Well …. TechEd has passed and it was a great time. InnoJam was probably the best experience and I managed to be a part of a great collaboration which was fun from the start – I will blog a little about our solution in some of my free time in the coming weeks, but back to the topic at hand, since this was my first time as a speaker at TechEd I was slightly intimidated and anxious … my session was on Friday at 8:00AM, the night after the 3 Doors Down concert and I was skeptical if *anyone* would even show up 🙂 . The morning came, and to my surprise, the room was full and even had multiple people standing at the back. I was impressed so many people attended, and showed that my investment of time and resources into the enterprise mobility space over the last few years was worth the effort. The presentation went well and thankfully I had the “Demo Gods” on my side connecting from the Venetian (iPad) to Amazon Web Services (Gateway) to Walldorf (ES Workplace) and back 🙂 . After the presentation wrapped up I had great comments and questions from the audience but ran out of time answering all of them, I figured I would share the premise of the presentation here for everyone and hopefully encourage more companies to take a few easy steps to start their journey into the mobile enterprise.
Category: Enterprise Mobility
iCRM – a free mobile app powered by ES Workplace
A *little* while ago, I developed and blogged about a app which used ES Workplace’s enterprise services to power a simple CRM client on the iPad – I also mentioned it was going to be a free downloadable app in the app store, well that time has finally arrived. You can now download iCRM for SAP in the app store, create an accounton the ES Workplace landscape and test it out. The best part is that if you have any of these ES Workplace services/configured or implemented in your own CRM landscape you can connect to them by simply changing the configuring in the app’s settings.
Some of the app features:
– View your business partners.
Using Netweaver Gateway Development Tool for XCode and Gateway 2.0 SP03
I recently downloaded the Linux pre-configured gateway trail along with the developer tool for XCode and ran into some issues that none of my newly created services were being displayed in the service list from the tool.
After doing some digging it seems the tool was originally developed for Gateway 2.0 SP02 and currently does not seem to support SP03 perfectly. When trying to discover the services it is checking the SData ICF Node versus the OData node which is where all services are defined for Gateway 2.0 SP03. Whats even more odd, is that the services show up only when the new OData Node is completely disabled.
If you are having issues discovering the services you have created (possibly in one of the awesome pre-configured gateway trials) open up the /IWFND/MAINT_SERVICE Tcode and try to disable the OData ICF Node. By default the services are created with both SData and OData nodes for backwards compatibility. Then refresh your services in the tool to check if the service is now available.
Enterprise Mobility Newsletter – April 23rd 2012
The SAP Netweaver Gateway 2.0 Developer Tool for XCode was released a little while ago after showing up at a Innojam event and Vishal demo’ed it back in 2010 at TechEd, but after multiple attempts at getting just a basic app to function from start to finish has been a challenging one. http://scn.sap.com/community/netweaver-gateway/blog/2012/04/23/using-netweaver-gateway-development-tool-for-xcode-and-gateway-21 for one of the issues I ran into.
Apple configurator is a new product recently released and updated (v 1.0.1) which runs on OSX Lion gives mobility admins a basic MDM platform for deploying and managing apple devices in the enterprise. This is perfect for a small company where some basic management features are needed within the mobility space. You can read a little more about the software here. Apple also recently updated the Apple Configurator which allows you to create and deploy profiles for iPhone, iPad and iTouch devices. These profiles contain security policies, email account settings and certificates enabling enterprise integration. The new version of the software is 3.5 and adds policy restrictions for Siri, voice dialing and photo stream to name a few. You can check the out the change log here.
SAP Quality Management, Product and Document Viewer for iPad
A quick mockup and concept for an iPad app which lets Quality Managers, Supervisors and shop floor employees view the CAD documents and identify points of failure during the quality control process.
Integrating Apple Siri with SAP Gateway
After hearing about folks hacking Apple’s Siri to do things like starting their Viper and controlling their thermostat, I thought about utilizing voice based integration with SAP to retrieve data. By default, Apples technology is pretty well locked down, but it didn’t take long for a developer to introduce a small workaround using a ruby app and a DNS filter. The filter intercepts the call to apple and allows you to inject your own questions, responses and data. If you are interested in learning more, this summary can guide you through the process of setting up and actually communicating with SAP from Siri.
Frito Lay iPad App
A project taking their traditional paper based reporting and supervisor process and bringing it to an iPad.
SAP Note Viewer for iPad and iPhone v2.0 Released
Thanks to everyone who has downloaded the app to date (roughly 9000 of you!). Also thanks to all the people providing feedback and ideas for future versions, keep them coming.
Version 2 of the app has been given some major improvements to the iPhone version including the ability to review the comment attributes (version, applications and status) which was already in the iPad version. Another improvement to the iPhone app is the ability to launch the note in Safari on the device. Basically a quick link to the note but you will still need to authenticate yourself.
The biggest improvement in v 2.0 is the ability to now search for notes rather than having to know the specific note numbers, as per the previous releases. Another interesting improvement is the ability to “Tag” notes, currently, Implemented, Deleted, Success and Failed are the options. A bunch of bug fixes were also made.
A Proof of Concept: The social aspect of enterprise data
Something I truly enjoy about my job is that fact that I am given freedom to explore creative solutions to business challenges. Being in manufacturing and the extremely demanding automotive industry, we are consistently challenged to produce better product, at a lower cost and in a shorter time in order to maintain reasonable margins. We are often faced with implementing solutions which augment our manufacturing processes and enable production employees to have better insight to the products being produced which ultimately ensures better quality. Some of these solutions include real time production labeling (tightly integrated from PLC’s to SAP), On-line visual display of requirements and products being produced and even include metrics like OEE.
iOS CRM for SAP and iPad – A free Mobile CRM App
Introduction
So its finally ready for a quick demo, the app has taken a little bit longer than expected to develop but has been a really good experience. Having worked very little little with CRM, it was interesting to get a bit of background knowledge and information about the product and its potential.
5.-iOS-Product-InformationDownloadBackground
I decided I wanted to build an enterprise app for the iPad while I was at TechEd a couple months ago, but wasn’t sure which direction to take – Should I go with a manufacturing related type app which assisted material handlers in the warehouse or something which is a little bit more generic and could be used by a wider audience. After meeting a couple great people at a Web Service Class (CD360) we got chatting and they planted the seed for something linked to CRM since users are often out of the office, don’t always want, or need, to take a laptop with them, and iPads seem to lend themselves well to such an environment.
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