TechEd Las Vegas is over – TechEd Munich is just ahead October 9, 2007
Posted by technologydriven in SAP.Tags: netweaver, SAP, Software-Architecture, teched
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SAP TechEd in Las Vegas is over. Not surprisingly in today’s Web 2.0 world, there has been a lot of blogging, podcasting and videos around the event, and Craig Cmehil has summarized those a little bit. I’d also like to resume some of the announcements and news from TechEd I find the most interesting here.
Tim O’Reilly did a guest keynote about the business models of Web 2.0-companies, and in his own blog he wrote about the Web 2.0 activities going on at SAP, like for example activities in Second Life, and their own internal social network called “harmony” (never heard of that before).
The executive keynotes of Peter Zencke and Vishal Sikka were mainly about Enterprise SOA, delivering new functionality for the business suite via enhancement packages and the switch framework, and new features of NetWeaver 7.1 (“Enterprise Services Repository”, “Process Integration” as advancement of Exchange Infrastructure and the “Composition Environment”). To make a long story short, it’s all about code-free modeling of processes, applications and user-interfaces based on services in a central repository today. You can read more about it on ZDNet and in Jeff Nolan’s post.
There also was an announcement of the SDN subscription program, which allows developers to get the SAP NetWeaver tools and platforms for an annual fee, similar to offers from other software vendors (e.g. MSDN). This is meant to enlarge the SAP developer community. Michael Koch wrote more about it.
So, this was TechEd in Las Vegas, but TechEd Munich is just around the corner. And:
Only on thursday, though, expensive enough… 
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More Technical Details about Business ByDesign October 3, 2007
Posted by technologydriven in SAP.Tags: business bydesign, SAP, teched
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The TechEd 07 in Las Vegas has started, and Peter Zencke unveiled some more technical details about SAP Business ByDesign (BBD) in his keynote and an interview with Dan Farber.
Some key points:
- Everything is built on services (UI is built on services also, there no integration of components on the database-level like in R/3 but on the service-level)
- SAP will not allow to run custom code in the hosted environment, but customers can run code on their own site, e.g. compose new applications based on the hosted services
- AJAX-functionality is not included in the UI for BBD at the moment, but it will come
- The basic foundation for BBD is ABAP (Objects), having “one implementation for each function”. The layers above are done with Java, based on (and partially automatically generated from) models.
- “Customizing” is done with a configurator, with a “question and answer and constraint engine”, not on the level of process models
- Linux is used as operating system for the hosted environment, and SAP’s own MaxDB as database
