Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

A photo posted by Twan van den Broek (@tbroek) on Dec 12, 2014 at 8:19am PST

#sitNL 2014 in tweets

What would an SAP community event be without Twitter ;-) Let’s do an tweet analysis to show the sitNL 2014 buzz we created.

Timeframe

731 tweets, starting at Nov 26 12:49:39 2014 and ending at Dec 03 21:11:24 2014 on: #sitnl. That is 4.14 per hour.

Top 10 Most Active Tweeters

1. @ceedee666 (63 = 9%)
2. @h_neumann (43 = 6%)
3. @fredverheul (41 = 6%)
4. @jpenninkhof(38 = 5%)
5. @koehntopp (37 = 5%)
6. @tbroek (36 = 5%)
7. @roelvdberge (30 = 4%)
8. @sapinsidetrack (28 = 4%)
9. @renaldwittwer (27 = 4%)
10. @svleuken (22 = 3%)

SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, de volledige SAP business suite in de cloud

Tijdens de keynote van SAP TechEd && d-code werd s-Innovations, ook wel SAP Simple Suite genoemd, door Bernd Leukert aangekondigd. Zonder er lang bij stil te staan werd de belangrijkste aankondiging tussen alle technische details weggestopt. Opmerkelijk, want s-Innovations is SAP’s nieuwe core en daarmee de opvolger van SAP R/3 en ECC. Het SAP zoals we dat tot nu toe kennen gaat op de schop en wordt opnieuw opgeleverd in de SAP cloud, de SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. In deze blog leg ik uit wat de SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is en wat de overeenkomsten/verschillen met het SAP HANA Cloud Platform zijn.

Relive the 6th #sitNL

Saturday November 29 around 75 SAP enthusiasts gathered to share SAP knowledge and passion at the 6th SAP Inside Track Netherlands, sitNL in short.

First some figures:

• 87 registrations
• 5 sponsors
• 19 high quality sessions
• 22 enthusiastic speakers
• 1 HANA start up
• 1 pubquiz
• 14 SAP Mentors
• 1 SAP Mentor junior
• 

Second a recap in pictures / slides

Welcome and opening Twan van den Broek Slides

Agenda #sitNL 2014

Only a few nights of sleep away - our 6th annual family reunion: SAP Inside Track Netherlands. sitnl in short. A day where the Dutch SAP Mafia (a nickname that we once got from Thorsten Franz) gathers together to share knowledge and passion around SAP. A lot will be familiar (never change a winning team or concept) but this year we added a third track, dedicated to BI. As every year our main topic is a recap of SAP TechEd && d-code.

HANA Cafe NL recap of SAP TechEd && d-code

Roel, Jan en Twan waren bij de SAP TechEd && d-code. HANA Café NL heeft live in Berlijn de ervaringen en belangrijkste conclusies opgenomen.

Aangeschoven in het café zijn:
Martijn Tielen, Emad Arnouk, Sandhya Debi Tewari, Henri Stuifzand, Leo van Hengel, Guido Koopmann, Igor Mitrovic en Fred Verheul.

Wat is Design Thinking?

Het is alweer een paar jaar geleden dat Hasso Plattner (een van de oprichters van SAP) het “The power of design” artikel in de Business Week is opgevallen.

Hierin werd uitgelegd dat het bij een goed ontwerp gaat om het creëren van ervaringen en niet om de producten alleen. Dat was het moment dat Plattner besloot om Design Thinking te implementeren bij SAP. Het gaat niet meer alleen om de beste ERP functionaliteit, maar juist de gebruikerservaring zou het verschil gaan maken.

SAP Mobile Device Management en Security voor €1 euro

Met SAP Mobile Secure biedt SAP mobiele services als abonnement aan. Voor maar €1 euro per device per maand biedt SAP device management en beveiligde toegang tot applicaties en informatie. Enterprise mobility tegen instaptarieven, is dat niet hetgeen waar we allemaal op hebben zitten wachten? Dit is dan ook geen blog over het nut van enterprise mobility of wat het nu eigenlijk is. In deze blog lees je wat SAP Mobile Secure is. Er is geen reden meer om je eindgebruikers te laten wachten op het bieden van mobiele toegang tot bedrijfskritische functionaliteit en gegevens.

SAP HANA Cloud Platform Mobile Services

SAP introduceert SAP HANA Cloud Platform Mobile Services, of anders gezegd Mobile Services: een SAP Mobile Platform in de cloud. Heb je het mobile platform nog niet in huis, maar wil je wel een centrale oplossing voor de ontsluiting van SAP naar mobiele applicaties? Dan is deze nieuwe cloud oplossing van SAP zeer interessant voor jou. Temeer omdat het licentiemodel eindelijk een laagdrempelige instap mogelijk maakt. In deze blog leg ik uit dat de cloud versie niet zomaar een gehoste omgeving van het SAP Mobile Platform is. Ook ga ik in op de kansen van deze nieuwe oplossing voor jouw organisatie.

