Unified SAP Developer License

This week SAP announced unified SAP Developer License. It is much expected initiative from many developers. This is license which will be used for most of ABAP and Java downloads available on SCN’s Download Center and SAP cloud offerings for developers. I guess that none of us lazy ABAP developer will ever read it fully. Bu what is most important to is and I quote from Juergen Schmerder blog:

Yes, that does mean you are free to share your ABAP projects on Github!) and it is free of charge and not limited in time.

So thank you SAP to make us – ABAP developers happy!

You can find full license terms here.

Blogs reposting 2

Again just reporting my SCN's blog post today:

Small, little and nice improvements in BW workbench: Popup: Find in Attributes

Blogs reposting 1

Today just reporting few blogs that I posted at SDN recently. Just in order to have a link to them from here I'm doing this repost. So here they are:

What year 2011 gave to SDN?
SAP HANA - composite post
Tuning of BWA – FEMS compression
Things that drive me crazy on SDN

Deploying RIG or SDN how to’s document to production use

There are couples of great applications available on SDN provided by SAP’s RIG organization. RIG is abbreviation of SAP NetWeaver Regional Implementation Group (RIG). It is a part of the SAP Development organization. The purpose of RIG is to help SAP customers and partners with implementation of SAP solutions. Usually they are dealing with SAP NetWeaver components as BW/BO/ABAP/NetWeaver/WAS/basis/PI.

RIG’s guys used to contribute to SDN as well by providing step-by-step guides deploying some additional functionality. Just to name some of those how 2 documents; there is a “Load a File into SAP NetWeaver BI Integrated Planning” provided by Marc Bernard. I experienced that this nice piece of webdynpro for ABAP code and BW-IP objects is heavily used within customers. Basically what it does is to enable your business users to easily load e.g. planning data from flat files into your planning application in SAP BW.

However have you ever wondered either application like this is supported by SAP? To tell you the truth they are not. I just came across interesting SAP Note (1588518 - How-to Load a File into BW-Integrated Planning) which is particularly discussing this data uploading application. Here’s quote from the note:

Please note that there is no standard support for how-to papers (see small-print of all SAP NetWeaver How-to Guides). For this specific guide, please ask the customer to post further questions to the corresponding SDN forum or blog… For high priority customers, you may contact the author of the how-to guide (Marc Bernard).

So that’s it. Be careful while asking SAP to help you with that.

PS: I would like to thank to Mark within this post as well for great solution delivered.

What year 2010 gave to SDN?

I started last year (2009) with brief summarization of initiatives that were newly introduced on SDN. This time let me continue and take a look on new stuff that year 2010 brought on the SDN field. Following here few new SDN initiatives:

1. Idea Place: ideas.sap.com is an place where SCN community members can put ideas in any area of an relation to SAP products, services etc.
2. SAP Community Network Shop, SAP Premium Educational Products and Resources  sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/shop – meanwhile those “shop” terms was rebranded under new name SAP Community Network eLearning - Online SAP Training.
3. SDN Code Exchange Platform: sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/code-exchange allows community members to share and collaboratively develop prototypes, showcases, add-ons or event start-up ideas they would like to developed or already started developing in form of projects. Provides platform for support of code and release management, online discussions and blogs, documentation and issue tracking.
4. SAP Community Netweaver Developer Edition / License – Was introduced in Jan 2010 as addition to miniSAP versions of SAP software. See here licenses comparison to find version that suits you and download it from here. Regarding previous offerings like NetWeaver Development Pack see this FAQ. For license maintenance go here.
5. In-Memory section sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/in-memory. Soon followed by introduction of "four-element (3 focus areas)" strategy at TechEd 2010 in Berlin. Here’s SAP offers a mixture of on-premise, on-demand and on-device applications, and better application orchestration capabilities.

Regarding challenges I see in upcoming year 2011; the biggest one from my point of view would be an integration of all SCN functionalities closer together. Some parts of SCN pieces are still isolated island where user needs to login separately (idea Place) or running on different platforms (blogs, wiki, etc.). From this perspective I see a room for improvement and it is a great to see that something is going on e.g. here.

SDN launch page

This post is dedicated to SDN. It is suppose to be a SDN launch page containing all important links related to SAP BW/BO/ABAP/NetWeaver/WAS/basis topics.

Soon there will be a lot of links. I just start with BW and its forums.

