Barcamp Cologne 25 - 26 November 2006

Finally a Barcamp not only close by to me but also at a time when I can actually attend, on top of that having the go ahead from management to attend as a representative of the SAP Developer Network (SDN) to see how our own SDN Day stacks up bit also to see if the Barcamp's are of interest or potential interest to our own communities.

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Barcamp Cologne

I got an email the other day from Nicole Simon about Barcamp, and the fact that there is one actually taking place near where I live. I've never really had a chance to go to one, everytime I in the area of one I miss it because of something else going on so this time when I got the mail I decided to jump right away and go for it.

Now this will be of course my first and me being a glutton for punishment have decided my first will be one in German. Not that I don't speak German but it's sooo much more fun to talk tech in English, I mean "Hast Du diese cool AJAX app gesehen?" just doesn't flow out very well that and the fact my grammar in German is not the best.

So I am off to Barcamp Cologne at the end of November to see what might be happening and that could be of interest to the SDN community as well as to the SAP community?

On my way to TechEd Bangalore

Well into final countdown now and just a week or so away from flying out to Bangalore, India for the final stop of the SAP TechEd tour. It's been a wild past 9 weeks and I've been on more plans and more cities, airports and countries than I can think of - thank goodness for Plazes reminding me where I am.

I'll be blogging and podcasting from their as well so stay tuned for what's to come!

Techies in Jax

It was rather surprising for me to get a mail from someone while attending the Office 2.0 conference in San Fran the other week who happened to be from Jacksonville. In fact he was a bit confused when he got an email update of those of us attending and saw a Jacksonville university in the list.

Well in turns out he moved to Jax round about the time I left and he's one of the few techie's you find around here. There are a couple like the refreshjacksonville.org group but not too many others. I missed their last meeting so perhaps next time I am in town.

I had a chance to meet up with Chris Custine and his wife Leah Mangan today at a local Starbucks and had a chance to talk shop. Turns out Chris was rather surprised and everything SAP has been doing lately. He'd been doing his research since the Office 2.0 conference and wanted to touch base a bit.

Great conversation and I think we might be hearing more from the two of them in the future... ;-)

New Device Makes Your Monitors Wireless

You've got a wireless keyboard, wireless mouse and wireless speakers, so why are you still "connecting to your monitor with a cable? This device connects the DVI port on your PC to the one on your monitor over an encrypted 802.11 a. g or b network, squishing the video data down to fit."

I just don't know I see so many ironic problems with this first being the power cables, signal problems etc.

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Adobe releases Soundbooth beta for audio amateurs, early impressions

I downloaded this and gave it a try with a few files I have sitting around and found it to be quite cool, could not find a way to export to MP3 yet but it was just a quick playing around. Did have some problems loading the saved WAV into Audacity but this is beta and I will follow it - at least until it goes to a "pay to use" deal.

Perhaps if it goes to a "pay" issue the "tooth fairy" will come along and offer me an option to use it as a "tester" for my podcasts and those for SDN as well?

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A Tale of Two Sheets -- Chapter 1 | Smartsheet.com

A Tale of Two Sheets -- Chapter 1 | Smartsheet.com



It seems Maria and the buys over at smartsheet.com have been having some fun with the camera and having seen first hand what smartsheet.com can do as well as gotten to talk to several of their team I just had to sit back and smile at this!

The comments over on YouTube are great as well!

Wrapping up Office 2.0

As the saying goes "a day late and a dollar short" with the SAP TechEd and planning weighing heavily on me I was unable to do my wrap up on the convention when I wanted to. Now I think it would be rather futile especially when so many others have covered so many angles and so many aspects of what occurred, Mark had a great wrap up!

So I've decided to touch on some of the personal highlights I had while there. For me it turned out be the perfect opportunity to meet some of the people I had been corresponding with online as well as reading, seems everyone has a blog these days. So here are a few of the people I meet there:

• Jeff Nolan, bummer he's left SAP now


• Ismael Ghalimi, still did not get a chance to sit down and chat with him


• Mark Crofton, he's the one I'm bugging now at SAP about blogging ;-)


• Charlie Wood, did not get a whole lot of time to chat but it was great seeing him again after Las Vegas

I also finally got to meet Sridhar and Raju from Zoho and had a few minutes to chat with them, got a nice photo and made sure we'd be chatting again.  I also made new friends like Maria over at Smartsheet.com and Jason at Preezo.net both of whom represent some very cool applications that I plan to keep an eye on and I think you should as well.

