sitNL – My first in-person event after a ‘dry’ period of non-physical events

June 11, 2022 … SAP Inside Track in the Netherlands… in person… after two years with so many restrictions and online events… it was almost unbelievable and as you can imagine… amazing!

I am happy and grateful having been able to be part of it. It was fantastic seeing so many familiar faces. While there were of course many locals from Netherlands like Laurens van Rijn, also some other very well-known community members like Morten Wittrock from Copenhagen, Denmark, and Jan von Ansem from Whitstable, UK attended (I am sorry I cannot mention all here). Even my colleague Katherine Kenneally flew in from Galway, Ireland (was so great to meet you in person for the first time! 😊). It was simply a blast. I was so touched to see all my community friends again in person after such a long time. People were keen to gain knowledge and see each other again in person. Approx. 70 took their way to Hertogenbosch, which is by the way a very beautiful city. With my colleagues Lena, Laura and Mynyna, I explored it the evening before a bit.

source: images by Laura Schmitz

But let me give more insights of the event itself from my perspective.

The SAP Inside Track was the 12^th event in the Netherlands and it took place in the SAP Experience Center in Hertogenbosch. It has been organized by Twan Broek, Jan Penninkhof , R. Konijnenburg, Tamas Szirtes & Wim Snoep. There were 2 tracks with 8 presentations each plus the common Welcome and Kick-off by Wim, the Keynote from Jan and the PubQuiz by Dick Groenhof. And all on a Saturday, community members spending the time together in their spare time – terrific!

After the Welcome note, Jan Penninkhof was in place to present his Keynote in the main room. He opened the session with a video from “Mother Nature”  which was kind of eye opening to me and definitely something to reflect, keep in mind and adapt behavior (remark: going more into detail of the topic of nature, would go beyond the purpose of my post). Building the bridge to SAP, Jan’s presentation topic was how to become an intelligent, sustainable enterprise and the relevance of the SAP Business Technology Platform in this regard.

Afterwards, I joined the session from my former colleague Marius Obert about CAP. He did some live coding on how to send messages to a user straight from CAP to improve the app’s user experience. Looked fantastic but cannot really say I understood a lot 😉

source: https://twitter.com/mwittrock/status/1535542926805172225?s=20&t=NouNesMMhxGnls-_biKD0w

After a yummy lunch with soup, salads, bagels and fruits, my lovely colleagues Mynyna, Laura, Lena and myself had our session about ‘How to make the most out of SAP Community’. Mynyna opened the floor with an introduction and history of SAP Community and outlined some numbers as well as the relevance and impact of being part of SAP Community. Lena gave a demo about how to start with creating your personal community profile, and how helpful our community tutorials are in this regard and continued with the fun part of SAP Community: the badges! Surely, you can also earn a badge after conducting a community tutorial. 😉 Laura was next to present about how to follow content and tags in SAP Community and shared some tips and tricks. Finally, I was on stage to talk about our new group functionality. It’s so easy to take part in discussions now with joining the respective group of interest! I also emphasized on a location-based group for Hertogenbosch, where the local community can discuss and meet and can be kept jointly and up to date.

The last topic from the four of us was the new Event listing. You are going to host your own event? From now on, you can easily list it in our Event listing. Simply send an email to community@sap.com with the name of the event and a url with more information and we are going to add it in. When it’s part of the community event listing, you can even track who is going to attend, invite others from the event entry directly and add it to your personal calendar.

source: https://twitter.com/NilPeksen/status/1535595867855536130?s=20&t=NouNesMMhxGnls-_biKD0w

There was a lot to consume in our presentation about SAP Community, so please find the related pdf file here.

In the next session Fabian Camps and team presented the Hunkemöller Clientele App, the new retail application for Hunkemöller, which can be used in their stores. Being a Hunkemöller customer on my own, it was really interesting to see how supportive the app is for Hunkemöllers employees to get real-time information on an iPad and support their “endless aisle” sales process. The demo was impressing.

Last presentation for me was “Dark Matter vs. Dark Data – Lighting up Dark Content” by Nil Peksen, which was interesting and scary at the same time, realizing, how much dark data exists in the virtual world. Did you know that only 12 % of the data is business critical, 23 % of it is redundant or obsolete and 65% of it is dark data, hidden within networks, people and machines?

source: https://twitter.com/MynynaChau/status/1535640284838731776?s=20&t=NouNesMMhxGnls-_biKD0w

Final highlight was the PubQuiz by Dick Groenhof. Various quiz questions about the world of pop, movies and common knowledge has been asked. It was quite tough for me and it’s not worth sharing my results here 😉 But it was definitely FUN – we all had a good laugh!

The organizer team around Twan, Wim, Jan, Ron and Tamas finally thanked everyone for presenting and attending this first SAP Inside Track in person after a break of 2 years. I think I can say that every participant was happy to have been part of sitNL. It felt like a reunion of a family. I am definitely looking forward to attending more SAP Inside Tracks this year. You too? Find the latest list here: https://groups.community.sap.com/t5/sap-insidetrack/eb-p/insidetrack but check also out all community driven events: https://groups.community.sap.com/t5/events/ct-p/events

Finally, I can only thank community members like the Netherlands community guys that they proceed with organizing their local events. It brings so much value into our community. If you haven’t had the chance yet, I recommend joining one of the upcoming SAP Inside Tracks! CU there! 🙂