SAP TechEd 2009

I just got back from TechEd, which was held in Phoenix this year. Usually it is in Vegas, which means no exposure to the outside. However, this time I stayed in a hotel near the convention center, permitting a four-block walk every morning. The weather in Phoenix was gorgeous – in the 80s with no humidity and clear skies. The contrast when returning to wet and cold Philadelphia was depressing.

I had some great classes at TechEd this year. Highlights were:

• The CTS+ course taught by Karin Sudrow and Patrick Schmidt. The presentation materials were clear, and the exercises were extremely well thought-out and WORKED. (Those of you who have attended TechEd know that exercises do not always work in a high-volume demo environment.) Rave reviews and kudos to Karin and Patrick on this one.
• Marc Thier provided some interesting information about the new release of Solution Manager. SAP has decided to cancel the Enhancement Package 2 for Solution Manager, and instead re-architect the system based on CRM 7.0. (The current release is based on CRM 5.x.) I tweeted the most significant information coming out of Marc’s presentation on Tuesday, October 13 from @lbsanders.
• Janko Budzisch presented a course on the new technical monitoring and alerting infrastructure to be available with Solution Manager 7.1 at the end of next year. This will allow all monitoring and alerting for ABAP AND Java systems to be available in one place, a very nice development for system administrators.

First (second) Solution Manager Seminar a success

Yesterday we concluded the first updated Solution Manager seminar (see Events link at right) in Frankfurt.  (Actually, we weren’t in Frankfurt, but in a suburb along the Main River called Höchst.)  John Krakowski from SAP, Marcel van den Top (recently independent with the breakup of BearingPoint in Europe), and I had a great time meeting European colleagues – and one Australian.

It seemed like the audience was made up principally of consultants; however, there were some interesting customers as well.  People had a complete range of Solution Manager backgrounds, from one attendee with no experience at all to experienced contractors looking for detailed technical hacks.  I wish we could be all things to all people, but we have to shoot somewhere in the middle with these things.  Sigh….  But we came away feeling great about the content we delivered.  We were able to discuss and demo new Solution Manager content such as the Business Process Change Analyzer, the Custom Development Management Cockpit (Marcel did a great job with that one), and things you can now do with the workcenters.

I still experience some frustration with the inconsistent “look and feel” as you pass from the workcenters to the SAP GUI and back, and I hope that Solution Manager customers participate in their local user group Influence Councils to provide this feedback to SAP, since I know I’m not the only one who feels that way.  (In addition, my laptop has issues with going from workcenters to the SAP GUI – specifically, when I try to access a GUI window from the workcenter, the GUI window flashes, bleeps at me, and immediately closes.  I’m running Windows XP via VMWare Fusion on a MacBook Pro, and I think I have all GUI and browser settings correct, but if anyone has any thoughts, please let me know.)

Next stop:  Philadelphia, my home city, July 15-17.  Please join us!

After the conference was over, Marcel and I shared a cab to the airport.  He was to return to his customer in Paris, and I picked up a rental car at Hertz to drive to Switzerland.  I am spending two days in “retreat” on the Swiss Riviera, in Montreux.  The weather is spectacular – I could not have asked for better.  I arrived at 5:30 Wednesday afternoon.  The view from my hotel room is amazing:

(The hotel room itself leaves a bit to be desired for a “four-star” hotel, but they have free internet and movies – and did I mention the view?)

Montreux is in the northeast corner of Lake Geneva (Lac Léman here in Europe).  The sun is warm, the air is cool, and I am writing this from a bench along a walkway on the lakeshore.  It is a bit hazier today than when I took the picture yesterday, but since I’ve experienced many cold and rainy Junes in Europe, I cannot complain!

Tomorrow I will drive through the Swiss and French Alps to visit old friends in the Ardèche region of France.  I have not seen them in thirteen years, and I am looking forward to spending the next few days meeting children who were born since my last visit, drinking excellent cheap co-op Gamay, eating goat cheese, and probably thinking little about Solution Manager.

Lots of work planned for when I get back to the States, though, so stay tuned for updates.  And as always, please leave feedback under the Comments link.  A plus tard!

Demos and other things

I just got back from a wonderful week-long vacation on the Texas Gulf Coast in Port Aransas. The week before that I spent (1) getting ready for vacation, of course, and (2) recording demos to use in my sessions for the Solution Manager seminar that kicks off June 22 in Frankfurt, Germany.

Some of the demos are pretty straightforward. However, the one on the Test Workbench functionality seemed to take forever! In my recorded demo, I try to show the basic functionality of Test Workbench – the parts that have been around for years – along with the new functionality available in the Solution Manager, enterprise edition, particularly as of SP18 (aka Enhancement Package 1). Highlights:

• Resequencing test cases within a test package
• Assigning individual test cases in a package to individual testers
• Applying dependencies to test case execution
• Workflow available in testing to notify downstream testers that they have test cases to execute

These are fabulous adds, which you realize if you have ever struggled with managing testing in a real-world environment with Solution Manager. They were not completely impossible before, but required many procedures, workarounds, and the flexibility of a Chinese acrobat to pull off adequately.

I still have a couple more demos to record this week before I can call myself ready for the conference. I will consider posting one or two of the demos here, so if you are interested in seeing these, please let me know what areas of Solution Manager are important to you by leaving a comment (link is next to the title of this entry). I recorded all my demos in SAP Tutor (licenses for the player are free with your SAP license), so make sure you install the player before trying to view any demos I post.