As most people are starting to find out I work for SAP as a Community Evangelist for the SAP Developer Network. My job there is not really a technology driven job but rather a people driven job. I work together with all of the contributors on SDN to help bring awareness to not only what SAP is doing but also what those using SAP are doing. So I was quite at home at the Office 2.0 event when I constantly got asked the question "Why is SAP here?"

Turns out there are an even larger number of people out there that are quite unaware of some of the interesting things we are doing at SAP and why we are even interested in what at one point was referred to as "these little toy startups". I promised the individual I would not say their name in relation to that comment and over the last week or so I think I have successfully changed their mind in terms of the companies and applications associated with "Office 2.0."

There's a of course a large amount of hype around this area and trying to tie it to the Enterprise level is not always the easiest task to do but in the long run I think there are a few points that many people will agree on.

• Collaboration


• Portability


• smaller footprints


• easier integration

Those points are the ones that I think you'll be seeing large Enterprise companies taking a more closer look at in the near future and I think we'll be seeing some huge changes taking place, on top of those already happening. It's an exciting time to be in the Enterprise software space and that is probably not often an adjective you hear very often.

Is "Office 2.0" going to change the Enterprise ecosystem? No, but it will change the way we look at that ecosystem and it will continue to influence how we develop for that ecosystem. Let's take for example spreadsheet applications, I'll attempt here at 37,000 feet to put my thoughts into focus here.

Currently just about every company you can think of at one point use a spreadsheet application, nothing special about it other than the fact that it does what you want, how you want. Now if we look at that in terms of the points I mentioned:

• Collaboration
  It's rather difficult to collaborate in a real time environment using a single spreadsheet file, with new enhancements coming to Microsoft as well as the multiple online versions of spreadsheet applications popping up this is changing. Now we are able to edit in real time the data that is being viewed by our counterparts all over the world based.


• Portability
  One of the biggest hassles of travel and doing your job is knowing exactly what you are going to need when you get to your destination, will I need that or will I need that, OK let's take it all with me. Why? Unless I am going up to the lake for the weekend or the beach for the week or something I will most likely have Internet access at my destination. If though I don't have Internet access I can still export my files from an online environment and get things done.


• smaller footprints
  How many of you have been on a trip and had nothing but problems with your equipment, PC dies, or you have battery problems or you forgot your charger (that one seems to happen a lot a the SAP TechEd conventions) - well if you are in an office environment there are computers and they have Internet access most likely so do you really need to install large applications on your laptop or computer just to access a list of numbers?


• easier integration
  This is where things start to get interesting for the enterprise level user. I created a small demo around this for the conference but unfortunately due to the lack of ability to enable "Port Forwarding" on the local network I was unable to show the entire demo but only a small piece of it. I will be doing some screen cams and sharing the entire demo and source code as soon as I find a spare minute to sit down and do. The demo I prepared was focused around test data in an SAP system (standard Flight Data available in all SAP systems) and with EditGrid, ZohoSheet, and ZohoCreator. I choose them mainly because of their responsiveness to me as an individual user as well as the features they offer. In fact Zoho is going to do a demo at the next SDN Day (part of the SAP TechEd)  in Bangalore in November. So imagine this, you have of course massive amounts of data in your system and you are offsite at your suppliers, your job is to negotiate the piece price of an item. For that you need access to real time data in your system. Typically you would access that data before leaving the office or you would attempt to log into your system remotely while there and access the data. Anyone who has done this knows it's not exactly the quickest means of getting data, instead though in a brave new world what if all you had to do was jump into an application like EditGrid or ZohoSheet key in the numbers that the supplier tells you (or even let them plug them in for you and save yourself the trip) and the application would automatically jump off through a layer of security of course and retrieve a mass of data and plug that into your spreadsheet for you giving you instant results to discuss. Imagine, "Sheet1" contains your overview your bottom line, "Sheet2" contains what the supplier added in (could not see anything else), and "Sheet3" contains data retrieved from your SAP system dynamically based on input from you on "Sheet1" and from your supplier on "Sheet2" and automatically updating your bottom line on "Sheet1" and your graphs and charts on "Sheet4".

Are we there just yet, of course not but I think we are on our way for these specific type scenarios and as we move forward and define more ways for the Information Worker of tomorrow to get their jobs done we'll see more and more ways of integrating enterprise levels processes into online and collaborative environments.

Amsterdam or bust

Boarding a plane today for Amsterdam, ah yet another lovely plane. This time to Amsterdam for the SAP TechEd conference. This one is starting to look as promising as the Las Vegas event and I've heard from a few old friends they will be attending so looking forward to seeing them again (one is all the way from Australia by way of South Africa).

