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Content Areas
1. Solution Manager There is uncertainty as to what Solution Manager does, albeit that more people are now dipping into the functionality available rather than using it solely for License Keys. Interest is high around which tools are available and what effort is required to use them. Tools most frequently mentioned are: Change Management, System Monitoring, Root Cause Analysis, Diagnostics, Business Process Modelling, Testing, Help/Service Desk, Document Management and the Upgrade tool set. What is the ROI when implementing these tools and how can they sell them to the business? People are interested in hearing not only what each of these tools is capable of, but also the technical and system implications that they bring. How does Solution Manager sit in the system landscape? How do you go about implementing Solution Manager in a complex system environment? There is also interest in hearing how companies may have used Solution Manager for Project Management, Risk Management and Central User Management. 2. Portal Whilst this conference will focus primarily on the SAP Enterprise Portal (EP), non-SAP Portal technology is also interesting to the audience. How to design, build and manage a portal? What have other people done that can be drawn upon? Is there Portal Best Practice? Once it is up and running, how do we administer the Portal - do we federate or syndicate our Portal? Collaboration through the Portal is a hot topic that also throws up the major issue of security. If your portal is externally facing how do you make sure that it is secure and that the users are authenticated? Should Single Sign On be implemented? What if you have non-SAP users who need to use the Portal - how can it be made more user friendly? What about Web 2.0 collaboration capability? How does the licensing structure work when you have non-SAP users accessing the SAP Portal? Interoperability is also an issue. How can a non-SAP portal be integrated successfully into an SAP System? How does the SAP EP integrate with other systems running in the business? Content Management within a Portal has also been raised as a subject of interest - what content can be/should be within the Portal environment? 3. User Interface (UI) Technologies Many companies have reported problems around pushing data and technology out to the users. Does anyone have a seamless UI strategy in place? What are the various options for the User Interface? What has worked for other users and what hasn't? From both a strategic and technical level interest was high around: Portals; Adobe Interactive Forms (being used in websites); Adobe Flex; SAP GUI and GUI XT (web vs. normal); SAP's Business Client; Microsoft .Net and Sharepoint; dashboard widgets and cockpits; SAP Composition Environment (CE) 7.1; Web Services and ESOA. What will be the impact of the Business Objects acquisition on SAP's UIs? Will the Business Objects 'front end' become a part of the SAP UI? Other areas of interest in this area lie in the newer technologies like Voice Interaction and Mobile. 4. System Landscape & Architecture One of the main questions that has come up in the system administration area is how do you go about rationalising and understanding your system? What are the options available for managing and migrating databases, managing complex landscape systems, server virtualisation and reducing hardware costs? On one hand how can a system be scaled down and on the other hand how do you make the move from a 3-tier ABAP landscape to an n-tier ABAP or Java landscape? Maintaining, optimising and tuning SAP systems is as always an issue - for both ABAP and Java systems. With server virtualisation what are the options and what are the benefits? What are the pros and cons of the third party tools out there? Customer case studies of virtualisation being used in a production environment are of the greatest interest. Other system administration issues that came up are the use of TDMS, client refreshes not using TDMS, System Landscape Directories, stress testing your system and Disaster Recovery issues. 5. Enhancement Packages & Upgrades What do the Enhancement Packs mean for SAP customers? What do they do and why are they needed? What is SAP's strategy and roadmap around the Enhancement Packs? The most frequently asked questions in this area have been: When implementing the Enhancement Packs how do you go about it? Are they a separate project? When do you do them? How often? What do you turn on? What is the operational and technical impact of the Enhancement Packs? Customer examples of Enhancement Packs implementations are of great interest. On a side note - what impact do the Enhancement Packages have on upgrades strategy? What are the SAP offshore options when it comes to upgrades? 6. People & Organisational Change Influencing and educating the organisation is becoming a more important role for SAP technologists. There is a real need to bridge the gap between IT and the Business, as well as the gap between IT and the users. Building business cases and selling benefits to the business needs to be complemented by an effective change management and user acceptance program. What tools and methodologies are available to help? Do you implement change incrementally or all in one go? What is best practice in an SAP environment - how do you get the most out of not only the system and its functionality but also your people? How can best practice templates be activated in an existing site or business with established methodologies and mindsets? With tightening budgets how do you leverage the most out of what you already have? In a limited skills pool, how do you ensure you retain staff, motivate your teams and put the right people in the right roles? How do you manage teams from 3 separate generations (Boomer, X and Y)? 