SAP Frontend Choices

SAP Personal Shopping Assistant is a new breed of mobile retail application designed for the consumer market. Somewhat like iPhone and Android apps like ShopSavvy or RedLaser, but actually a lot more. While these apps sport features for tracking and crowd sourcing deals, finding out price-matching policies at various stores and finding out what store near you has a product in stock., SAP Personal Shopping Assistant provides deep value to interaction between a particular retailer and the consumer.

SAP had earlier this year introduced “Precision Retailing” powered by Apollo – which is at the crossroads of retail and technology.
Apollo completely changes the shopping experience for consumers, and also how retailers and consumer product (CP) companies can use it to influence customers.
The SAP Consumer Mobile Solution is a new offer tailored to the needs of retail and consumer products companies to create interactivity with consumers at the point of decision.

• To the consumer, Apollo is a personal shopping assistant that delivers rich product information and special offers in real time through mobile phones.
• To the retailer and CP, Apollo is a marketing tool that enables real time interaction with the consumer at the point of decision to inform and influence consumer behavior, drive traffic and increase average spend. Retailers and CPs are able to interact with consumers in the field, one-to-one, with a very high level of personalization.

The solution has two components: a consumer mobile application connected to a retail/CP marketing content management platform (on-demand application with role-based dashboards). It delivers customer context-specific information and special offers to the consumer both inside and outside the store, and enables the creation of a real-time information-based service covering the entire retail/CP value chain. The areas of focus include social communities, personal shopping assistant and closed loop couponing/special offers.

Unlike other companies that merely broadcast generic information to users, the SAP consumer centric solution ties consumer location and interests, to loyalty programs/buyer history and inventory information to create a personalized shopping experience, thereby maximizing value for consumers and merchants – it delivers true real-time, one-to-one content to the consumer to empower consumers at the point of decision.

Project Apollo leverages existing SAP products such as SAP Real Time Offer Management or SAP Business Object enabling SAP’s customers to interact with their consumers, in ‘real real-time’, with the right information depending on the shopping context.

The Global Business Incubator at SAP is a global organization dedicated to developing innovative businesses targeted at meeting the needs of new market opportunities. Each initiative is structured like a start-up company, consisting of a small team of individuals, responsible for all aspects of the firm – from strategic planning to tactical implementation – for all functional areas. An initiative CTO works with the product management and development teams.

It is interesting when SAP keeps touting new features for the Portal, for instance in Netweaever 7.3, when it is now that broad end user community is coming to terms with basic Portal functionality like surfacing roles for ESS, MSS or SRM. Surely, the smooth Single Sign On to various SAP apps helps end user experience as well though.
SAP continues to tout features like Workspaces, Wikis and Forums, Mashups, Web Page Composer from various versions through 7.3 – when what is really getting used is role based navigation, KB based document management, and the fact that you get a consolidated view into the backend systems using SAP Portal.
Most of the enterprises either use default SAP Portal Interface with two rows of navigation on the top and detailed navigation on the left calling in SAP transactions in the middle. Or they take a higher route, engaging some kind of user interface experts to totally revamp the look and feel, basing it on some creative use of pages created out of HTML, and stored in KM.
However SAP keeps convincing developers to use Web Page Composer, for instance to nicely design the pages. Yes, WYSIWYG is a good way to author content on Joomla (an open source Content Management System), but I doubt if anyone is looking to do that for an SAP Portal Home Page, when you have Enterprise IT resources and System Integrators available with either none, or sometimes creative strategies. None of them even looking at something as trivial as Web Page Composer.

Mashups: It will be interesting to note how many companies are using a page with Supplier, Materials and the page going into Material Details and then showing the Supplier location page that also displays a Google Maps – as an example of external service integration – all instances of what SAP calls Mashups. Its time these examples need to come out of SAP’s demo instances and Teched Workshops, into the real world, i.e. if there are any takers.