Forums:

• All BW related
• BI General
• Business Content and Extractors
• Data Warehousing
• Business Planning
• Business Planning and Consolidations, version for SAP NetWeaver
• Business Planning and Consolidations, version for the Microsoft Platform
• Business Objects – all
• Crystal Reports, Xcelsius and Interactive Analysis
• Business Objects SDK Application Development
• SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator
• SAP NetWeaver
• Trials, Previews & Other Downloads
• SAP Application Server
• SAP ERP 6.0 Upgrade
• SAP Enhancement Packages
• Software Logistics
• Test Data Migration Server (TDMS)
• ABAP Development
• Business Objects General
• Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Scripting Languages
• SAP Education
• SAP Certified Professionals
• SAP NetWeaver Partner Initiative Consultants

Articles:

• BW articles
• BO articles
• Data warehousing articles
• RIG How to Guides
• Portal and collaboration articles
• ABAP articles
• Webdynpro articles
• SOA articles
• Software logistics articles
• Performance articles

Downloads:

• miniSAP (Software downloads)
• SAP NW main releases
• SAP NetWeaver 7.01 SR1 SP3 ABAP Trial Version
• SAP NetWeaver 7.01 - ABAP Trial Version
• SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (2004s) - Trial Version on Linux
• SAP NetWeaver 2004 - Trial Version on Linux
• SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment
• EHP1 for SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment 7.1 - Preview Version
• SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment 7.1 SR5 - Trial Version
• SAP NetWeaver Mobile 7.1 SP3 - Trial Version
• Application Server Tools
• Business Intelligence Tools
• Mobile Tools
• SAP NetWeaver Mobile 7.1 SP3 - Trial Version
• Portal Tools
• More Developer Tools

BI:

• SAP BusinessObjects BI
• SDK Application Development
• Crystal and Xcelsius Support
• BI Platform Administration
• BusinessObjects BI for SAP - BusinessObjects BI integration content for SAP
• SAP Business Explorer (BEx)
• Enterprise Information Management
• Enterprise Data Warehouse
• Data Warehousing
• BWA – BW Accelerator
• SAP NW Business Content (BCT)
• BW-IP
• Crystal Reports
• Sample reports

Blogs:

• By category
• Business Intelligence (BI)
• SAP NetWeaver Platform
• ABAP
• Web Dynpro
• Service-Oriented Architecture

Other Areas:

• Web Dynpro ABAP
• Web Dynpro JAVA

 

What year 2009 gave to SDN?

There were a lot of new things came during year. Really year 2009 was so fruitful to SDN. Kindly notice in this post that I do not recognize any more between differed types of community networks. I use term SDN for all of them: SAP Community Network (SCN), Software Developer Network (SDN), Business Process Expert (BPX), BusinessObjects Community Network (BOC), etc. Let me mention at least few new initiatives that enriched SDN during last year:

1.    SAP Collaboration Workspace (CW) – is tool to enable collaboration between SAP and its customers and partners. CW is enterprise social-networking site, powered by Jive Software's Clearspace and its successor Social Business Software 3.0 (SBS). CW initiative started backing to 2008 as wiki functionality was added to SDN. It evolved into orchestrated ecosystem with goal into fast, easy, global, secure, enterprise IP protected collaboration solution. In June 2009, SAP and Jive (at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston) announced an agreement that will see SAP's BusinessObjects BI OnDemand software integrated with Jive's community and collaboration platform. So we can expect much more out of these in future.

Side note: Jive’s Clearspace functionalities of forums and enterprise wiki are used in SAP NetWeaver Portal (based on NetWeaver 2004 SPS23). Forum is called SAP Forums (Primary Components: BC-COM-FOR, XX-PART-JIV-FOR, XX-PART-JIV-WIKI on OSS).      

2.    Integration of BO into SDN – A new community has born – dedicated to BusinessObjects BI products: SAP BusinessObjects Community (BOC). Same as BO support portals was absorbed by OSS; BO communities needed to be under one roof. You can find here plenty of information related to broad portfolio of BO products.

3.    Careers Center – Based on JobTarget platform it does help on one hand employers to identify SAP talents worldwide and on other hand job seekers to show their skills in environment of the SDN.

4.    SAP Docupedia - Collaboration Workspace from SAP, documentation wiki for additional content and community contributions. It is kind of user written documentation of SAP products. You can see how better users are when writing the documentation in parallel to official one at hep.sap.com.

5.    InnoCentive – represents SAP commitment to technology innovation and sustainability. It is a part of InnoCentive which is a global, online marketplace where organizations in need of innovation–companies, academic institutions, public sector, and non-profit organizations–can utilize a global network of over 160,000 of the world’s brightest problem solvers.

6.    University alliances (UAC) – provides connections between university leaders and students, SAP customers and partners, and SAP internal experts. Several universities across the world and involved in here.

