Open letter to SAP for better cloud innovation and integration
Dear SAP!
We are ~600 engineers doing civil engineering in Europe and China.
We see cloud solutions as our best way to collaborate in our future.
BUT – we see cloud solutions not trying to integrate into a user acceptable digital workplace by themselves.
We need sophisticated file cocreation and collaboration features, especially in CAD and engineering software, but in MS Office also, inside and outside the enterprise. That’s our business.
We’d like to have a simple interface to all cloud content for best UX and performance:
We want a socialdrive that brings the cloud back to my desktop. A simple drive on one hand and a rich social web client on the other, based on the same content and integration with e. g. Alfresco One, O365, A360, SAP by design (which we do not have but consider to buy) or S/4Hana.
Imagine things would be easy again: Invite a coworker or an external partners expert to your project team, share content on a secure social web platform but invisibly on the other hand: manage permissions to folders on the socialdrive just that simple. Invite and collaborate on files as easy as on web content. Make it the same. Invite in the web and permit on the folder = one step.
Don’t think about IT, just work and make successful projects!
Have your drive activity appear in the projects activity stream – alongside with the contract activity, the invoice and payment activity, the timesheet activity, the social conversation activity and make file approvals and serialized workflow as easy as sending an email. Bring the social into business. Make the business software social by nature.
The IT complexity from the users perspective is getting harder year after year. Let’s make it simple again. Make it easy to be productive. Deliver solutions people use with passion because they help them do their job better.
Please find someone in your universe who can tell me if this is on your roadmap.
If not, i’ll give up. You are my last chance to make a better world with easy IT.
Please care.
Yours, Bernd Gewehr
Dear Mr. Gewehr,
I guess you have come to the right place! 🙂
SAP Mobile Documents provides a set of native clients (mobile and desktop). E.g. the desktop client can synchronize the required files right to the desktop computer.
As Mobile Documents is also a content integration hub, it integrates with various applications.
With CMIS it supports all repositories that follow this industry standard.
Our colleagues from the Business Suite also have connected to SAP Mobile Documents as a content provider. We can share more details with you in person.
With the latest update of Jam, you can just put the collaboration features on top of SAP Mobile Documents and can consume all content that is connected.
With the Visual Enterprise Viewer in conjunction with SAP Mobile Documents, colleagues can view the 3d CAD models on their mobile devices and have all the content available offline.
We are happy to show you a demo!
Kind regards,
Jens Koster
Jens, thank you so much for taking this serious and for your engagement into my question!
Many of the words you used ring in my head as long wanted tags of enterprise solutions:
- native clients, desktop and mobile
- content integration hub
- CMIS
- industry standard
- collaboration features
- jam = social
- mobile devices
- offline access
WOW!
You guys at SAP seem to be the only ones to look from a serious it architects perspective on enterprise IT. Most others look as a vendor of monolithic solutions with no or far too less integration points.
In a discussion with a well informed CIO some days ago, we talked about the nucleus of enterprise IT when going to the cloud. He proposed the ERP System as the most promising candidate for that important role. Now i understand, why...
So although we're all heading towards christmas, I'll keep you updated with my requirements and share our first thoughts with you.
Again, thank you, I was loosing hope to find one who sees things like I do! Gotcha!