7. Archiving Archiving has become more a more popular topic every year but many people are still asking "Why is archiving an issue?" Why should companies archive? What are the legal obligations and what are the business benefits? What archiving products are available? How do we create an archiving strategy and then develop and maintain our archives? There are also questions around retrieving from the archive - where is the data? How can I get data from legacy systems and what about archiving non-SAP data? 8. Support Organisation When it comes to Support, Customers are interested in issues around internal and external support. What are the implications of the new Enterprise Services Model when it comes to support? What services are there in the new model? What does it cover? What do we need to pay for? Can the Enterprise Services be customised or enhanced? On the Support Packs front most of the interest lies in the technical implications of installing them. When is the best time to install them and how do you minimise system downtime? Many customers are also interested in managing help desks and internal support. What is the best approach - does Solution Manager hold the key? 9. Security With the increasing use of Portals and as working practices change, security is a primary issue. How should companies approach security - what are the best practices? Portal security is a must for anyone who has an externally facing portal. There is therefore a great deal of interest in SAP's Identity Management tool and its capabilities as well as non-SAP identity management tools. What are the benefits and system implications of ideas like: having a Single Sign On environment, position-based security, segregation of duties and Governance, Risk and Compliance? Finally what security tools are available? 10. Development & Modelling In the development space the latest in developer tools from SAP is top of the wish list. An idea of where is SAP headed with Netweaver 7.0.1 is also desirable. The discussion over ABAP and Java and ABAP vs Java was as strong as ever this year, as was the discussion over which of those languages to use when building WebDynpro applications. ABAP Shared Objects, Object Oriented ABAP, developing Web Services, BSP's and Rich Internet Applications were all topics that were raised by developers. In the Adobe space there is much interest over what can be done in Adobe Flex as well as using Adobe Forms in Portal Development. SAP's Composition Environment (CE) 7.1 was another area of interest. Demonstrations of modelling tools such as Visual Composer and third party tools like ARIS is of interest. In addition there is interest in Business Process Modelling. Finally with the increasing use of Java comes the increasing risk of applications being hacked. There has therefore been some discussion around application hardening. How do you make sure your applications are secure? 11. Knowledge & Content Management As well as the broader issue of document management many companies are eager to learn about tools that can help them search and extract information from across their SAP landscapes. What is available in standard SAP functionality - the Content Management Server? What does the Knowledge Management module provide users? And what specialist third party tools are available for document management, knowledge management and enterprise search? Is anyone using the TREX capability? 12. Interoperability How SAP systems interact and integrate with non-SAP systems is an issue that was frequently raised this year. There was a lot of discussion around SAP-Microsoft interoperability. How well do Microsoft technologies integrate with SAP technologies? Microsoft applications mentioned included Sharepoint and Duet. There is also some concern as to how the Vista Operating System will affect SAP systems. Will the new Microsoft Office Suite integrate with SAP and have the Vista performance issues really been addressed? Lotus Notes and Cognos were also raised under the interoperability topic. Other issues raised were around running multiple SAP systems and Business Warehouse (BW) integration. 13. Mobile Technology What is new from SAP and 3rd parties in mobile technology? What is possible with mobile technology? What is SAP working on? What are the security issues that need to be addressed? 14. ESOA In the area of Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (ESOA) there is interest in not only the impact on the business, but also on the technology. How do you develop a business case as well as a technical strategy? What sort of ROI can ESOA really bring an organisation? 15. Business Process Modelling (BPM) & Business Intelligence (BI) Business Process Modelling and issues around Business Intelligence were also raised this year. What BPM tools are available? ARIS, PI, Web Services, Solution Manager - which to use and why? How should our business processes be documented? What about Reverse Business Engineering? How do we deal with the technical issues surrounding BI - architecture, performance and testing automation? 16. XMII & other XApps What is XMII and what other XApps are currently available? Why should we implement XApps and what is the best practice strategy? From a technical point of view how do you architect XApps and what is the technical effort involved? Ultimately what is the value for the business? 17. Business Objects There is a lot of interest surrounding SAP's acquisition of Business Objects. What will be the SAP/Business Objects Roadmap? How is it going to affect SAP customers? What is in the Business Objects toolset that we should know about? How much of the Business Objects toolset will end up in SAP? How will it affect our system landscape? 18. SAP Process Integration (PI) Now that XI is officially PI what does that actually mean? What are the best practices around XI and can it be standardised? Moving from PI 7 to PI 7.1 - why upgrade? What is the new functionality available?
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