Sure SAP keeps coming out with improvements for administrators and developers like File Extension and Size filter in KM or Transports of KM, or various APIs for third party integration – all is fine, but any substantial improvement in the end user interface seems still off radar. Yes, AJAX based interface makes things slick, but real improvement is required at how, for example, is the experience of a supplier in the supplier Portal. Is an Office Admin at a Supplier partner able to easily maintain the user profile, and look at Product Categories? This is an age of Facebook and Google where user interfaces don’t let there be any click more than necessary. Unless SAP can bring forth easier and simplified navigation to what an end user has to do, any amount of progress in SAP Portal features will essentially go nowhere.

почистване“Without Mobile, There Ain’t No Real-Time Enterprise”. Enterprise pundits are only beginning to imagine how mobile will change the game not only in business logistics, but how the entire Human Resources user experience can be revolutionized by mobile. With SAP having the business processes, and Sybase an ace in mobile and network messaging, the most immediate synergy and a profound impact at enterprise level is in making. Mobile 1.0 era thus far has only boosted efficiency. 2.0 will now herald the real-time enterprise.

Know that Sybase primarily does not bring apps to the table, nor the backend. Sybase’s well-honed mobile device management software is the actual differentiator. Sybase’s products ensure that enterprises look at all devices as IP addresses only. The software takes away the burden of handling the different mobile device platforms. What the mobile devices will themselves do is a function of integration with backend, and the ingenuity of the developers who will create the user interfaces.

SAP used Sybase’s mobile platform before it bought the company. This May, the combined company plans to release a system development kit (SDK) for third-party developers and customers to build applications on top of the SAP-Sybase platform. It will “work on all kinds of phones”, and you should not need to write different applications because it’s a different phone. It is designed to connect to other applications, not only SAP applications, but also with Oracle and other competitors’ applications.

However, with this major realignment underway in underlying architecture, there are some clouds over what SAP talks in its documentation and training available today.

Backend data can continued to be consumed by the way of exposed Web Services, or even by use of BAPI’s via JCA. Netweaver Mobile Data Orchestration Engine (DOE) can also be used. However, SAP’s old LMS (Light Mobile Server) technology is giving way to the new SAP Gateway as a backend access tool (Architecturally, LMS, Project Gateway, and even SAP Mobile Connector are similar).
If you want to think in which direction is the momentum – SAP’s NetWeaver Mobile team has moved into the Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) team. DOE will be integrated into SUP.

Now, there are two categories of mobile app in the SAP vision:
1. Instant Value
2. Mission Critical

SAP had already designed some sample instant value apps using LMS. However they have recently been rewritten using Gateway and are in beta for some time now:
- Employee Lookup
- Travel Expense Capture
- ERP Sales Lookup
- Mobile StreamWork

Now Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) is a layer between data and its consumption. Some instant Value mobile applications may not need a lot of advanced services offered by Sybase Unwired Platform and they can be written without using Sybase Unwired Platform. However, there will be other Instant Value Mobile Apps that can be written on SUP and SUP will in turn consume SAP data in four different ways, including preferably using Project Gateway. The mission critical apps will likely use more of SUP.
Note that Sybase Unwired Platform can be used to connect to non-SAP data and applications as well. It will act as a synchronization middleware, amongst other things and with functionality like providing security and management (Afaria).

Ultimately, Project Gateway has a very important role to play in making it extremely simple to consume SAP data through any popular environment or device. It is already the key enabling technology for the latest behind SharePoint and Duet Enterprise for Office users to connect to SAP applications (and apparently also for similar access through IBM’s Lotus technology). And Project Gateway technology is forming the underpinning for enabling access to SAP applications through Mobile devices as well. SAP’s plan is to integrate Project Gateway and Sybase Unwired Platform as well as part of their Mobile SDK project (as announced here: http://www.sap.com/usa/about/newsroom/press.epx?pressid=14101).