I'll also be meeting, in person, for the first time new team mates and we'll be having the second SDN Day ever!

Boomchicago is looking to be a lot of fun as well!

If you are there as well be sure to stop by and look me up!

Planning your "thing"

It seems I am a bit behind in some of my blogging due to SAP TechEd and just recently the Office 2.0 conference, which I still need to blog, podcast or video cast my review of day 1 and 2 - one of these days I will get back on top of things I hope.

But all of this made me realize I had not mentioned some of the "planner" app's I tried out. Tracks and Zoho Planner are the two that really hit me the best in terms of ease of use and features and of course "look and feel", Tracks though I downloaded and installed so I decided to stick with Zoho for now.

Considering Zoho also has SSO now it's quite easy for me to jump into each of their applications. So life got quite a bit easier there as well.

I've found that the only way to really get things done is to "plan" your work the problem though is that many apps require so much effort that you don't actually get anything done because you spend your whole day planning what you are going to do. So I decided to see what the online versions had to offer and last Monday I tried them for the first time with multiple people. Last Monday we had a telephone conference and the only reason was because one of the people for the meeting was not there sitting in the room with everyone else, me, so I suggested since the meeting was about SAP at the Office 2.0 conference we use one of the online apps to do our meeting notes, etc. One of the guys logged into Zoho Planner and started a new page and then shared the page with me. Since I already had some notes put together I was able to quickly go in and add notes to the page while they were taking a look at the app and getting a feel for how it worked (hmm that lasted about 3 minutes total, nice easy to use interface)

It was quite impressive when working from a remote location with other people, where as for me personally it was almost a bit of overkill but perhaps I'm not giving it enough credit? With Zoho Virtual Office now up I'll have to go try it out and see how well it embeds data from all the various apps together. Back to working in remote groups though, since this one time worked out well enough in my opinion I decided to test my luck with a second project and that was the planning of the SAP TechEd Bangalore, specifically with the SDN Clubhouse and the SDN Day taking place there. Now those of us involved are all SAP employees but one is located in Bangalore, another New York and me (I'm in between at the moment) and some of the material and things are just getting a bit much to continuously send back and forth. This one I am going to consider my "test" or proof of concept. I told one of the two about the program before hand and the other I told nothing about the program. Trust in the Enterprise or any world for that matter is a big piece of the puzzle.

• Will either of them log in and try it?
  
• Will they continue to use it once logged in?
  
• What do they think about it?
  

Me, here are some of my initial thoughts after logging in:

• Where's my Roadmap?
  
• Why can't I automatically or easily link to Zohosheet, Zohowriter or Zohocreator? Or to even things like EditGrid or Gliffy?
  
• Why do I have the option only to upload? Why not a url for a document instead of a file off my local drive?
  

Hopefully planning my work a bit better will help me keep up with my blogging as well...

SAP and Scripting Languages

Looks like Amsterdam at the SAP TechEd will be alive just like it was in Las Vegas a few weeks back around the topic of Scripting Languages and SAP!

Especially nice when you know how much hard work you've put into getting there ;-)

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Enterprise Mashup Panel @ Office 2.0

Click to Play

The opening of the Enterprise Mashup panel, silly camera has a 3 minute max and I did not realize it until a minute or so later so please forgive my mistake but enjoy the nice opening that Ismael gives.

connectbeam @ Office 2.0

Got to check out ConnectBeam today, Mark Crofton actually put me on to them and said that we had a channel/domain so I would be able to immediately see who else from the company is there and what they are tracking.

This service is a social bookmarking for the enterprise, basically you start a topic, throw links and documents into it, tag everything and share that with others inside of the same domain as you.

Some of the basic features as social bookmarking tools, but then lots more for a more enterprise level. Something I recommend you check out. Now if they created out of the box integration for a few different Wiki's we deal with and Jive Software which runs our forums life would be really interesting on SDN.

preezo @ Office 2.0

Just spent some time speaking with Jason Roberts the founder and President of preezo, which is taking the idea of online presentations to the next level.

He has a demo running live here at the Office 2.0 conference so if you are here I suggest you rush over and check it out, the best part of the whole thing though is that some of the features he popped in right before the conference and others that people have been asking for and talking about are probably going to be popped in shortly after the conference. I doubt he'll find the time right now as the crowd where we all are with the Pods is rather filled and constantly people are coming over to see what is what!

preezo is definetly an up and coming service to watch!