SAP River RDE, the future of SAP developers is cloud

SAP CodeJam SAP River RDE

Last Friday Wim Snoep organized an SAP CodeJam on SAP River RDE. As all CodeJams, this event was very successful as well.

Wim opens event



Michal Keidar explains about SAP River RDE

SAP TechEd && d-code Berlin

This year the EMEA SAP TechEd && d-code heads to Berlin again. My 12th episode so far. And I will be visiting the event as long as SAP offers

• quality hands-on workshops on latest and greatest SAP stuff
• in depth roadmap sessions
• possibility to talk to product managers
• community member expert sessions
• DemoJam, the Idols show for SAP enthusiasts 
• possibility to meet and greet with peers in real life 

Also happy to be on the 2014 agenda.

#sitNL - The saga continues

For the 6th time Dutch SAP enthusiasts gather together on a Saturday, just right after SAP TechEd. Oh wait, just after SAP d-code ;-) We all know that the SAP world is changing rapidly as we speak. So times are changing (a great song from Bob Dylon).

SAP DemoJam CARE-MIT

SAP TechEd && d-code season is happening real soon. In only a few weeks season start is given in Las Vegas. Personally I will attend the Berlin version in November. Next to all the latest and greatest from SAP there is this special night - DemoJam. The ultimate innovation competition for SAP technicians. And yes Leo and I have submitted a proposal. We took the winning concept from SAP Inside Track InnoJam NL earlier this year around CARE-MIT.

Hiking the Grossvenediger with The Next View

In 2014 The Next View celebrates its 5th anniversary. And we did that in style. We all took off to Austria and hiked the Grossvenediger, top 4 of highest mountains in Austria.


Hiking route

The first day we hiked in pretty good weather conditions to Defreggerhaus.



The second day, the hike to the actual summit (The Next Summit ;-) we woke up early and found out that snow covered our route. But that didn't undermine our spirit. We took off and had a great hike. We almost made it to the top, but unfortunately weather conditions (snow and wind) worsened and with the sign in sight we had to return.


Look very close, you can see a grey cross somewhere in the top left corner ;-)


Back to a safer spot to take our group picture.


With Schnapps of course ;-)


What an amazing experience. Hiking a 3666 meter high mountain was something completely new for me. Doing that with colleagues was really awesome!

More pictures in my Grossvenediger album.

Visit SAP AppHaus Heidelberg

Some heavy Design Thinking ;-)

With some fellow SAP Mentors we got invited by SAP's AppHaus in Heidelberg to participate in a two-day workshop about the AppHaus concept. And again I got overwhelmed by the power of Design Thinking. Bring together a bunch of people, give them a challenge, facilitate with whiteboards and post-its and see the energy flow ... a bit bluntly ;-) But still I can recommend to anyone to experience Design Thinking soon.

Hoe werkt Design Thinking? Voorbeeld case met service engineers

Iedereen die betrokken is bij IT implementatieprojecten herkent de situatie dat een project al gestart is met de realisatie terwijl de specificaties nog niet helder zijn. Verschillende projectleden zoals business analisten, technisch architecten en product specialisten gaan individueel aan de slag met de verkregen informatie. Het grote gevaar is dat het oorspronkelijke doel, het ondersteunen van de eindgebruiker, uit het oog wordt verloren. Design Thinking kan de oplossing bieden. Maar wat is Design Thinking en hoe pas je het toe? Ik leg het in deze blog uit aan de hand van een praktijkvoorbeeld.

SAP HANA Cloud Integration (SAPHCI) CodeJam and podcast

SAP HANA Cloud Integration (SAPHCI) now public available, enough reason for a CodeJam and podcast episode.



June 27th, Guido Koopmann and Igor Mitrovic organized a CodeJam on SAP HANA Cloud Integration, SAP HCI in short. With about 30 participants it is clear that the topic is hot, mostly due to the fact that the cloud integration solution is now available separately. No need to first buy one of the other SAP cloud solutions, the tight integration with SAP HANA Cloud Platform is gone.

SAP’s innovators dilemma

Een nieuwe productstrategie met een volledige nieuw applicatieplatform. SAP vaart duidelijk een nieuwe koers om de huidige technische mogelijkheden optimaal in te kunnen zetten om bedrijfskritische processen te kunnen ondersteunen. Soms dien je je strategie dan ook radicaal aan te passen. De SAPPHIRE stond volledig in het teken van de nieuwe strategie. Hoe kan het nieuwe SAP HANA Cloud platform oplossingen bieden en hoe draagt dit bij aan de versimpeling van je processen?

