OpenSAP – The end of a new beginning

There were two awesome blogs posted here during the journey of OpenSAP course :

What makes openSAP highly impressive! by Kumud Singh :

http://scn.sap.com/community/hana-in-memory/blog/2013/06/09/what-makes-opensap-highly-impressive#comment-369051

and the other blog The big question about openSAP HANA Course by Graham Robinson:

http://scn.sap.com/community/hana-in-memory/blog/2013/06/10/the-big-question-about-opensap-hana-course

As Graham said in his blog,

I am one of more than 32 thousand “38 thousand now” people signed up for the openSAP course Introduction to Software Development on SAP HANA.

So here i would like to share my journey with OpenSAP Course :

I started my journey with SAP HANA SPS3 and then worked with HANA SPS4 also but after that i got busy in my project.

And then later on this year when i saw SPS5 and read about XS i thought i have entered an unknown territory 😕 – the visual changes in HANA Modeler were very welcome but the whole XS part  made me think i will have to start all over again but then i heard about OpenSAP course in April and thought lets enroll for the course – one of the best decisions i have taken in my life.

I started with In Memory Data Management Course and that really helped me to understand what happens at the back end of HANA – and this even raised the bar of my expectations for Software Development Course.

The Software Development course started on 27th May and now only Final Exam and Extra Knowledge assessment are available to be completed – but anyone can still register and enroll for the Course and watch all video sessions.

The entire OpenSAP course content was well thought out, well structured, and the lectures were delivered seamlessly by Thomas Jung

I have never had such a great experience in attending any Online Course or Webinars.

Earlier I used to wait with eagerness and passion only for Wednesdays – the day when Big 3 Mangas( Naruto, One Piece and Bleach) are released – i am a Manga addict 🙂 but during the course I started to wait for Saturdays with the same passion and was busy on Saturdays refreshing OpenSAP site until the new content was uploaded.

What i liked about the Course?

All the videos and weekly content were greatly linked – before the start of each Video we were told what we would learn in that video and then a recap of what we learned in the earlier videos or earlier week  and then finally a conclusion in the end – this really helped to keep the flow of the course.

I watched all the videos with great enthusiasm and learnt lots of new things and the Course exceeded my level of expectations.

Thomas is a great speaker and we all should give him due respect and the credit he deserves for delivering such high quality content in such a simple and efficient manner that made it easy for everyone of us to understand. I also learnt a lot of non technical things from Thomas especially the presentation skills.

Another thing i liked was that he used to share his own experience during lectures and tell us about additional things like Chrome plugins that make our work very easy.

I was really surprised and happy to see Extra Knowledge Session and that too we were asked as to what extra things we want to learn.

We got to know new SPS6 features, ABAP on HANA, troubleshooting and other important stuff that is so important for us developers.

Many people wanted BW On HANA video but i know its such a vast topic in itself that it could not have been covered in Extra Knowledge Session.

The OpenSAP team has done a great job in delivering such high quality content to such a large developer community. From the photos shared by Thomas we could clearly see that SAP was very serious about this Course and as told by Thomas himself – they did all the recordings in the professional production studio in Walldorf.

http://scn.sap.com/community/hana-in-memory/blog/2013/05/09/introduction-to-software-development-on-sap-hana–free-online-course

The whole Team deserves the credit for putting on such a great show.

The OpenSAP site also offers discussions and Communities. I did not found communities to be very active but there were lots of very good discussions and I saw the OpenSAP team doing exceptional work in handling the forum discussions. They were very helpful and answered lots of questions, even provided codes for OpenSAP exercies, updated any issue being faced and even asked what could be added to make the course better.

I should also thank Juergen Schmerder for providing guide on updating AWS system to Rev 56 as it helped everyone using AWS for completing the course:

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-30980

What could be better?

I liked almost everything about the course.

Although there were some technical issues during the course as OpenSAP site was down sometimes – due to huge traffic as people were really interested in the sessions and assessments – though OpenSAP team compensated the loss of time by extending the date of assessments.

Luckily i never faced this problem.

Secondly, the download speed for contents was very slow and few more mirrors could have been added for downloads.

For me i didn’t dislike anything else.

This course has been a great learning curve for me and I learned lots of things from this course and it has helped me to take my career to a new direction.

In our Company, many people were attending this course and due to this i got to interact and know lot of other people with whom i might not have interacted otherwise. So the course not only enhanced my technical skills but also increased my social quotient 😉 .

I have already completed all my Weekly Assignments including Extra Knowledge and Final Exam, its along wait till the Final Exam result will be out 😀

Out of 38,000 enrolled people around 10000 were able to proceed till Week 6.

As said by Clemens Link from OpenSAP team here : https://open.sap.com/courses/2/discussion_topics/1542

“So here is the official answer, and you’re really the first one outside the company to get it: it’s ~1600 internal and ~8400 external”

10000 is a very big number and this shows how successful this course was.

I would say that this is the end of a new beginning as due to such a huge success of this course, now we will see more courses being offered by SAP as a part of OpenSAP Course.

Finally, I would like to thank Thomas and the whole OpenSAP team once again for providing us such high quality content.

This Course has just raised the bar of expectations for the next course that will be provided by OpenSAP team.

Kudos to the OpenSAP team.

Note: Thomas did repeat two of his shirts during the course – to find out just watch all the OpenSAP videos

To know OpenSAP Statistics, check this blog by Clemens Link;

https://open.sap.com/blog/

Regards,

Vivek