SAP Frontend Choices

Sybase Mobile Apps for SAP – whats next?

admin — Thu, 13 May 2010 06:20:17 +0000

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.

Sybase has also developed strategic alliances with leading mobility solutions providers, including Apple, Samsung, Verizon and RIM and leading service providers including Verizon, Orange, and MobiDM – all this could give SAP a decisive edge in getting enterprise data to millions of enterprise users on the move.

Sybase Mobile Sales for SAP® CRM provides anywhere, anytime access to SAP® Customer Relationship Management. It is supported on iPhone and Windows Mobile smartphones, with support planned for additional devices, such as RIM. Remote access to CRM data from mobile device and is fully certified and supported by both SAP and Sybase, and leverages the proven mobile infrastructure strengths of Sybase Unwired Platform and SAP NetWeaver®. The solution provides full access to SAP CRM accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, activities and analytics all from a mobile device.

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

Sybase mobile sales for SAP

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

Sybase Mobile Workflow for SAP® Business Suite

SAP StreamWork for collaboration

admin — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 14:52:39 +0000

SAP StreamWork is a web-based collaboration product.

StreamWork aims to help groups of employees make better collaborative decisions. Previously known as 12sprints, SAP StreamWork has come out of beta release and is now generally available.

Pricing starts at $9 a month for each user. There is also a free edition with limited storage and features.

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

Or follow the page on Facebook here.

BI user experience with SAP’s own Business Objects

admin — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 06:16:56 +0000

>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.

SAP SEM gives way to OutlookSoft based BPC

admin — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 05:45:33 +0000

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

Whitepaper – Netweaver Business Client and SAP Netweaver Portal

admin — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 17:36:17 +0000

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.

MaXware behind new SAP Netweaver Identity Management

admin — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 21:25:39 +0000

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.

And now SAP NetWeaver 7.0!

admin — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 08:22:58 +0000

SAP continues with its name and package nomenclature game, and confusing the heck out of its customers and users. So the latest (since Sapphire) is that mySAP ERP 2005 is now called SAP ERP 6.0 and, in particular, that SAP NetWeaver 2004s has been renamed SAP NetWeaver 7.0.
So basically remember that it’s the same NetWeaver release behind all of these names: SAP NetWeaver 2004s, SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (2004s), as well as the new official name SAP NetWeaver 7.0.

So its no co-incidence that one of my favorite interview questions is – what is the difference between R/3 4.6C, R/3 Enterprise, mySAP ERP 2005, SAP NetWeaver 2004s, ECC 6.0, and so on. And eight out of ten experienced SAP consultants find themselves struggling. Talk about clients….

Going BI 7 – Cannot escape a Federated Netweaver portal landscape

admin — Sun, 13 May 2007 06:25:39 +0000

With new Business Intelligence version 7, SAP has moved it BEx Web Analyzer to a pure Java framework. This necessitates that there be usage type BI Java, the prerequisite of which is usage type EP. Which means every BI 7 upgrade or installation needs a Netweaver Portal together with KM and Collaboration installed. This has been an interesting way how the landscape has been laid out.
Now it does not really mean that BI Java has to be set up on your primary portal instance. Instead what it means for all practical purposes is that it will almost necessitate setting a separate portal instance. While users will not necessarily know (and should not know) that there is another portal, this additional portal will be real for portal administrators and BI team to manage. The framework for this new portal can (and should) be kept dormant (hidden). The real use of this portal instance should be limited to the use of its underlying J2EE engine to run the BI Query runtime and BEx web analyzer. And probably to use the KM that comes with it for information broadcasting functionality.
In BI 7, The AS ABAP usage type continues to have the BW 3.5 Web Runtime together with IGS for graphics, and is topped off with BI Content Add-on. Which is inclusive of all that is required for web based BEx reporting as people have seen coming out of BW 3.5. Whats new is really the BI Java Usage type that brings all the new added functionality (the IT Scenarios like Enterprise Reporting, Query, and
Analysis) to the fore for the users. For example Analysis Item, Formatted Reporting, Web Printing, PDF Export, etc. Its also required for rendering Webdynpro for Java apps for BI Integrated Planning.
So while technically one could do a “technical” upgrade to BI 7 without the Java engine, any new functionality will need Java (and hance the dormant EP instance).
How is the BI Portal different from the user facing primary portal instance?
Even if your company did not foresee a need for a federated portal, looks like there is no escape from it since in this new architecture, the BI Portal becomes a producer portal and the main portal the consumer portal. Content from the BI producer portal surfaces inside the consumer portal as url iViews, remote role assignment is possible, etc.

Duet update from Sapphire & Duet Appliance – HP comes into play

admin — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 06:25:26 +0000

At Sapphire SAP & Microsoft announced the extended roadmap for Duet 2.0 and Duet 3.0.

Microsoft and SAP will extend their Duet partnership with two more major versions aligned with the next generation of Microsoft’s Office and SAP’s Business Suite. New scenarios include sales and supply chain management beyond ESS/MSS. There also seems to be a momentum building towards extended use of Sharepoint Server for unstructured data and collaboration – though Netweaver Portal will continue to be critical to the architecture. There are also enhanced Duet tools and infrastructure interwoven with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.

Duet 2.0, is planned for the end of 2008 and Duet 3.0 is planned to be released soon after the next generation of SAP® Business Suite applications and Microsoft Office software, including Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server.

http://www.sap.com/company/press/press.epx?pressid=7607.

Check www.duet.com and http://www.sapmendocino.com

In addition, together with HP, SAP and Microsoft also announced Duet Appliance – a pre-installed and configured Duet solution based on HP servers. You can see http://www.sap.com/company/press/press.epx?pressid=7577 for more information.

SAP xApps in comfortable lead over Oracle’s Project ‘X’

admin — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 06:23:49 +0000

SAP started talking about composite applications, or xApps, around 2003 with its Enterprise Services Architecture Strategy. All SAP xApps composite applications combine Web services and data from multiple systems. The company has developed a composite application framework that supports model-driven application composition, a user interface layer and a collaboration framework to relate any service or object from SAP’s Netweaver to any other business object. There are xApps for Sales and Operations Planning, Lean Planning and Operations, etc. – and some of the new ones around Governance, Risk and Compliance and Mobile Business.
Now Oracle has jumped into the fray – probably it had to with its multiple app portfolio. Big question is whether Project ‘X’s approach will overshadow and perhaps be injurious to Oracle’s Fusion vision. If Oracle is smart, Project X could generate an annuity business. However with this, a JD Edwards customer could use this integration framework to access G-Log’s logistics hub, Demantra’s demand planning capabilities or Siebel’s CRM functionality without having to license the suites themselves or wait for Fusion Applications.