SAP Tech Night Sydney 1703 #SITSYD Recap

Sydney greeted us with a wet evening for SAP Tech Night 1703 but that didn’t seem to deter over 50 people who turned out for our biggest Tech Night yet. Thanks to our sponsors the SAP Mentors and the SAP Australian User Group (SAUG) our attendees were greeted with hot pizza and cold beers to get the night started. After a 1/2 an hour of eating, drinking and meeting new and old faces we made a move into the presentation room and everyone took a seat for the first session of the night.

SAP Mentor Gary Hooker was first to go, accompanied via the magic of Skype by fellow Mentor Graham “Robbo” Robinson from his new abode somewhere hidden on the north coast of NSW. Gary had taken time off work, driven over 300 km from Canberra to present and had brought with him an array of gadgets to show the crowd including the nifty Intel NUC with HANA Express Edition (HXE) installed. Gary proceeded to give us an introduction to HXE and regale us with installation and setup stories that apparently have sent him prematurely grey. Gary always gives a great presentation, he’s got a nice relaxed presentation style and gave us the lowdown all all the system installation and admin features of HXE. Then the disembodied voice from the sky (aka Robbo) took us on a developer’s tour of HXE, Graham had prepared a video (isn’t that cheating?) to run us over the basics of how to get started developing on HXE and how to use the SHINE content (analogous to the old SFLIGHT examples).

A quick change over with just enough time for attendees to grab another drink, or in this case have a drink brought to their seat for them (did I mention the fabulous service we provide?). Next up was Mr. Mike Doyle; time for a tour of the Fiori Cloud.

Mike has spent almost a year now working on projects using the SAP Fiori Cloud Edition (SFCE) and it was clear that he is a big fan of it. He started off explaining to us the different use cases and architectures you can employ to get started with SFCE. After setting the context for us Mike dived into live demos and showed us around the SAP Cloud Platform and some of the services that go into making up SFCE including the Portal Service, SAPUI5, GIT and the WebIDE. Mike then rolled up his sleeves and got stuck in, creating a new Fiori Launch Pad (FLP) based Portal site, a new Catalog and Group and then jumped into WebIDE to create a new SAPUI5 application and added it as a new tile to the FLP created earlier. Kudos to Mike for doing all this live on stage (no pre-recorded video here… uhhem, Robbo take note ?).

Time flies when you are having fun, and I must have been because it was 7pm and time was up before I knew it. Time to pack up and head down to the pub for a drink, after all it was St. Patrick’s Day the next day, which sounded like a good excuse for a Guinness or two to me.

I’ve had great feedback on the night, people really seem to enjoy the format and the great content. A massive thank you has to go out to Gary, Graham and Mike for taking the time to prepare and present on topics they are clearly so passionate about and for sharing their knowledge with our Sydney Tech Community.

So now that SAP Tech Night 1703 is behind us, it’s time for me to start planning SAP Tech Night 1706, I have some more top speakers and great topics planned… stay tuned!