TechnologyDriven

The series of "Online Meet-Ups" (WebEx-sessions) about ABAP topics showed in it's last edition the new "Enhancement Framework", which is available with WebAS 7.0. It basically makes it possible to enhance SAP coding and extends the possiblities offered by user-exits and BADIs. The framework provides some exciting features, e.g. it gives you the possibilty to implement your own coding at the start and end of every SAP function module, form and method. More information can be found here and here.

Google has finally started it's map-service also in Germany, France, Italy and Spain. You are now able to plan routes and do local searches at maps.google.de. And you also get high-resolution maps, like goyellow delivers them already since 2 months or so.

UPDATE: Google also offers a beta-version of a Google-Maps-Client for mobile phones. The Java-applet can be directly downloaded and installed from www.google.de/gmm. It offers local search and navigation-functions, but doesn't transmit cell informations of the mobile network.

Some guys from SDN developped plugins for Firefox, which make it easier e.g. to search for OSS notes, to search within the online-documentation and to search within SDN. It would be great if SAP would also make Firefox an officially supported browser soon.

There was an interesting discussion between Nicholas Carr and Andrew McAfee about wether the "Web 2.0 toolkit" (wikis, blogs, RSS and the like) will find it's way behind the firewall into corporate IT-systems. One could well argue that busy professionals are overstrained already today handling email, phone-calls and instant-messages. But aren't the new techologies adequate to better master and control the information-flood? Anyway, i find it interesting that a company like SAP invests in a company like Socialtext, and I think Web2.0-features will come into enterprise-IT automatically: because the big software-vendors will incorporate those features into their already existing Web1.0-products (like MS Sharepoint, SAP NetWeaver Portal and so on).

mp3.com-founder Michael Robertson announces his 3rd completely browser-based office-application, ajaxXls. In contrast to ajaxWrite and ajaxSketch (all available at www.ajaxlaunch.com) this is (at the moment) only a viewer for excel-spreadsheets. Although the applications are missing some functionality and aren’t, let’s say “fully matured” yet, this is a very interesting project, which especially shows the power of AJAX-based web-applications. I will stay tuned for the other apps to come, one per week is announced.

Similar projects:
http://www.writely.com
http://www.irows.com

A few days ago some vague rumors occured that Big Blue might want to buy the German business-software vendor SAP. Both companies, as usual, did not comment on these speculations. Probably there's not much behind it.
But in my opinion, this acquisition would make some sense. IBM sees itself as a technology-company, but in times of SOA, integration and standardization, will they be able to grow with this strategy? Other vendors (Oracle, Microsoft, SAP) have middleware-stacks comparable to WebSphere too, but they also deliver the applications based on the infrastructure, especially the market-leader in business-applications SAP. With IBM and SAP forming one company, SAP could concentrate on it's strength, building applications and services to support business processes, and IBM could deliver the technical infrastructure. Integrating NetWeaver and WebSphere should be much easier than integrating/migrating NetWeaver to the Microsoft-world. One year ago there have been negotiations about an acquisition of SAP by Microsoft…