrete on this just something about this was the planned innovation. I think the main take way was a tool to make a migration form a dual stack to a single stack easier.

 

BPMN Process.

I was able to play some around with the BPMN. It did work really nicely and it seems like it was possible to design the user interface on some of the process. This could help support master data like customers. This was SAP consulting that had made some easy way to implement the features. I do look forward to be able to use this tool for PI processes compared to ccBPM.

Mappings

It is possible to perform mappings in Netweaver Developer Studio using the mapping plugin. This mapping tool is also used for mapping in BPMs, it is nice that you only need to use one tool for mapping. One thing that I did notice was that the mapping tool did not have any way of making contexts.

I know that contexts always cause problems. It is though necessary when working with most mappings. Without control of the contexts it is going to be really difficult to make sure values are collected correct.

I did not think that this tool was ready to make B2B mappings yet. With the expression structure you are doing mappings in, it easy becomes impossible to see which elements to use. Also it is not possible to test each node, only the full mapping.

I do hope that the swing based GUI is not going to be deprecated anytime soon.

B2B add-on

The B2B add-on is the place where I see the most innovation and change. It was interesting to play around with it. It is an elegant solution and there a nice support for different features when dealing with EDI. Compared to Seeburger, it is nice that all data formats and versions are delivered. The format is much like Seeburger, but some nodes have changes. I think it will be fairly easy to make the small changes.

It sounded like in the future there will be a B2B addon monitor in Solution manager. This add-on will allow users to monitor how long time it takes from an order is sent to the order response is received. It will make it really easy to use the tool. This solution is probably a feature to start using SAPs B2B add-on.

Cloud integration

Cloud Integration seems to be the place where a lot of the PI work is focused. From my understanding it will be possible for partners to develop integrations using the platform. I understood around Q1 2013, It would be nice to be able to make a cloud based solution and then use it with multiply partners.

The mappings seems to be possible to reuse so you don’t need to remap all the different objects. This may mean that it is possible to migrate to and from the cloud.

I don’t know fully how the ERP on premise system will connect to the cloud based system.

Other or HANA

HANA and mobile still seems to be the place there focus was. HANA seems to be growing into a more mature database that is going to take over all uses of databases with SAP and other types of applications. I’m looking forward to see how this is going to work and how it will affect SAP PI. It is probably more on the process orchestration that we get benefits from using HANA, if we need real time reporting on the status. 

 

SAP Teched was a nice experience for me to explore. I did have a nice time networking and getting to talk about what was going on with SAP PI.

There was a workshop on Empathy which was really nice. We got to share some stories and reflect on where we wanted to go our self.

I did not win anything in the Las Vegas, on the good side not loses either. Guess it would be different if I was playing.

1 Comment
Labels in this area