Highlights SAPphire NOW event

For our customers we hosted an SAPPHIRE NOW update event. Biggest highlights from this year were:

1. SAP is simplifying. Both its products and the organisational structure
2. SAP Fiori and SAP Screen Personas are now free for SAP customers
3. Disruptive innovation leads to new business
4. SAP is on the move from R/2 to R/3 to SAP HANA Cloud Platform (SAP HCP)
5. SAP HANA is the enabler for the future

SAP Inside Track InnoJam NL live verslag

HANA Café NL was live aanwezig bij de SAP Inside Track InnoJam NL. Tijdens het evenement zijn ervaringen opgenomen tot laat in de nacht en uiteraard waren we live aanwezig bij de bekendmaking van de winnaars - team CARE-MIT!

SAP’s gevecht tegen complexiteit

Vorige week vond de SAPPHIRE NOW plaats, de grootste editie sinds het bestaan van SAP. Met 25.000 deelnemers in Orlando en 250.000 deelnemers online zaten velen op de laatste aankondigingen van SAP te wachten. Heel bijzonder was dat de focus dit jaar niet op de nieuwste technologie lag, maar op de uitdagingen die bedrijven tegenwoordig tegenkomen. Uitdagingen veroorzaakt door complexiteit. Volgens Bill McDermott, de CEO van SAP, is vereenvoudigen de enige remedie.

SAP Inside Track InnoJam NL tips for participation

Another get together at our HANA Café NL, this time:

• Fred Verheul
• Roel van den Berge
• Ronald Konijnenburg
• Twan van den Broek

We discussed the InnoJam event that takes place June 20/21 in Den Bosch.

SAP Fiori and SAP Screen Personas finally free for SAP customers

This week the SAPPHIRENOW event takes place in Orlando, a yearly event where SAP announces its strategy and new products. On Tuesday Bill McDermott, the CEO from SAP, did some major announcements. All with regard to making SAP simpler. In this blog I will describe the license changes for SAP Fiori and SAP Screen Personas. These new UI innovations are now part of SAP’s maintenance fee.

SAPPHIRENOW keynote

HANA Cafe NL talks about #UI5

A recap of our fourth HANA Cafe NL podcast. As the podcast on UI5 is in Dutch (he what'd you expect from the #DutchSAPMafia ;-) I tried to do the recap in English.



A short (?) transcript of what came to the table at our own HANA Café NL.

Participants that shared SAPUI5 / OpenUI5 real life experiences during introduction.

Kick off VNSG focus group SAP Custom Development

March 25, Kickoff VNSG SAP Custom Development Focus group. A group that focuses on developers was still missing and is now setup by developers:

• Jan Willem Kaagman - chair
• Fred Verheul
• Jan Penninkhof
• Roel van den Berge

Kickoff of the Kickoff by Jan-Willem

VNSG 2014

April 3 and 4 the Dutch SAP User Group organized its annual event “VNSG Congres”. Theme in 2014 was “User Centric”, the agenda offered a lot of sessions on how to improve the user experience on top of SAP.

See the recap movie for a short impression:




The Next View's presence focused on SAP – Microsoft interoperability, a joint effort of SAP, Cordis Solutions and The Next View. We demo'd solutions to improve the user experience for organisations that have SAP as backend system and SharePoint as frontend.

The #SAPRiver Of Dreams

Eindhoven, March 7, SAP CodeJam on SAP River

SAP specialists Inbal Zilberman and Yoram Hod travelled to Eindhoven to share the passion and enthusiasm in aCodeJam on SAP River with us. Inbal already wrote about her experiences in a summary blog.

Is SAP River the new ABAP? Join a local CodeJam or apply for a free account on sap-river.com and follow the tutorials to find out yourself. Initially it might be a bit scary, but the tutorials will lead the way, no need to have hydrophobia. Let’s recall a song by Billy Joel – The River Of Dreams:

To the river so deep
I must be lookin' for something

The SAP River might look deep or filled with wild water, but as SAP Developers we are looking for something, the future of SAP Development. No need to be afraid – just jump into the water and swim!

Inbal kicks off the event

Yoram shows the code

HANA Cafe NL - a series of podcasts to begin

SAP HANA Cafe Netherlands - a series of podcasts about all the fun things in our life as SAP developers. Roel van den Berge, Jan Penninkhof and Twan van den Broek will start and invite other friends of the Dutch SAP Mafia to join in the coming episodes.