Addressing the "issues" of Office 2.0

Listening to the keynote right now and one of the points that popped into my head is about "trust" in the enterprise, this topic has been on the SDN blogs a lot lately as well and Dan Farber and Esther Dyson currently doing the "Keynote Interview" have been touching on it from different aspects during their talks and they have discussing the idea of perhaps a hybrid model of Office 1.0 and Office 2.0, something that brings the best of both worlds.

This is of particular interest to me as I'm more concerned with the Enterprise level of what is happening around these techonologies. SAP is not likely to just tell their customers to open their systems up to the public internet like I have done for the demos (shhh don't tell) but rather that some serious thought will have to go into the topic of security especially data security and introducing that data into a collaborative environment allowing for multiple editors and modifiers of the data that is still control by the overall system to ensure data integrity.

smartsheet.com @ Office 2.0

Sitting here listening to the keynote at the Office 2.0 conference, and wanted to share a few of the things I'm seeing already.

I see video being done so we'll probably be able to see this online later as well. No bags were given - instead we were given an iPod Nano (branded on the back with IT|Redux) and the ability to sync with any of the pods here and actually get material loaded. Just don't sync it with your PC otherwise you loose everything. Ismael gave us two tips for this. 1) complain to Jobs about it 2) for the duration of the conference just don't sync it with your PC.

Room is filling up and some real cool stuff being talked about. I've actually just had the pleasure of meeting SmartSheet.com, OK I did not actually meet "them" but rather Maria Colacurcio from their team. Very insteresting young lady who has been telling me all about what they do and what they don't do. So they are not just another online spreadsheet but they are redesigning the way you work with your information.

Our mission is to provide the most usable on demand team productivity application.

Watching her fly through the screens and getting prep'd for the demo I was quite impressed with the look and feel and especially the performance. I also started to think about my own demos I've been working on for the conference which are dependent upon IT now for connectivity :-( anyway while watching her I started to see some more ideas for Mashups around SAP as well as other places. So just a few minutes into the conference and I've already learned a ton of cool stuff.

Now before anyone says something - these are just my own rantings and ramblings and not neccessarily the views or opinions expressed by SAP themselves and should not be taken as such.

Trek to Office 2.0

Click to Play

I've decided to start of this Video Blog around my trek to the Office 2.0 conference this week in San Fran.

Format is a bit simple and current ones are done with a Canon IXUS 50 

Where are you?

Me I'm on my way (sitting in the Memphis airport where you have to pay for WiFi access) to the Office 2.0 conference taking place tomorrow, our team from SAP had our little pre-meeting last night, using believe it or not Zoho Planner for tracking all our notes, etc. We decided since we were talking Office 2.0 what better way to get into the thought process than by using an Office 2.0 app to do it?

So many will of course ask, what in the world SAP is doing there or what we might have to demo there and all I can say is you'll need to stop by our "pod" and take a look for yourself... ok so I'll be blogging later about the demos and other stuff but isn't the idea of suspense cool?

Zoho ROCKS!

A picture tells a thousand words and in this case I don't think I need say anything more than - "THANK YOU ZOHO!"

SAP doing a demo @ Office 2.0 Con?

Did I mention I was going to the convention and that I was working on a demo for the SAP pod - oh yes SAP will have a pod and some things to show. My demo is still up in the air but it's looking good right now!



It's actually more than one demo and the first one is working, the next 3 are almost finished up. It was only 2 originally but I got two more ideas last night at 0100 in the morning so I thought I'd give them a go and see how they work.

Don't ask me which Office 2.0 app or anything more specific about the demos just yet, don't want to spoil any surprises...

Zoho the missing piece!

This is the first time that I've been excited about not being able to access an application or service.

Zoho is currently down, OK well many of their applications are currently down for maintenance and that maintenance is the long awaited "Single Sign On" across multiple Zoho apps. This is one of those major missing pieces and it going live just a few days before the Office 2.0 convention could not have been better planned.

Once this piece is in place Zoho will have one of the absolute most complete packages of all the other Office 2.0 services. Here's to sitting on the edge of your seat and waiting for the mail announcing things and how to merge my accounts into one!

Airfare Prediction Website!

Use it to predict and estimate what prices will be like for various travel times. Now if they would only include international destinations as well!

Excellent features cool interface and simply great! If I was living in the US I would be using this all the time!

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Phone Blogging from Odeo - "no dialtone"

It seems that the Odeo phone blogging service is no more, shame too as I tested it multiple times and had plans for it in the future but it seems that it was not to be, I wonder if they'll provide the technology or software behind it to the public now?

I really only gave it a few test goes while out in town Saturday mornings or going for walk with my son or something but I was really liking the freedom to do it. The Odeo blog announcing it gives a list to a few other services that actually do the same or similiar things and all of course compatible with Odeo.