7.    SAP EcoHub – includes SAP service provider’s offerings to customers in easy way to discover, evaluate, and buy partner solutions and services from SAP’s community-powered online solution marketplace.

8.    Community Code Gallery – It is a part of SDN wiki which allows sharing of code, snippets, tutorials, etc.

9.    Best Build Application – Official SAP reference of building apps to be compliant SAP Business Suite software. It does contain all the rules, practices etc to meet solutions to architectural approaches, standards, and industry best practices similar to the ones used by SAP. See overview in presentation here. See the guide itself here.

10. Get Active. Stay Active. Build Your Reputation. – SDN is highlighting and showcasing active contributors no matter how that doing it. Even it is answering on forums, blogging, mentoring, documenting, wiki-ing, article contributing and so on. For starting with SDN contributing see FAQs.

11. SAP Mentor Program – If you are so good in particular SAP area; means you are so active at all SDN stages you can become nominated and might be later really become an SAP Mentor. See details of program here, FAQs here.

12. PlaNet Finance Program – Another incentive program for active contributing to SDN. For overview of this program see here. See active top contributors here, top companies here. Here you can even dig into contributors list based on several filter criteria.

13. SDN Events – Place where you can find all SDN related events both: regular and virtual plus recorded ones.

14. BI Best Practices – Offers practices helping companies to build up BI strategies. See details here.

For sure there are much more other initiatives that I’m not aware of. This is just small demonstration how great SDN is.

SAP Discovery Server

Here it is. Another initiative; coming from SDN to encourage developers to be interesting in SAP software. After SDN’s Mentorship program, SDN NetWeaver Subscriptions program another one is available. It is called SAP Discovery Server      and its purpose is similar to Subscription just there is a hosting of application included so you don’t need to install it by yourself. Cost of program is about 10k euros. You can use of course this program for non-production environment only as this is license agreement. It can be used for evaluation, test, demonstration, proof of concept, and other similar purposes only. It is necessary to consult this program with your SAP account executive or local SAP subsidiary to fit it to your specifics needs.

For list of Software Components/Development Tools/Integration Readiness/ and Content see on SDN here. Quite large scale of SAP software is provided. Starting with SAP ERP 6.0 through NetWeaver 7.0 (NW AS 7.0, NW MDM 5.5, NW EP 7.0, NW BI 7.0, NW PI 7.0) followed by Solution Manager 4.0 (SolMan), SAP GRC Suite 5.x, SAP xApps, SAP RFID all based on MaxDB 7.6.

Note that there are two versions of this program. For details see SDN.

SAP community networks got over 1 mil members

On December the 10^th 2007 both SAP’s community networks including SDN and BPX got over 1 millions members. SAP launched SDN in 2003 and till now it becomes important resource for all SAP people and significant part of SAP ecosystem. Communities are spreading fast in they continue to introduce new interesting programs as recently SDN Mentorship program and SDN NetWeaver Subscriptions program.

SDN’s Mentorship program

SDN started to introduce new and new very interesting programs recently. After this September’s announcement of SDN NetWeaver Subscriptions program new program is coming called SDN mentorship program. The aim is to recognize best SAP people in particular knowledge area and then to evangelize SAP technologies within the others SDN members. Such an expert will be supported by mentor program to spread his/her knowledge within the community. Member is selected for limited time period – 1 year. Later somebody else can replace mentor while he/she is recognized by other: mentors, community members, committee from ECO, CN, PM and development. Benefits of mentoring are quite highly valuable: Invitation to SAP events, VIP Access to SAP Information, VIP Seating (TechEd, Sapphire, etc.), and maybe in future some direct access to SAP Development. So hurry up and become SAP mentor.

Some more information about this program you can find on Mark Finnern blog.

SDN NetWeaver Subscriptions program

SAP’s online developer community which is a part of SAP ecosystem called SDN is launching NetWeaver Subscriptions program. Once the program will be introduced you can obtain through this subscription program an access to the full SAP NetWeaver stack - for a subscribed period paid by a reasonable subscription fee. SDN means by term NetWeaver stack following components: Developer Studio, Development Infrastructure, ABAP stack, BI, XI, MDM, Portal, VC... The solution will not be some online access to servers which are running NetWeaver but subscriber gets a box with the DVDs, but also access to the Service Marketplace, the OSS, the Enterprise Services Workplace and the Virtual TechEd sessions, and SDN is promising a lot of other useful things (premium presence in the forums). More information about the motivation to this program can be found in this blog and you can register yourself to program here.