#sitNL – the lost recordings

The lost sitNL recordings? No, Ali found them, thank you very much. So why the lost recordings?

What happens if a lot of SAP NetWeaver enthusiasts gather on a Saturday to share knowledge, but forget to push some buttons in Adobe Connect? You will have a mixture of successful and failed recordings ;-) We now have:

• Sessions with audio and video (hurrah)
• Sessions without any audio (for all you lip readers ;-)
• Sessions without video (podcast style)
• Sessions without any audio or video (so, no recording)

So how to improve in 2014? Any volunteers? Any Adobe Connect professionals in the house at November 29th?

SAP User Experience Event - the recordings

Once again our Ciber SAP User Experience event, this time all the recordings are available. Thanks to Carl Adams for initiating and thanks to Ted, Roel, Wim and Leo for recording their sessions.

A short glimpse of possibilities on how to make your end users HAPPY with:

• User Centered Design & Delivery as methodology
• SAP Screen Personas 
• SAP Fiori
• SAPUI5

Intro by Ted Castelijns and User Centered Design & Delivery by Twan van den Broek.

SAP Screen Personas by Twan van den Broek.

Thank you @CiberNL and hello @TheNextView

Another strange moment in my professional life, I will leave Ciber to join The Next View March 1st. Time to have a short retrospective.

Team picture at outing 2010

First of all I am proud, proud on our SAP NetWeaver team:

Alice, Arnaut, Bernard, Dave, Dennis, Frank, Guido, Harrie, Iemke, Igor, Jeroen, Juan-Jose, Laurens, Leo, Marc, Michael, Ravi, Roel, Ronan, Sanket, Steven, Ted, Tim, Wim and Vladimir. 

SAP User Experience presentations

Well that was a new experience … on request of a colleague in the UK I have recorded my sessions of our SAP User Experience event. Not while standing in front of an audience but while sitting behind my desk. That appeared to be some different job ;-) Record once, twice or three times, deleting ‘silence’, editing a movie, those kind of things. In the end my 45 minutes talk is shrunk into a 10 minutes YouTube movie. And that leaves me wondering what I have missed during the recording or what I have told extra in front of our customers.

Anyway my ‘web cast experiences’ can be found online.

User Centered Design & Delivery

Link to the original prezi. Thanks to my colleagues Margreet Klerkx and Bart van Lankveld for the visualisation of the process.

SAP CodeJam on #SAPRiver (Eindhoven, Netherlands)

SAP's CodeJam team visits Eindhoven once again. Most of us already know Eindhoven as sitnl city 

Great visual! Wondering about the details?

- The Blob, a shopping center

- Flying Pins, large scaled art object

- Evoluon, conference center (former Philips expo center)

Now back to our original topic: SAP River. Now what is SAP River? Please read John Appleby well written FAQ blog.

SAP River is a development platform based on the SAP HANA Platform, that allows expression of intent, to build entire business applications.

Happy Birthday Hasso Plattner

For Hasso Plattner 70th birthday the SAP Mentors created congratulations videos. So did Roel van den Berge and I, to say "Van harte gefeliciteerd" and to thank for:

• SAP R/2
• SAP R/3
• SAP Fiori
• Design Thinking

;-)

Design Thinking with field service engineers (continued)

In december I had a talk at the VNSG UX focusgroup, it was a next chapter in my Design Thinking with Field Service Engineers story. As we are in the middle of development, I have added some examples why Design is also important during Development.

Tip
Make sure that your designer is still involved during the development process. Developers encounter issues during realisation that might require a change in design. Only a close collaboration enables that these changes will be in line with the overall design.

Ciber Kickstarter Finals 2013

Yesterday the Ciber Kickstarter 2013 finals took place. Five finalists took the stage and presented their idea to the jury in order to win the “innovator of the year award”. 

Some background

How did we get there? What started out as “So You Think You Can Innovate” in 2011 and 2012, turned into Ciber Kickstarter in 2013. Still a gamification of innovation ideas, extended with a ‘social’ element: 

Submit your idea on our site and get funding to work on your project. Funding not like real money, but with friends, people who like your idea on LinkedIn with a voting button. To make it to the next round the jury evaluated every idea on a few aspects:

• Innovative value
• Fit with Ciber portfolio
• Presentation of the idea 
• Number of votes on LinkedIn

With the initiative we want to create a platform to facilitate innovative ideas. Don’t just think of it, create it! See how it grows into a working prototype. Get support and coaching from Ciber management and join the competition. As the world changes so fast, it is important to provide this platform to stimulate innovation and collaboration. Don’t try to do it all yourself, find colleagues with similar or different expertise to make your project a success.