What we did 

Nigel James and I organised the day as a community-driven unconference, and arranged for it to be on a Saturday, with free registration. This had a number of big advantages for us:

• Community-driven: all we had to do was put up a Wiki page and write some blogs to generate publicity. The SCN Community came along and volunteered to do sessions, filling in the Wiki and leaving us comments & suggestions.

• Unconference: This means that the sessions are designed to be discussions, with a host to keep things moving. In a "normal" conference, one expert at the front of the room talks with Powerpoint slides to a bunch of other experts. In an unconference, the whole room full of experts is contributing, making the session a lot more effective - everybody, including the host, comes away with more than they entered the room. Being an Unconference also meant that it was "fault-tolerant" - we had a couple of session hosts that couldn't make it due to illness. Instead of cancelling the session, we were able to find another person willing to host each session on the day; after all, there was no need to prepare a presentation - it was just a matter of keeping a discussion going.

• Saturday: It was easy to ask my company, Axon, to use their offices on a Saturday when nobody else would be around. This saved us a lot of effort in terms of finding a venue, paying to rent it, etc. Also, it meant that attendees were so passionate about SAP technology that they were willing to give up their own free time to be there, ensuring a high quality of discussion.

• Free registration: A double-edged sword, but the advantage was that we had very little administrative work to do. If we had charged people to attend, we would have had to deal with collecting fees, worrying about tax, and all sorts of inconvenient stuff like that. Anyway, the venue came to us for free, and Axon were even kind enough to buy us all lunch. The minor disadvantage to the event being free was that only about 50% of the people who signed up for the event could make it on the day - it was a beautiful, sunny day with a major football match on, and nobody lost any money by not turning up.

How the day went 

The day started well, with 20 people busy talking to each other in the Axon Cafe by 10am. In fact, this networking was going so well that it was hard to interrupt everyone to get them along to the Axon Theatre for the welcome session, but once there we had a great presentation from SAP's Ran Cliff, who gave us a sneak preview of what's in the pipeline for the SAP Community Network. There are some very interesting initiatives being discussed at SAP which, if they become reality, will help give SCN members the opportunity to play an integral part in how SAP develop and test new products. After this welcome session, and a "message from our sponsor", we started the two tracks of sessions for the day.

The two tracks were for Web Services and Everything Else - I pretty much only went to the Everything Else track, so you'll have to read some other blog to find out how the Web Services track went. 

My first session was about Active Directory integration. This started off with me talking a bit about how we have integrated AD with SAP HR and SAP CUA at one of our clients, but quickly turned into a discussion of the benefits of the NetWeaver Identity Management product. Next up was a Workflow Open Forum, chaired by workflow gurus Mike Pokraka and Mark Pyc. This session was really interesting for me, as we ended up discussing the future business process platforms from SAP, including such things as BPML, BPEL, BPEL4People, XI/PI, Galaxy, Guided Procedures and good old SAP Business Workflow. I came out of the session knowing a lot more than when I went in.

With two sessions out of the way, it was time for lunch. We had catered for 40-50 people, with half that number in the room, so there was plenty to go around. More wraps & sandwiches anyone? :-)

After lunch, Harald Reiter took us on an in-depth tour of the seldom-used PCD Filtering framework of the NetWeaver Portal, and showed us how to dynamically show Portal content based on any number of user attributes, including those coming from other systems such as HR. Then, after a coffee break to counter the growing effects of lunch, I ran a session on the Universal Worklist in a vain attempt to sell more copies of my SAP PRESS book. This would have worked much better if I had remembered to bring a copy of the book with me...

For the last session of the day, I filled an open space with a last-minute session on something I've been exploring in the Java technology space: Comet-based applications written using the Lift web framework for the Scala language. Scala is a object-oriented and functional language which runs on the Java Virtual Machine. It has XML as a native part of the language, which makes web services really easy to do. Lift is the web framework being developed using Scala, which gives the power of a scripting language with the type-safety and performance of a compiled language. Lift makes it easy to do Comet applications, Comet being the next step on from Ajax. Where Ajax makes changes to the page as a result of a client request and server response, Comet works from the server side only - so for example, if an administrator sends a system message, a Comet-based web application can show that message on-screen instantly, without the need for the user to do anything. 

By the end of the day many people had gone home, having far to travel or having attended the sessions which interested them - and that's fine, all part of the relaxed nature of the day. The handful of us who were left decided that going all the way into London for an event and meal was too much hard work, so we instead took advantage of the last of the sun and went to a pub in Egham to sit outside, share a few beers and put the world to rights. It was at this point that we got a call from Mark Finnern to wish us well, which was a nice end to a great day. We also decided to hold another event in 3 months time, on 16th July - the plan is to do this as an evening event held on-line as a Webinar. 