I certainly hope this is not a prelude to anything negative happening with Odeo Studio, unless of course Pluggd.com comes up with a similiar feature that is ;-)



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Everyone else is doing it...

Lemmings march, OK so everyone else is writing about so I guess I can at least say I checked it out.

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Contacting Kid-Safe

Nigel suggested that I contact Kid-Safe to find out more, OK he suggested a bit more but I'd like to at least get more info and see if they have package of sorts that could be used by local groups in different parts of the world to teach kids as well... but their site is a flash site and they only give a phone number and no email.

So how do I contact them without making a phone call?

Kids, Parents and the Internet

I've posted a few times about this and I continue to think this is an area that should be encouraged more and more.

Education and the Internet, after my last blog post Arvind from Zoho actually emailed me to let me know about an,

..initiative from AdventNet geared towards helping parents & children with a special focus on children with special needs. Though Jambav doesn't do any educating of the manner that you suggest (yet), you may find it useful...

I was taking a look and I noticed that no it does not specifically address the issues I am have been mentioning however it does take another step in the right direction. It brings parents together with their children into the same environment. It has blogs from parents to parents, it seems to be a fun environment for all involved and I think those are the types of things we need along with the education to help build an "internet" bond between parents and kids. How many of you parents with teenage kids know what they do on the internet, does your child have an internet page or a MySpace account or any other account out there? Have you done a search lately?

Wishlist: Flixn, Jumpcut and Blip.tv

The other day I posted about how I was trying out Blip.tv, then again on each of the tools I use dealing with video and I got some great comments from the companies themselves which made me feel great as I always like when I see them keeping an eye on who's saying what.

So giving it thought and playing around I have come down to the following:

• Sharkle.com - Private video content to share with my family and friends - this I'm reconsidering as non of my friends and family actually go in and look unless I make it public and blog it.
  
• Jumpcut.com - Let's me upload video content and photos and actually edit everything together to create a new video (helps when I am on the road for working with video) - be very cool if I could actually send the edited videos to Blip.tv though
  
• Blip.tv - My platform for my new up and coming Video Blog
  
• Flixn.com - which lets me record video from my cam directly onto the net again be cool if I could then send the video into Blip.tv
  

So Flixn Co-CEO Samuel J. Greear asked me to let them know when I figured out what I wanted. Well I have or at least I think this would be really cool and I could see promoting it to the SDN user base to encourage them to do more video content as well.

I want to log into Flixn.com, especially while I am on the road and record some video via a webcam then I want to send that video over to Jumpcut.com to edit and add in some text or a little intro or maybe some music then I want to publish that newly created "movie" to my Blip.tv account. Now in no way am I saying that any of these tools are not great on their own but each in my opinion has a fantastic feature set and instead of seeing one of them try to scramble and add in the additional features why not just start collaborating? With Flixn.com I can already get code to display the video in multiple different locations and in Jumpcut.com I can import from Flickr.com or Facebook, so why can't I import from Flixn.com as well? Why can I only upload to Blip.tv and not import from Flixn.com or Jumpcut.com?

Matthias rocks at the Demo Jam

Matthias didn't nail down the 1st place but he did an amazing job including the little snafu in the beginning with his VPN.

The Demo Jam at the SAP TechEd was really great this year and Matthias did an amazing job considering he actually almost bombed out due to a VPN problem but still came back and did his demo in record time and made it to the top 3!

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Office 2.0 Database, errr the other one

So what's that they say? Imitation is the greatest form of Flatterly? I guess you could say it's a creative way of adding a giant chunk of ads to the top of a page ;-)

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Office 2.0 Conference Countdown

It's official on the 10th I board a plane in the morning and fly to the West Coast. I'll be attending the Office 2.0 Conference, SAP has become a sponsor for it after a very interesting meeting in Las Vegas during the SAP TechEd the other week.



I've been busily working on a demo that we might be showing, it's still up in the air whether we will or not so I'll have to keep it low key for now but once the decision is made I will blog about it.



See nothing too unusal right? Just the same old standard SAP connection stuff... err wait a second SAP connecting to an Office 2.0 app? I smell a mashup coming...

* Disclaimer - any "mashups" or demos created at this time are done strictly by me and not officially by SAP

SAP Widget Foundation API

It seems that SAP has decided to move full steam ahead with creating and using Enterprise level Widgets and they've decided to use SDN as their primary communications channel!

I've been trying out several of the widgets that have been created inside of SAP already and when trying to deal with so many facets of an enterprise environment the use of widgets has drastically improved my way of working.

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