Sybase mobile SDK includes SUP and the Project Gateway which connects mobile apps to SAP data and processes. It will include server and client APIs, API libraries and development tools build around Eclipse. The SDK will also enable GUI design via HTML5, and offer pre-built HTML5 mobile app templates.

If you are a developer or a system integration organization, get ready for multiple opportunities
(1) Building add-ons to the mobile SDK
(2) Selling analytics apps on SAP’s EcoHub
(3) Build EPM (enterprise performance management) apps linked to SAP
(4) customizing mobile apps – 100% of enterprise customers add customizations to their mobile apps today

Opportunities will be plentiful; what is required is to position ahead of time, both for individuals, and organizations.вик услугиКартиниИдея за подаръкикониikoniикониПравославни иконииконописikoni

холови гарнитуридомейнSAP has released a new collaboration portal that the vendor says will help end users make faster and better business decisions, the latest in a wave of products bringing collaboration to business intelligence (BI).

SAP StreamWork, previously known as 12Sprints while in beta testing, allows users to access and share documents, including Excel spreadsheets, BI reports and data visualizations, all from one environment.

Users can create action plans around specific tasks, invite colleagues to participate, and track their progress against business goals.

As for StreamWork, which was released at the end of March, SAP is working on integrating it with its business software – specifically CRM – but wasn’t ready to specify when that would be ready. The focus now is on bringing in more tools and templates from partners, facilitated through StreamWork’s open APIs.

StreamWork is a collaboration portal that allows users to work together on one screen — creating action plans around specific tasks, inviting colleagues to participate in work, and tracking progress against business goals. There’s a free version and an enhanced version that costs $108 per year on average, according to SAP. The professional edition – which has higher limits for recording and storing information — costs $9 per user, according to Gartner.

But StreamWork as a collaborative decision-making platform isn’t quite there yet, according to analysts.

It has some good capabilities – including tracking activities and recording collaborations, as well as integration with email, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Adobe, WebEx, Evernote and Box.net. But it has limited capabilities for defining decision attributes such as success criteria, priority and due dates as metadata. It doesn’t show participants where they are in the decision process. It doesn’t suggest the right participants based on relevant skills or past successes with similar decisions. Also, according to a Gartner report, it doesn’t allow participants to mine previous decisions for best practices, techniques and templates.

According to an Article in Forbes magazine (by Dan Woods – where he compared various collaborative software offerings by other companies) SAP StreamWork has taken steps in the direction of offering structure to one form of collaboration: making decisions. StreamWork proposes a model for making a decision, tracking the arguments for and against, capturing the supporting evidence and the key objections. The goal of the product is to not only accelerate collaboration during the decision-making process, but also to provide a historical record. As the results of decisions come in, it is possible to see what was right and what was wrong about how the decision was made.

Some reviews of StreamWork have focused on the lack of one feature or another without recognizing the potential that such a decision-making system could have on management. For example, it is not at all unusual in business for a team to be tasked with making a decision, prepare a methodical case and then have the HIPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) carry the day without much regard for the analysis. If an archive of the decision is available at the time of the decision, and more importantly, known to be available later, it is much less likely that the analysis will be ignored.

In a sense, StreamWork applies the Lean Manufacturing concept of standardizing work to the process of decision making, which makes a variety of continuous improvement processes possible. First of all, you can see what evidence turned out to be most predictive. I was surprised when the StreamWork product managers told me that they did not consider direct connectivity to SAP ERP data such as purchase orders or materials masters or budgets to be of primary importance. They said business intelligence analyses were the key evidence most of the time to support decisions.

Another nice feature according to Dan: Because you can see who said what about the decision, it is possible to see who has the best intuition for predicting the behavior of consumers, markets, competitors, regulators or anything else. Also, in most companies decisions take far too long. By standardizing the process, people can stop reinventing the wheel again and again and start focusing on the data needed to justify a decision.