Feedback

So, if you were there, what did you like best, and what did you like least about the day? How could we make it better for next time?

Those who were not there - what could we do to persuade you to turn up to a UK community event?

For our own part, we learnt a few things:

• It's really important to ask for the air-conditioning to be turned on for the weekend
• We should be more involved with the local SAP office at an earlier stage in the planning
• We should make sure we have contact details for people who have registered, so we can remind them the event is happening and confirm they are attending 

Turning "-ise" into "-ize" I can live with - but I wasn't prepared for the effects of the Chicago Manual of Style used as the basis for the publisher's house style. A few things I was taught about English in school are flatly contradicted by the CMS - things like the Oxford serial comma being de rigeur - but I'm happy with the result.

Right now I'm working on the website for the book, so in a few weeks' time you'll be able to download the source code for all the examples and get direct browser links for all the references to SAP documentation. I'm hoping to be able to do this in Wiki format so that readers can add to the content and make it (in conjunction with the book) the best UWL guide available.

Nigel James plugged it here.

Now, it has a life of its own on the SDN Wiki, here.

The Community Day at TechEd Munich was transformational for me in one major respect - it turned my perception of the SAP Community Network from a really useful website and bunch of forums into a genuine community of really talented people, some of whom I got to know a little better. TechEd as a whole is a great conference from an educational point of view, but nothing packs a bang-for-your-buck punch like the Community Day. Instead of SAP telling you what's what, your in a room with some of the best minds in SAP practice - some from SAP but most from customers, partners and consultancies - discussing topics which you as a group have decided are worth talking about. It's like being able to design your own perfect conference from scratch.

So now it's time to do this in London instead of Central Europe. The beer may be warmer, and the comfort food may be more fish'n'chip oriented, but the meeting of minds will be as good as ever.

Please go over to the Wiki page and add your name to the comments page if you're interested in learning several things about SAP and what it could do that you never thought possible.

Actually, scratch that - to use the term "vapourware" is a little unkind. What we actually got was a sneak preview screencams of what will be released over the coming year or two - it's just annoying that SAP keep showing stuff at TechEd, getting you really into the problems that the new shiny thing will solve, only to get to the end and say "but you can't actually use this yet. We're keeping it to ourselves for a while. Even if we do let you play with it, we certainly won't support productive use." Like last year when Shai Agassi made a big thing - and it was a big thing - about SAP having the first certified Java EE 5 stack outside of Sun. Since then, most of the other big vendors have released theirs to the public. SAP have not. What's the point being the first to certification if you don't let anyone use it for their business? I am told that the NetWeaver Composition Environment (CE) 7.1, which uses the Java 5 engine, is in ramp-up and will be released soon. Let's hope so.

On the upside, NetWeaver CE shows the power of SOA with a stable core. The SAP ERP solution will continue to run on NetWeaver 7.0 (based on ABAP plus the J2EE 1.4 stack) minimizing any risk to the world's ERP systems. All the new goodies are in the CE 7.1 system which will be deployed as a new instance which communicates with the ERP core via web services (or RFCs if you're feeling naughty). This means that you can do business process and user interface innovation without scaring the accountants too much, which has got to be a good thing. Still, there's a certain irony to having a developer environment which allows you to develop composite applications more quickly and more easily than ever before, but makes you wait a year before you can deploy them.

Flexing the UI muscle

An up-and-coming technology, which I got to grips with at the Community Day just before TechEd, is Macromedia Flex and its close relative AIR (the Adobe Interactive Runtime). This technology just leaves AJAX and Java applets standing still. I really like Web Dynpro in terms of how it separates model, view and controller, and even more for how it provides an abstraction layer for the UI, but the HTML rendering really sucks, performance-wise. Example: I enter a timesheet in Web Dynpro and click to get a pop-up so I can pick a WBS code. From click to popup being ready is about three seconds, which wouldn't perhaps be so bad if it were all server round trip and database lookups. The thing is, this is three seconds of 100% CPU on the client (a new dual-core laptop) - OK, it's only maxing out one core, and each core is only 1GHz, but the fact remains that on a new HP dual-core laptop just getting a popup from Web Dynpro browser-based app soaks up three whole seconds of CPU time. Every time you click. The UI just shouldn't have that kind of overhead - imagine if this were some Citrix server farm and every user click generates several seconds worth of CPU overhead on your Citrix server - that's just not funny. Sub-1-GHz thin client browsers are even less funny (but let's face it, even the Portal's JavaScript is too much for them).

