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Author's profile photo Ronnie André Bjørvik Sletta

Report from the trenches – SAP Inside Track OSLO 2019

We did it!

On Saturday 17.august 2019, we held the first SAP Inside Track in OSLO for ages. And what a success it was! We held it at the home offices of Sopra Steria, on the 25th. floor of the iconic Posthuset. We had around 30-35 people, coming from all over Europe. There was even three junior consultants coming all the way from Italy.

The Sessions

As many might have noticed, we choose the theme “The Future Is Now” for this years event. We wanted to show that there’s a lot of exciting things happening in the SAP ecosystem, and that there is no reason to wait to learn it. We had DJ Adams, giving the keynote on continuous learning, before Malin Liden took us through a great talk on diversity and innovation. Then DJ Adams took the stage for another presentation, this time on the Cloud Application Programming Model. Next one out was Paul Hardy giving us a lecture on his view on the future of ABAP.

After a brief lunch, Sebastian Wolf had a session on APACK, before Simen Larsen-Frivoll came on, talking about two things close to his heart; beer and technology. More precise, his IoT enabled home brewery, connected to SAP Cloud Platform. The last session came from Stein Tronstad, talking about practical use of SAPs ML/AI offerings.

All the sessions are available on the SAP Inside Track OSLO YouTube channel.

Livestreaming

We decided early on that we wanted to livestream to YouTube. Both for accessibility, letting people participate, even though they are prevented from coming in person. This also had some cool side-effects, namely that we actually had a global audience, with viewers in India (hi Nabheet Madan), and Australia(howdy Jorg Thuijls).

We’ve had lots of experiences around the streaming, so we plan to have those in a separate blog post at a later time. But we can reveal, that live-streaming is one of the best decisions we made. And as a nörd, there is nothing like putting together a livestreaming rig.

The Team

While SAP Inside Track OSLO has been my “little” project, and I’ve had Kristian Larsen with me as co-organiser the whole time, we couldn’t have pulled it of without volunteers helping with the execution. There are many great people working at Sopra Steria, and Yvonne Kolltveit, Jakob Hansen-Tangen, frode solbakken, and Anne Holme all approached me to lend a hand.

The People

While the sessions are interesting and great, the best part about a SAP Inside Track is the people. Fantastic human beings, as diverse as it can get, all sharing a common love for technology and learning. Having the honour of arranging an event like this warms my heart, as I see that people enjoy themselves in each others company.

The Sponsors

This would been very hard to pull of without support from our sponsors, Sopra Steria, EY Skye, SAP, and SAP Press. So a big thank you to all of them.

SAP Press provided us with three digital copies of “ABAP to the Future” by Paul Hardy. These were raffled out, and won by Yvonne Kolltveit, Haowen Tan, and Rehan Yousaf.

What’s next?

This has been an amazing experience, and there is no question about it; you can all just start to prepare for the news of SAP Inside Track OSLO 2020!

In the meantime, there is work to do. We have to have a debrief and also try to collect feedback from the participant, to identify learning point for the road ahead. We are planning to put together a more technical blog post on the livestream, as that is a nörding goldmine, so look forwards to that one. I also hope that I can patch together a post on lessons learned, to share with the SAP community, as other SIT organisers might find them useful.

And lastly we can reveal that we already have started planning a smaller event around January – February 2020, most likely a Codejam. So on that bombshell, we sign off with sitOSLO 2019 sending all our love to the whole SAP community.

Resources:

SAP Inside Track OSLO on YouTube

SAP Inside Track OSLO 2019 photo gallery

SAP Inside Track OSLO Wiki

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      11 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Svea Becker
      Svea Becker

      Thanks for sharing, Ronnie. It's always great to read how things went when you weren't able to attend! Congrats on the successful event!

      Cheers,
      Svea

      Author's profile photo Ronnie André Bjørvik Sletta
      Ronnie André Bjørvik Sletta
      Blog Post Author

      Thank you for all your support during the planning process. This has been a great experience for me, over the last 8-9 months. And hadn't I heard you on the Coffee Corner Radio podcast, on my commute from work, this event might never even have happened. That episode finally gave me the answer to what is should do, to try and bootstrap a local community in Norway. So in many ways, you're one of the main catalyst that made me do it. 🙂

      https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/episode-11-sap-inside-track-sit-council-with-svea-becker/id1370422791?i=1000424110471

      Author's profile photo Svea Becker
      Svea Becker

      Oh wow, thanks, I wasn't aware of that. It's great to hear getting people motivated by "only" doing the things you really like 🙂

      And look what you have achieved: another great event in the SAP Community surrounding and a steady local community. Keep on going and let me know if I can support again in any way!

      Author's profile photo Craig Cmehil
      Craig Cmehil

      Looks like a great event, still very sorry I missed it but I was able to attend from afar!

      Author's profile photo Ronnie André Bjørvik Sletta
      Ronnie André Bjørvik Sletta
      Blog Post Author

      Thank you Craig. Don't worry about missing out on it. Now you'll get the chance to make your first sitOSLO the 2020 event, when we have learnt many lessons, and hopefully make it even better. 🙂

       

      Author's profile photo Nabheet Madan
      Nabheet Madan

      Superb recap, I must appreciate great event and well organized. I will be really happy to read about the livestreaming setup, do pen it down.

      Keep up the great work Ronnie.

       

      Thanks

      Nabheet

      Author's profile photo Ronnie André Bjørvik Sletta
      Ronnie André Bjørvik Sletta
      Blog Post Author

      Thank you Nabheet, and thanks for following along one the live-stream. Hopefully I'll get the time to write about it soon. ?

      Author's profile photo Jelena Perfiljeva
      Jelena Perfiljeva

      Nice write-up! It's very cool that you had live streaming, wish all the events would do that.

      Maybe I'll make it to the next year's event, looks pretty awesome. Well done.

      Author's profile photo Ronnie André Bjørvik Sletta
      Ronnie André Bjørvik Sletta
      Blog Post Author

      Thank you Jelena. You're more than welcome next year. ?

      Author's profile photo Margot Wollny
      Margot Wollny

      Congret on the launch of SAP Inside Track Oslo. It seems as everything was perfectly organized and everyone really enjoyed the day. I am also really impressed of the quality of your videos and already looking forward to read more about your experiences here.

      Keep up the great work!

      Author's profile photo Ronnie André Bjørvik Sletta
      Ronnie André Bjørvik Sletta
      Blog Post Author

      Thank you Margot. ?