SAP TechEd Blog Posts
Share your experiences about SAP TechEd: Write about your favorite sessions and other conference highlights.
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matt_steiner
Active Contributor
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Introduction

I’m writing this blog post on the train back from Munich where I attended TechEd’07 and I’m still trying to get a hold of all the impressions I got this past week. So in order to get it all out I decided to write about to share my experience with all those who didn’t get to go…

Even though I’m certainly talking from a my personal point of view I tried my best to compile an informative, yet entertaining blog post, so make sure to check out the links to get the complete picture about what was hot and what was not at TechEd’07 in Munich…

Community Day

When I got asked by my manager if I’d like to host a session on Community Day I wasn’t quite sure what to expect or what sort of expectations I would be facing by the attendees. Nevertheless, as I’ve decided to get more Talking About Custom Composite Development within the SDN Community I said yes - facing the challenge opportunity…

Honestly I was stoked to see the Photos from SAP TechEd Munich spread by the SDN team and the community members that day (especially the analysts from RedMonk and last year’s Demo Jam winners from Colgate-Palmolive seemed to have been enjoying being there, which definitely contributed to the nice atmosphere.) The easy-minded and fun approach of all the people there clearly showed to me that the term “Community” is not just a nice name, but for real…

So, with the promoted motto “Community Day Influence I: Burning Man” on my mind I went on to host my BoF session on "Building Composites with SAP NetWeaver 7.0 Foundation" hoping for an interactive session.  It turned out that I was facing quite a diverse audience (in terms of experience on the subject matter) and so I sketched out the usual NetWeaver fridge on the whiteboard, quickly introducing the various tools in SAP’s offering for developing Composites, before diving deeper in the topic on how the architecture of a Composite Application should/could look like (more details to follow very soon in my next blog post). I had some quite interesting discussion afterwards with a few community members and received some nice feedback – so “Tell you friends. Plus notes from Community Day"

On the right you see a picture of me sitting next to SCI-FI author Bruce Sterling (who was special guest of the day), during the speed-networking session where we (and the folks from RedMonk) briefly discussed about SAP’s position towards OpenSource -> “Yes, We Are Open!

In case you wonder who’s that paper guy in the back whom we face… well, that’s a picture of SDN long-time member and top contributor eddy.declercq/blog who wasn’t able to make it physically to TechEd this year. So, the “Where is Eddy?” campaign got to be the running gag of this year’s event in Munich…

Key Notes

Well, TechEd’07 in Munich started with the usual big bang in form of keynotes that set the tone for the next days. Probably the most interesting moment happened during a live demo in Klaus Kreplin’s keynote when suddenly a WebDynpro error page showed up. That definitely caused some amusement within the crowd and some not-so-happy faces from the people on stage. Well, those that looked a little closer have seen that it was just an issue caused by an expired HTTP Session, so not really a big thing, but well… for me it was quite comforting to see that even board members sometimes have to experience the “live demo effect.”

Oh, not to forget that he also mentioned that Composition Environment (CE) fits on a 700 GB disc… wow, forget about HD DVD and Blue Ray… we got 700 GB discs at SAP 🙂

Let’s get serious again… another interesting thing – which I didn’t know so far – was that SAP acquired YASU Technologies and their Rule Engine, which definitely looks like it would be a value-add to the CE stack. For me in particular there was something else that I thought was really cool… a brief demo of a Composite dealing with Complaints Management. Why’s that you may wonder? Well, I was part of the team that developed that Composite ?. It’s definitely not my intention to brag about it, but I want to mention it in order to give myself a little bit of credibility since I’m new to the SDN blogging community.

I guess you can relate to what it feels like to see something you spent quite some time and effort on to be regarded worth to be shown within the keynote of TechEd.

Demo Jam

We saw some entertaining and interesting demos again this year (check out the video here). Me personally, I liked the one with the title “Enabling of Next Generation B2B by Web 3.0” the most as this was really “cool, in a different kind of way” (to quote the presenter). Everybody that has tried to map business objects from a requirement document to actual Global Data Types (GDT) will appreciate this coolness demonstrated. Anyway, all participants showed some really neat and sometimes “sexy” (to quote the moderator) stuff, so I’d say that each of them would have deserved to be picked as the winner.

Oh, and after Demo Jam was done, I made another unique experience… standing in line to get to the man’s restroom… could the beer have anything to do with it? 😉

Catering QoS (Quality of Service)

I’m sorry I have to say that now (as I’m usually not that type of person that point fingers), but the catering service could have been better. Not that the food was bad, it simply wasn’t available to everybody. On Tuesday I was in one of the longer morning sessions and therefore got to go for lunch rather late. After standing in line for quite some time I was facing an almost completely empty buffet table… it got better during the week, but there were long lines in front of the buffet tables throughout the week. Anyway, they had plenty - and more importantly free - beer in the evenings, so no grudge held 😉

Sessions

Oh yeah, I almost forget the sessions… it was as hard as ever to decide which sessions to go to as there were so many interesting ones. So, here’s a list of my personal top three sessions (in chronological order):

Note: I’ll add links to the session recordings as soon as the stuff is publicly available.

Conclusion

As you can probably tell I had a great time and it was definitely worth having to cope with catching up on all the things that pilled up on my desktop and in my email inbox during this week of leisure educational training 😉

PS: Click Photos from SAP TechEd Munich to see the Pictures available by courtesy of the SDN team.