TechEd 2015 – ABAPosaurus wraps it up (Day 4)
My Mentor shirt has proud statement ‘ABAP 4ever’ written on the back (see Exhibit A on the left). Other Mentors usually have their Twitter handle there, but, as you know, Steffi Warnecke and I have a Twitter-avoidance pact, so I had to improvise. Suddenly this year my back has been getting tons of attention (I guess it indicates that ABAPers are becoming rare birds even at TechEd), as well as suggestions to replace this statement with ‘ABAP 4ever(ish)’ or even ‘ABAP 2025 and who knows what’s next’. But fortunately, most of the attention the shirt is getting is rather positive.
First session of the day INT111 ‘SAP Best Practice Integration with SAP Process Orchestration and Others’ was presented by fellow Mentor Daniel Graversen. I’m not quite qualified to judge the content, but I liked the presentation overall.
After the session I ran into an old friend and it turned out we both picked DEV102 ‘SAP HANA Cloud Platform: A Guided Tour’ for the next hour. Normally I prefer the customer sessions, but this one was presented by the Mentor alumni Matthias Steiner, which changes everything. I thought it was a good overview, although still not buying the whole cloud thing. It’ll surely be another fad. 🙂
Quick survey – if you are looking for the room Toscana 3608 and see this sign, which way would you go? (And think quickly because the session has already started.)
If you turn left you are probably a programmer. 🙂 Absolutely love these mind-blowing signs here.
Next session UX126 ‘UX Directly Impacts A Bottom Line: Intel’s Strategy…’ by Bala suresh from Intel was one of the best at the conference (slides are now available here, thanks to Mr.Suresh!). Calculating business value and ROI of UX initiatives (or pretty much any IT projects) is kind of a big deal. The session brought up many other good points as well, I very much recommend checking out the presentation slides. Extra brownie points go to Mr. Suresh for using very diverse images in his presentation:
After that I was off to DEV206 ‘Case Study: Customer-Facing Innovation Platform with ABAP for SAP HANA’. It was presented by Thorsten Franz so needless to say more. Learned some interesting stuff about the SAP Landscape Transformation Replication Server.
I’ve already noticed the day before that attendance at many sessions was very light. Not sure what’s the deal here. It seemed there were more attendees this year than in 2013 but several sessions had barely 15 people show up. Did everyone else just come to TechEd to lounge in the bean bag chairs while staring at their phones and laptops? Could’ve done that at home…
The last session TEC221 ‘Store 360: Real-Time Visibility and Forecast Across All Products and Stores’ I picked assuming that LuLu Group had something to do with Lululemon brand that got in hot waters back in 2013 when their founder made some controversial comments that lead to his resignation. But apparently it was a completely different Lulu. Anyways, I thought it was just OK. The sessions that go like “we have this dot on the map that we can click and wow, look, a chart!” are just not cutting it these days, I feel.
In the afternoon the event was winding down. Sadly, I did not win the Xbox, two Apple watches, Parrot drone and not even a gift card. Sigh…
Before we go into the “lessons learned” I’d like to share a simple Lumira visualization with you (and if anyone knows how to make that darn thing to show the legend in larger font, please let me know):
So what did we (I) learn from this event?
- We need more and better customer / practitioner sessions. Sure, it’s great to know about the road maps, strategies and what’s coming our way, but how about bringing home something we could use the next day, not the next year (or next decade) as well? Next week I will check out ABAP push channels that Paul Hardy talked about.
- We need better / simpler communication channels between SAP and customers. This already was a subject of The Blog, but this year I saw with my own eyes the actual willingness by the SAP folks to get the feedback from the customers about their products. In several sessions someone from SAP was present and suggested to reach to them with any thoughts and suggestions. (They forgot to leave any contact information though.) The Mentor group is supposed, in part, to serve as an “interface” between the SAP and customers, but there are only that many of us and some areas are clearly underrepresented.
- SAP should not just talk the talk but also walk the walk. Talking about the customer service in the keynote? Then tells us what you are doing to fix your own customer service. Pitching the UI tools? Start using them on your own websites first.