And according to an article on zdnet.com, with demise of Google Wave, could SAP’s Streamwork be next for the chop?
SAP Mentors use it and as part of that see plenty of problems with that technology, not least the persistent email notifications when something changes. It’s downright annoying. But for some the big issue is that they don’t get it.

During SAPPHIRE 2010 a senior evangelist for Streamwork was asked what it’s about. She replied that Streamwork is a social application that helps people make collaborative decisions. But still one wonders where is the process element that ties a user back to economic activities? Perhaps not easy to find.

As a user pointed out, people who live in the enterprise world have a hard enough time juggling different applications. Why would they step into something like Streamwork and then back out to the app they use on a day to day basis? It doesn’t make sense.

Hopefully SAP will keep Streamwork alive and find a way to integrate it to apps in a contextual manner. If its own mentors using it are at pains using it, how can SAP sell it as an innovation?

Enterprise 2.0 is the strategic integration of Web 2.0 technologies into an enterprise’s intranet, extranet and business processes. Enterprise 2.0 implementations generally use a combination of social software and collaborative technologies like blogs, RSS, social bookmarking, social networking and wikis. Most enterprise 2.0 technologies, whether homegrown, free or purchased, emphasize employee, partner and consumer collaboration. Such technologies may be in-house or Web-based. Companies using YouTube for vlogging or a private Facebook group as a modified intranet, for instance, are implementing a form of Enterprise 2.0.икони на светциСувенири

SAP’s $5.8 Billion purchase of Sybase suddenly brings to focus Sybase as a visionary enterprise mobile apps company, more than just what it is usually known for – a database vendor.
Looking at Sybase from within the SAP world, it looked like a database company that of course no SAP customer uses, and with a couple of mobile apps for SAP. Considering that there are now tens and tens of thousands of mobile apps now being produced by perhaps thousands of small and big companies and even individuals, Sybase’s mobile apps appeared as handiwork of a small group of developers within Sybase. The demo of their app “Mobilizing SAP CRM and Workflow on iPhone” in Teched in Phoenix seemed just like that – just an entry in the Demo Jam (most of the entries are by individual developers). The Jam session highlighted a day in the life of a sales rep using the Sybase Mobile CRM and Workflow for SAP functionality on an iPhone.
Today Sybase only advertises a couple of Mobile scenarios for SAP – Sybase Mobile Sales for SAP® CRM and Sybase Mobile Workflow for SAP® Business Suite.

And the platforms supported are iPhone, Windows Mobile, and to some extend Nokia Symbian and Blackberry. Support for Android, and even Palm and the new Windows 7 could become critical in coming months.

There is no doubt that as an SAP’s independent business unit, Sybase would now double and quadruple development efforts more SAP scenarios. Which SAP process could become early candidates, it would be interesting to see. Some of the Employee Self Service and Manager Self Service apps could be early candidates, in addition to more robust support for Inbox, Travel and Expense, etc.

It would also be interesting to see how Sybase’s embedded database and Mobile Data Management could be put to even better use, like synching up with some SAP data for the user, and helping even in offline scenarios: if people could do their expense reporting on the phone while sitting in an airplane, they would love it.

Sybase is such an engine with the telecom companies with SMS and MMS, etc. – the old SMS could find an easy application as a notification medium for some workflows.

Key functionality includes Account and Contact Management, Lead and Opportunity Management, Activity Management, Sales Documents and Analytics and Customization and Enhancement Capabilities.

Using the Sybase Mobile Workflow for SAP® Business Suite solution, mobile workers can now receive and manage SAP Universal Worklist notifications and alerts on their mobile device of choice. Pre-defined processes, such as requests and approvals for travel or leave can quickly be completed on the go. Additionally, clock-in/clock-out activities can easily be recorded directly in to the SAP Business Suite system, all from a mobile device. The solution currently supports iPhone, Windows Mobile and Nokia Series 60 smartphones, with support planned for additional devices, such as RIM BlackBerry smartphones.
Universal Worklist Workflows, Alerts & Notifications
Leave and Travel Requests
Clock-in/Clock-out Capabilities

There is also an integration API available: https://streamwork.com/api/Table_of_Contents.html

Or follow the page on Facebook here.

