Introduction
I writing again this afternoon from the SDN club house. There is a noticeable difference on everyone's face today. I think that pure exhaustion is beginning to set in. But many sessions were still standing room only today. People are also looking forward to getting out on the bay tonight for the big evening event. I'm sure the party will provide lots of great photo opportunities. So I will skip right to the session I have seen today so maybe I can get some rest before heading to the big party
Introducing SAP ViewPoint
I decided that today I would broaden my horizons and head off to some sessions that are a little outside my comfort zone. My first session of the day was definitely in this category - Introducing SAP ViewPoint. I was really curious to see some the technology behind this solution that I have been using as part of SDN. I certainly got what I was looking for. In fact I even got a CD with a Technical Preview to try out when I get back home. After this session I'm quite intrigued by the idea of publishing data to ViewPoint from ABAP via XML. I have this vision of publishing reports to the web and letting users decided what they really need to see. Quite often in a role based portal someone else decides for you what role you have. This role is usually much large than what you actually need. This way you empower the end user to really choose what content they want and need.
The Integrated SAP Internet Transaction Server in SAP Web AS
Talk about a packed session! This was already a very large room. I arrived a few minutes late and I ended up standing for the whole session in the back of the room. There is no doubt that there was some serious interest in the Integrated ITS. Although I have seen sessions and documentation on the Integrated ITS in the past, the session provided details on how to configure and administer it.
Of special interest to me was the detailed section on how to estimate how much em/global_area_MB you need to configured for the Integrated ITS. I also found interesting that the ITS stores its session information in Shared Memory. This shared memory block has to be mapped in the work process memory as one complete block. Already SAP is recommending 64-bit platforms for this solution because of the effect it has on your total shared memory area and more importantly the overhead it adds to all of your work process memory areas. The presenter also suggested that you not plan to free up the hardware that your stand-alone ITS might be running on today. Instead plan to just turn that server into a WebAS App Server.
SAP NetWeaver for Linux - An Update
Next up was a session that gave me an overview of the status of SAP's software offering on Linux. Now I have to be honest. I'm not really pro or anti Linux. Actually I don't really care what OS I run on (the beauty of programming in ABAP!). I attended this session for two reasons. First I thought it would be interesting to learn a little about Linux. My company is considering looking at Linux as a possible future OS, but with no definite plans to but SAP software on it. The second and more devious reason to attend was that I heard that they were handing out a DVD that had both the Java and ABAP Stack for NetWeaver 04. I really wanted to get my hands on the ABAP Stack and I learned something about Linux in the process - Not a bad deal!
Conversion of SAP Systems to Unicode
Coming from a company that is currently running MDMP (Latin-1, Latin-2, and Thai) and planning to upgrade to Unicode; this session was a must have for me. I got the details on how long it takes and what kind of problems you can hit. As an added bonus, we saw a live demo where they did the complete steps to convert a hand full of tables to Unicode. We got to see the preparation steps, the vocabulary build, and what happens when things go wrong. I'm still a little scared of the upcoming conversion to Unicode, but I feel like it is a little less of an unknown now.
Closing
Well I really have to finish up this WebLog, or I am going to be late for the evening party. Once again we had a full, exciting day. I hope that everyone has been enjoying this little peak at what has been happening to one attendee of SAP TechED.