- More stuffed animals! I cannot stress this enough. 🙂
That’s all, folks, I’m heading home tomorrow and passing the baton to the TechEd Barcelona attendees. Not sure how they could possibly have as much fun as we did in Vegas, but hopefully it will be close.
Another great write up, thanks! It's like a funnier version of actually being there.
The only gripe is that the following link doesn't seem to want to work:
The session brought up many other good points as well, I very much recommend checking out the presentation slides online
Robert, sorry about that. The link worked when I added it, but I guess it was only available temporarily. So far I could not find the slides in "general availability" (they are available in the Agenda Builder for the attendees), but will check with the presenter if they can be at least posted on the ASUG web site.
Robert, Mr. Suresh kindly made his UX sessions slides available online, I added link to the blog as well.
Thanks Jelena - as always I love reading anything you post. It was great to catch up again this week and as always I wish we could have had more time. You rock!
Cheers
Graham Robbo
ABAPosaurus is apparently not going extinct, as Exhibit A in this blog shows. 🙂 Hopefully the related species Basi(s)osaur will fare as well in the coming asteroid strike, er, I mean cloud transition.
😆
The first thing I noticed was that there are 205 rooms in the left side, so I guess I'm a data oriented programmer.
Anyway, the important question is, somebody who "runs simple" would go to room 3806 diagonally?
Miguel - lol, that was my thought too "how many rooms are there?!". 😯
In reality the rooms 3606-3608 are actually accessible from both directions, it's just if you turn left you'll have to walk all the way around while if you go straight it's the shorter route. Very odd layout and even stranger signs.
That made me laugh! 😀 There are a lot of things worse than being mistaken for Tammy. ^^
Oh and I would have gone on straight ahead for the Toscana room, but I'm not a programmer, so... *g* Was there a wrong way anyway?
@Miguel:
😀
I sign your conclusions, especially the last one. I was forced to visit the "new" support site today to search for some notes and.. well... it looks nice until you click on something. And then you have to click some more and more and there are popups and.. *shudders*.
Is there a survey you can participate in after the event? Like after training sessions?
Like the others before me I loved your blog series for TechEd this year again! And I wondered just now... what happened to "d-code"? 😕
There is no spoon.
Steffi, I was wondering about d-code myself. The rumor has it whoever had that idea is not with the company anymore. But in any case I'm glad we are back to "TechEd".
Did you mean this support portal? Really love that it takes me to areas where I'm not even authorized and then I have to go through 3 more pages. The good thing about it is that it'll be replaced by the "new new" one sometime in future.
I was thinking about including a link to the extra-new fresh support page in my post, but then I was like "Maybe don't jinx it..." 😀
Yeah, I meant that support page. How many times you need to authenticate to get to the info you want... that has to be some kind of record. And I love even more that for some content you still are re-routed to the old pages with the old designs (like the tickets). ^^
Well, I'm awaiting the new solution and then we'll see if it actually is a solution to all those complaints and issues.
I like TechEd better, too. 🙂
Steffi, if you are using a certificate ("digital passport") then there is actually a setting in the browser options to select one automatically. Here is a screenshot from Firefox, but there is one in IE too:
Someone on SCN clued me in on this and it made my support life much easier. (Although I also don't understand why does it have to prompt for certificate at every click.)
The popup is pre-filled on most occasions, but exactly: who so many of them? :/ But I hope, with the "one identity over all SAP sites" project it will stop, too.
Jelena,
This year I did not have the good fortune to participate in TechEd Las Vegas (or any other venue for that matter), so I was glad to see your blog series.
Even though I come from a different professional background (I used to translate ABAP books, not code by them...), I enjoyed reading about your event experiences because they really do transport the reader to the conference. By reading your blogs, I followed you around from session to session, meeting people, picking up tchotchkes, etc. The authenticity shines through, as does the humor, and all of it within the context of learning more about what SAP is doing these days.
Thanks for your contributions on SCN!
--Audrey
Thank you for the kind words, Audrey! I'm glad I could provide a glimpse into the "TechEd experience". 🙂