>матрациng the Teched in Las Vegas last week, BI201 – SAP NetWeaverBusiness Intelligence Roadmap touted new Java-based Front-end and BI Integrated Planning as having high adoption and perceived as quantum leap in user experience.
And on Sunday, SAP’s planned acquisition of Business Objects creates interesting situation for end user (front end) access to SAP Business Intelligence (BI, or BW) data (good SAP has started inserting a disclaimer on every Roadmap document).
While the ‘new’ technology roadmap is far from clear, there is going to be significant overlap of end user tools amongst SAP BI, Business Objects and even an earlier acquisition from this year: OutlookSoft. Specifically, the performance management tools of OutlookSoft buyout (in turn acquired from Cartesis) overlap with Business Object’s own performance management offerings to a good degree.
This is just a clear admission on SAP’s part that its own BI end-user tools were not real. There indeed have been recent major reverses for SAP when big companies went through an evaluation of BI frontend tools, and many came up recommending Business Objects for giving end users’ valuable access to enterprise data in SAP BI cubes. This will clearly be a win situation for many clients, and market intelligence of this nature could have be a factor in influencing SAP’s move in acquiring Business Objects.
For foreseeable future, Business Objects’ products are expected to remain “agnostic” – able to work just as well with databases and applications from competitors as with SAP systems. In its understanding of the world, SAP may be able to teach a lesson or two in process ‘centricity’, as compared to data-centric view most BI Vendors traditionally hold. What will be critical in coming months would be how much a focus does Business Object entity loose on innovaton and product improvement as it tries to integrate with the acquisition. And in longer term, as it tries to integrate its products with SAP’s product line.
SAP’s Web Services enabled Netweaver platform, standardized on top of J2EE should make integration easier. Business Objects end user queries run on Java, .Net and COM technologies. One quick next step could be to standardize BusinessObjects Enterprise, Application Foundation, BusinessObjects Enterprise XI and specifically BusinessObjects Analytics on SAP’s own Java application server. Then may follow other products like SAP Identity Management as the LDAP repository.

There is shuffle in one more area of SAP. The SEM (Strategic Enterprise Management) module build on top of BW is loosing out of favor. For all practical purposes, the future direction in Performance Management and planning seems to be the new avatar of SAP’s acquisition Outlooksoft. Outlooksoft was a medium size player in this area. But SAP has known to have problems with SEM. The product and its platform have been rigid. The models created by planners have been very difficult to be integrated into the SEM module, and have very often required intervention of developers to enhance the code. On top of it, SEM had limited web based tools, and the platform basically posed challenges on the frontend side. Give and take, SAP’s own offering has been a laggard and it was a matter of time before the realization to plug the whole dawned.
Outlooksoft had lowered the cost of entry to integrated business performance management by creating applications based around Microsoft’s SQL Server database and Excel. The latest Outlooksoft 5 release has been redesigned with a service-oriented architecture that makes it easier to deploy the product via the web and with different databases – which closely mirror’s SAP’s product philosophy. This also simplifies integration with SAP’s own NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI) infrastructure.

Industry analyst Gartner reported that SAP would continue to develop its Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM) and Business Warehouse products and seek to roll out OutlookSoft as a companion application to act as the “face” of the underlying SAP systems.

