On Sunday 14th June 2009 we held SDN Community Day Australia in Brisbane.

There were around 30 participants with most in town to attend the Mastering SAP Technologies Conference although at least two people travelled from interstate just to attend Community Day.

I really enjoyed the day and it was great to see both old and new friends discussing and debating their shared passion for SAP and all things related.

I opened the session with a general welcome and took the audience through Craig Cmehils' presentation on Community Influencers to help them understand how SAP view community involvement.

A special presentation was made to Tony de Thomasis in recognition of his recent appointment as a SAP Mentor.

We then had a couple of rounds of "Speed Networking". At each change we had to forcibly break up groups to get people to join a new table as conversations were well established and people reluctant to leave them for later.

There was plenty of interest in break-out sessions and fortunately plenty of people willing to lead discussions and do presentations.

The break-out sessions were
ZOA an open-source integration framework for SAP Netweaver
Peter Chapman talked about the ZOA Framework community project he is leading. What it is and how community members can contribute.

Best Practices for external facing portal.
Matt Harding lead this discussion. Matt has recently completed a project building an external facing portal and he shared his learnings from the project.

SAP Business Objects
SAP Mentor Ingo Hilgefort is in town from Vancouver and he helped demistify the SAP/BOBJ product mix.

Java@SAP
Oliver Mayer lead a discussion on SAP current and future Java strategy including the SAP Composition Environment.

MS/SAP Interoperability
Richard Frykberg discussed Microsoft and SAP interoperability

SAP Corporate Research Update
Marek Kowalkiewicz from SAP Corporate Research in Brisbane discussed some of the work they have been doing. This included projects with interesting names like BirdsEye and Yowie as well as NetWeaver BPM.

At the conclusion of the formal proceeding the participants adjourned to the bar where several of them are still "discussing important SAP topics".

All in all a very successful and interesting day.

You can see more photos at Flickr