Saturday December 12th was the day the first SAP Inside Track in the Netherlands took off. 30 People gathered in Eindhoven to listen to and discuss with 6 different speakers. How about that? Thirty enthusiastic SAP consultants from 10 different companies join together to share thoughts and ideas on the SAP TechEd: The SAP TechEd XPerience.
The borderless enterprise comes to live when the SCN community works together on an event like SAP Inside Track.

 

To make sure we could make it through the day, we started with a lunch at 12:00.


Robert Verlaat (Avelon) started with a BPM presentation, “What’s new in SAP NetWeaver BPM 7.2”. In his presentation new features as intermediate events, report steps were pointed out. Also a CE7.1 demo was shown which integrated regular SAP Workflow with BPM and a web service.


Ingrid Bos (Ingrid Bos Consultancy) hosted the first parallel session, “What’s new in ABAP”. Ingrid pointed out her key lessons learned from the sessions she joined at SAP TechEd.


Paul van Os (Oxolution) brought 70 slides to explain about the great new features in SAP PI. Paul first asked who was already experienced in PI, those who answered yes were not allowed to ask questions ;-)
PI7.2 brings great performance features with queue handling and tuning. Process monitoring according to SAP takes place in the Solution Manager. We didn’t quite agree on that one. A good monitoring tool with restart possibilities is still to be custom built.


Aleem Mohiuddin (Tata Consultancy Services) presented an overview on Web Dynpro for ABAP. FIRE was always about Form, Interfaces, Reports and Enhancements. Aleem talked a lot about fire, firing plugs to raise events. That shows that SAP NetWeaver development with Web Dynpro for ABAP is so much different from regular ABAP programming.

After a break, used to share thoughts and get to learn each others, we continued.


Norbert Maijoor (TopForce) explained where we stand with the BI / BO integration. No proper BI solution with a solid solution architecture.


Finally me, Twan van den Broek (CIBER) with a hands-on demo on SAP NetWeaver BPM 7.2.
I almost had a no go with my demo. The CE7.2 environment which run so smoothly at home, had severe issues with the network available at the premise. It just didn’t want to start up. Finally with a VPN connection it came to live. Wise lesson: always test your local CE environment without your personal network connection. AND create movies from your demo’s otherwise you may end up with empty hands.
In the demo the integration between SAP NetWeaver BPM and Visual Composer (the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio version) was shown. Creating an application without a single line of code.
Next to that also the great new possibilities from the Enterprise Services workplace were shown. Find your service, see what example data can be used, test drive the service on an SAP system and download the .sca file to import it into your local Developer Studio. The download not only works for enterprise services, even complete processes can be downloaded and locally adjusted according to your needs.



We concluded this inspiring day with a dinner. I am happy to tell you that everyone had fun and was enthusiastic on the concept. So we are already making plans for 2010!
Relive the event with pictures on Flickr or via the Twitter search with #SAPInsideTrackEindhoven.

Thanks to CIBER for sponsoring the event with the location, lunch, dinner and some goodies.


Next? SAP Inside Track Bonn, February 20th 2010. Hosted by Tobias Trapp and Thorsten Franz.

Let me share a final tip within the SCN community: If there is a SAP Inside Track organized locally - JOIN! There you will learn a lot of fellow community members and for sure you will meet new friends.