Tag Archives: Fiori

SuccessConnect 2014 – Las Vegas – initial thoughts

Mike Ettling shares SAP/SuccessFactors new commitment to inform customers

(Mike Ettling explains SuccessFactors new commitment to putting customers first)

So I’m in the lounge at LAX – the new OneWorld business lounge – it’s loads better than the old Qantas lounge, they have craft beer on tap for a start, which did lead to rather a few posts:

Which weren’t particularly related to themes I normally post on, but nevertheless probably tell you something, I’ll leave this as an exercise to the reader to speculate on what.

So whilst I’m nice and relaxed after a nice shower and looking forward to heading home, I thought I’d capture a couple of things that happened whilst I was at SuccessConnect this week, and hopefully this will also remind me to expand on them at a later time.

Firstly – customer first

The commitment by SuccessFactors to publish a roadmap to customers is a big win. And It’s not just a win for customers. As a partner it’s much easier to advise a customer when you have a good understanding of what _might_ happen in the near future. By making as much of the solution as possible accessible by the upgrade centre rather than provisioning (an ongoing effort) it removes from customers the need to engage an SI partner for what may well be just an administrative task. Allowing customers to attend the same training that partners can attend is also a great thing – so now there is a real possibility that customers can do some of their support in-house.

Why, you might ask, am I cheering this as a good thing? I am one of those partners who previously customers had to rely on to make these changes. Well, it’s really because I don’t like doing boring stuff. If as an SI all the work I do is very simple, then customers can be a little resentful for paying me as much as I would like to be paid. I see this as an opportunity to get rid of the boring work and instead focus on bringing real value through expertise. We shall see, but I’m hopeful that this is the path SAP envisages as well.

SAP a SuccessFactors company?

With Rob Enslin opening the conference, I got a real feeling of SAP being a full part of the conference, and not it being a SuccessFactors as a separate company anymore. That said, all the “Cloud DNA” was still there and it was interesting to see Lars make a guest appearance. The reaction from the SuccessFactors staff to seeing Lars was remarkable, it was all a surprise, and a nice one for most. However, Fiori making itself felt in the UI development pipeline amongst other “Simple” things shows that the “DNA” exchange isn’t just one way.

Dmitri demoing new features

Phased releases

The public announcement of a phase released of functionality, with updates being released a month earlier on the test instances of a customer is great news. This will help extension developers hugely (although ideally I’d like access to the update another few weeks before the customers get it in their test systems, but can work with this idea!) Customers too have the ability to check out any mandatory (although there are few of those) updates before they get deployed. All in all a great step forward to helping customers manage their solutions – and the spontaneous applause from the audience when it was mentioned shows it’s not just me as a developer that appreciates this.

Righto, that will do for now, Mike Ettling’s flight to Sydney has already left, and mine to Melbourne is going soon. I’ll be catching up with him and the team again for the Sydney version of SuccessConnect, but I’m so glad that I was here this week in Las Vegas, it has been great.

 

#SAPPHIRENOW what it meant to a developer

I make no secret that I love developing. My favourite job title is “Chief HR Geek”, I adopt others as the need arises, but as a real in the dirt developer, content is always more important to me than flashy styling.

That’s why I was one of the only attendees at SAPPHIRENow 2014 wearing shorts. It’s fricking HOT in Orlando in June, wearing a suit?! Are you kidding me?

But it’s worth noting that to most businesses in the first instance, flashy styling is worth more than content! BUT – flashy styling with content, that’s awesome.

Fiori

With the announcement of Fiori being available as part of standard maintenance (yar boo sucks to those companies who’ve decided to skip SAP maintenance and have a third party do it) there comes the possibility of a double whammy of flashy styling and good underlying content.

The demo of a CFO drilling down in real-time to underperforming or problematic areas of the business and analysing why was compelling. I think Robbo has written about this as the killer app for HANA. I think he might be right.

But the key thing for a developer here, was the front end that this was achieved with, wasn’t a Business Objects add-on, wasn’t some WDA functionality. It was SAPUI5 over an OData layer exposed by Gateway.

If companies are going to be able to adopt these applications – and more and more of them are coming – there is going to be a clear need to support them.

Using tooling to build UI5 apps using ABAP won’t cut it

Whilst there are some amazing frameworks out there to help migrate stuck-in-the-mud ABAP developers across to building UI5 app, this does not help when there is a need to extend a standard Fiori app. Developers will need to learn JavaScript (or more properly ECMAScript, but that’s just me being pedantic.) If you can’t code JavaScript and refuse to learn, start calculating your redundancy payout because that’s what you’re going to be worth to your company. Alternatively, brush up on your SQL skills – and you can start writing some of the pushdown code for HANA. Either way, ABAP is going to be complementary to either DB manipulation or front-end display, but not a stand-alone skill set.

Fiori extension points

Did you know that many (not all!) Fiori apps have built-in extension points? You can use these to substantially alter the behaviour and appearance of the app. But to do so, there is something you should know – guess what? JavaScript!  Whilst the RDE (fingers cross for R to start meaning Rapid in near future) allows for some pretty amazing WYSIWYG modification to apps, the likelihood is that some form of developer intervention will be required. At the very least someone is going to have to figure out if the business requirement can/can’t be met using this simple customisation. And what skill set is going to be needed to figure out what those extensions can/can’t do? Yep you guessed it, JavaScript.

In Summary

For once I’m going to keep to a simple post without the detail that me as a developer I love so much. Because I want to emphasis this message.the future is fiori

I’m eventually learning to understand, unless you have flashy styling (Fiori), it doesn’t matter how good your content is (HANA) you can’t sell it. Combine the two together, and you have something that will change the marketplace and means developers need to change their game.

Perhaps if I ever attend SAPPHIRENow again, I’ll compromise and wear my jeans.