This is where Flex comes in - you get all that UI goodness of AJAX (in fact forget AJAX, Flex beats even the standard Windows UI hands down) and the performance hit is, well, normal. Quick. Substantially sub-second response times. Any data over the wire gets transmitted in compressed binary format, so large datasets for scrolling tables are no problem (compared with ultra-bloated HTML or even XML formats). That means there's no roundtrip as you page through a table. Searching, sorting and personalization of tables is all done on the client. From a developer's point of view it's all familiar too - the UI markup is in XML, and will be familiar to any web developer (it's not so very different from XHTML), except that you have a proper set of UI components to play with and proper tools to design with. Data can come from local flat files, XML sources, even SOAP calls. That's Flex, and it runs in a browser - pretty much any browser (it just needs Flash 9, which is a browser plugin and therefore much easier for end users to install in all but the most locked-down of corporate desktops).

AIR is basically Flex, but running on the desktop with an embedded SQLite database for local persistence - surely competition for Java in the heterogeneous desktop app space, though Eclipse and Netbeans are pretty well established when it comes to rich-client platforms for the desktop. AIR could do well in the widget space, allowing constantly-present, low desktop real-estate applets to do useful things like present alerts from the ERP core, newly arrived Worklist tasks, and so on.

What starts to make all this Adobe UI technology really exciting is the emergence of Flash players (the underlying UI technology for Flex and AIR) on mobile devices. Imagine AIR mobile, and suddenly we have a unified rich-client platform with local persistence across both desktop and mobile devices. Forget Web Dynpro rendering to lowly WML on a BlackBerry - suddenly the big disconnect between SAP mobile apps, SAP desktop apps and SAP browser-based apps just disappears, and that's very powerful indeed.

So here's my top tip for the 3-layer architecture of the future: stable ERP core with business logic and data persistence in ABAP (Model); service, process and application flow orchestration in Java EE (Controller); and user interface in Flash/Flex/AIR (View).

Duet - is it dead yet? 

So, speaking of next-generation user interfaces, is Duet dying on its feet? Several people I spoke to thought that SAP was really playing down Duet this year compared with last. I think that Duet has come from the hype cycle's peak of inflated expectations last year into the trough of disillusionment this year. Duet is just far too complex to deploy for the benefit it delivers. You need three servers (ERP on NetWeaver, Duet on NetWeaver on Windows and Exchange on Windows), three development environments (ABAP Editor, NetWeaver Developer Studio, Visual Studio) - if you can even develop anything, which is doubtful for a year or two at least - and two teams of consultants (SAP and Microsoft) just to be able to book your holiday in Outlook. Which takes about three clicks out of the box in ESS.

The sessions at Tech Ed this year seem to be pointing at using Duet as more of a workflow notification & action platform (an eventual replacement for Universal Worklist, perhaps?), reinforced by the move of SAP Business Workflow guru Alan Rickayzen to the Duet team. Personally, I don't think Duet is dying, but it's reached a low point from where it will steadily climb the slope of enlightenment to plateau in a productive niche, and the UWL replacement could well be that niche. More scenarios will be delivered, increasing the value. No doubt the installation and deployment will be made easier in time (wizard-based deployment? Virtual machine images?) - and the most serious problem will be addressed, that of SAP technology teams currently requiring an army of Microsoft consultants to explain all this Exchange stuff.

I learnt a lot while writing this book - hopefully you will too. Guided Procedures are way cool...

You can read all about the book at the SAP Press website. 

• Community Day - a hundred or so people sharing what they know, and they know a heck of a lot.
• Community Day evening event - talking and drinking way too much with Bruce Sterling.
• Meeting some old friends: Tim Kyle, Simon Griffiths, Paul Williamson
• Making some new friends: Gregor Wolf, Nigel James, Owen Pettiford
• The SDN Clubhouse, with its excellent coffee
• Presenting my sessions, one of them in a theatre in the main hall: 

Thanks to all who came along and gave such excellent feedback. I plan to do another session or two next year, this time with more in the way of live demos.

I'll be at TechEd 07 in Munich, presenting two of the SDN sessions:

Processing workflow tasks on a Blackberry handheld using Java Web Dynpro

  and 

Zero-administration user management: a perfect configuration?

See you there!

There is a pretty detailed questionnaire to fill in. Not only do you need an outline of the proposed book's content, but you also have to demonstrate that you can write and you need to show that there is a market demand for the book. That wasn't too hard for me - the SAP Press Workflow book has less than one page on the Portal, and none of their Portals books mention UWL at all.

Fast forward a month or so of discussions, and I have now signed a contract to produce the book. I will have completed the manuscript by July, in time for the book to be released for SAP Tech Ed 2007.

This is the outline I am working on: