SAP User Experience event

The Future is NOW! 

That was our main theme for an SAP User Experience event on October 3rd. It is referring to the current possibilities to improve the user experience within the SAP world without having to migrate to the latest new release of ECC. You can do it today! And that is a good thing as User Experience (UX in short) is hot, even for SAP as it is one of SAP’s main focus points for 2013. We all know where SAP came from with the grey/blue transaction screens ;-) 

Picture from SAP Design Guild, some more historic screens at their site.

Finally we now realised that it not about the transaction to be executed but about an end-to-end business process. And to really support the user of this process a user-friendly user interface is key. It is the difference between searching for the information you need and supporting your business process. That is how you can identify a good user experience.

Keep on coding in the free world

At this years SAP Inside Track Netherlands (#sitNL), Roel van den Berge shared his experiences on SAP TechEd with regards to SAP Mobile and SAP Fiori. And on top of that he showed us a very creative movie, based on SAP TechEd's keynote which stated

Code enables freedom

So, Roel came up with new lyrics for "Rockin' in the free world" from Neil Young. I think he did a great job, the new SAP based lyrics even match the original ones!

New design for my blog

It was about time, time to do a bit of cleaning in the 'house'. While working on a new design for my blog, I had a few wishes:

• Rolling header with pictures
• Leaner design
• More space for blog posts

This is the result:

the new one

the old one

Thanks to Louis van de Wiele, who helped me out with some scripting and CSS stuff.

Hope you like it.

And a happy birthday it was ... #sitNL 5 year anniversary

Celebrating 5 years of sitNL

On Saturday November 23, it was time to celebrate our 5thanniversary. For the 5th time SAP NetWeaver and SAP TechEd enthusiasts gathered together to share knowledge at SAP Inside Track Netherlands, sitNL in short.

Or to look at it from another perspective, our little event is just the warm up for Haseenah’s delicious dinner party in the evening 

Our sitNL birthday cake

Some statistics

The Ciber office was crowded, 62 participants joined for our SAP TechEd XPerience.

Some participant statistics

• 52 from the Netherlands
• 5 from Belgium
• 4 from Germany
• 1 from Norway (Thanks for joining Njal ;-)
• 44 different companies
• 7 customer representatives
• 12 freelancers
• 14 from Ciber
• 3 from Accenture
• 3 from TCS
• 2 from Synerscope

Some other sitNL statistics

• 14 high quality sessions (agenda)
• 1 entertaining Pubquiz
• 1 live podcast recording by the Dutch BI Podcast members

Recap

Roel van den Berge already shared his personal sitnl experiences. In this blog I’ll try to recap the day in pictures, slides, replays and some words.

Welcome and opening Twan van den Broek Practical use of innovations, check out how Mr. Beanuses scissors, his credit card and his socks to create a lunch. Innovations without practical use or where the end user experience is not taken into account will have a hard time in maturing. Prezi
SAP HANA Cloud Platform Matthias Steiner Matthias prepared the keynote for Vishal at SAP TechEd in Bangalore  Try it yourself, experience the cloud athanatrial.ondemand.com. When asked about participating the opensap courses, the majority of the sitNL crowd raised their hands. And made Matthias happy of course. Slides

Tweet Analysis #sitNL 2013

Thanks to Martijn Linssen we are able to do a sitNL Tweet Analysis via TwUniverse. And for your convenience, Martijn uploaded a pdf file to our wiki page. 

First some numbers

648 tweets, starting at Nov 17 20:50:27 2013 and ending at Nov 25 08:44:22 2013 on: #sitnl. That is 3.60 per hour.

Top 10 Most Active Tweeters

1. @steinermatt (48 = 7%); 
2. @tbroek (48 = 7%)
3. @roelvdberge (46 = 7%)
4. @martijnlinssen (41 = 6%)
5. @fredverheul (39 = 6%)
6. @jpenninkhof (33 = 5%)
7. @qualiture (27 = 4%)
8. @h_neumann (24 = 4%)
9. @wolf_gregor (23 = 4%)
10. @yonex_nl (23 = 4%)

Top 10 Most Influential (based on getting RT-ed)

1. @roelvdberge (50 = 19%)
2. @tbroek (44 = 17%)
3. @steinermatt (31 = 12%)
4. @jpenninkhof (19 = 7%)
5. @konijnenburg (15 = 6%)
6. @qualiture (13 = 5%)
7. @cbasis (8 = 3%)
8. @tomvandoorslaer (8 = 3%)
9. @fredverheul(8 = 3%)
10. @martijnlinssen (7 = 3%)

User Centered Design & Delivery / mini workshop

At the Ciber Knowledge Carousel Louis van de Wiele and I had the opportunity to explain User Centered Design & Delivery to our attendees. We decided to focus on the design part and conducted a mini Design Thinking workshop. To participate actively in a workshop is a better experience than just sit back and hear what the presenters have to say. But with only 45 minutes for our session we had to push time boxing to the extreme ;-)

User Centered Design & Delivery Workshop from Twan van den Broek

Our challenge was to “Redesign the event experience”, how to improve the event experience for an attendee. (Hah, quite an interesting case, if I may say so, attendees of our event were able to suggest improvements that we can use for our event next year ;-)

After an explanation of the challenge we kicked of with the first step.

1. Context

A short interview, 2 minutes sharp, to gather personal experiences on attending events.

• When was the last time you visited an event
• What did you like
• What didn’t you like
• Why did you attend

Agenda #sitNL - SAP Inside Track Netherlands November 23rd

Counting down, only a few days to go before sitnl kicks off. I think we have a very interesting line up at our fifth SAP Inside Track NL. Thanks to all the speakers who have submitted a session.

This year we have shortened the sessions a bit to make sure that there is enough time to get to know each other, talk to each other and enjoy. But with 8 tracks, there is still enough knowledge to absorb ;-) And we all know:

You can gather new knowledge by sharing yours.