SAP said it planned to sell the integrated OutlookSoft-SAP products by the end of this year. SAP acquired Russian strategy management specialist Pilot Software, while it also sells the Profit Analyzer program developed by Acorn Systems.
An example scenario for end user interaction is – say a car manufacturer using Outlooksoft for budgeting would be guided through changes in product plans by a set of Excel-driven wizards, email alerts and narrative guides in Word and PowerPoint format. There is some level of integration with the Microsoft Office 2007 suite allowing Word, Excel and PowerPoint users to “consume” business performance information over the web

In SAP’s Business Planning and Consolidation’s ((formerly Outlooksoft)current 5.1 release, there is almost no change from Outlooksoft – its the old product with an SAP logo. Future releases will be based on the NW OLAP engine (ROLAP) engine, leveraging the capabilities included in NW around access performance. Future release will also be available on the Microsoft stack

The next release of BPC will not be integrating to BI-IP. That is, the next release of BPC will read/write to NW BI InfoCubes built specifically to support BPC. Front-end convergence (i.e. being able to use the OSFT front-end on say a BI-IP cube) is planned for the subsequent release.

The OutlookSoft solution does require a specific data model (i.e. certain mandatory dimensions which have certain mandatory properties, different way of handling non-cumulative figures, currency conversions, etc). So, unfortunately, it’s not “plug and play” as far as front-ends and functions, etc go.
You will still create your own Dimensions and assign them to cubes. There will also be additional meta data tables that the OutlookSoft application and client uses, which are also very important. You cannot just pick a cube and make the OutlookSoft solution run on top of it (at least not for the release next year).

More information on this topic: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/7004

NetWeaver Business Client (NWBC) is a rich client that can access all of SAP’s business applications. It runs not only new Web Dynpro or Visual Composer applications but also classical Dynpros (standard SAPGUI screens), BSP pages, analytic dashboards, iViews, portal pages, etc.

Too much detail on this is not forthcoming – other than an interview explaining the approach by Vishal Sikka, CTO of SAP and this whitepaper USING THE SAP NETWEAVER ENTERPRISE PORTAL AND NETWEAVER BUSINESS CLIENT. A few months back, the time line on this was another 18 months or so. SAP may be giving access to specific clients/partners for beta testing.
Some documentation has started referencing NWBC so probably its on the horizon.
NWBC will essentially enable users to switch between a Web-style UI and a desktop-style UI.

An important missing piece of the Netweaver puzzle has been an Identity Management piece. Identity Management in old R/3 world was easy but very limited and siloed - create users and their attributes in SAP directly (or via an HR process) for most part, and let them diffuse to other SAP systems in the landscape and set a degree of automation in managing the security attributes via CUA. But enterprise have challenges with users having a number of IDs and passwords that they have to remember and the whole management around these IDs. For this and in an attempt to make SAP tie in better with other pieces of enterprise IT systems, SAP’s new java line products started to connect to an LDAP as the main user store. And techniques connecting the ABAP system to the LDAP also started showing up. However, as the importance of LDAP increased, more conspicuous its absense from SAP’s own product suite became. Virsa acquisition added the slick GRC tools, but with MaXware acquisition, the shape seems to be rounding off. SAP just made available “SAP NetWeaver Identity Management 7.0″.

Now SAP has its own product that can connect to a heterogeneous IT landscape effectively – it has a self service interface and together with better integration with GRC Access Control tools should bring down the cost of ownership and compliance audit. The focus can be on integrated Business Processes which mostly already fed by the SAP applications. There is also the promise of seamless SOA support and above all, MaXware has already been a respected name in Identity Management space and SAP’s re-branding will only help further.

This is going to create a positive pressure from SAP side on an IT Organization. Hitherto, for example SAP Portal user and role assignments could connect to an iPlanet or Active Directory LDAP which is not typically part of SAP footprint. While the MaxWare connectivity would continue to be open and SPML based (letting competitors compete at a level playfield(?)), now there is a powerful product in SAP’s own inventory that fits the bill and in due course would integrate better and easier. Expect new implementations or organizations will look very seriously at SAP Netweaver Identity Management (in addition to existing MaXware clients).

More details on SAP User Access solutions are here.икони