SAP Tech Ed, Community and Quality of interaction. Or is Research in Motion the company that really ushered in Office 2.0?

By lunchtime yesterday I was kind of worried that our RedMonk track hadn’t worked out so well, given relatively light attendance. Over the course of the afternoon though I realised I was using the wrong framework to think about it. The truth is the RedMonk track was really solid – the quality of the interactions was pretty excellent.

Enterprise 2.0 Roundtable

We turned our panel with the Enterprise Irregulars into a roundtable discussion, which talked about Enterprise 2.0. Frankly any discussion which engages folks from Research in Motion and Bose is a good one, in my book. It struck me that Bose is particularly interesting because you can think of it as an attention management company- those calm moments on a plane, just loving the music. The Bose guy laughed and said Dr Bose wasn’t really thinking along those lines… 😉

And who has done more than RIM to change the boundaries of work and play, personal and business communications in this era called 2.0? RIM is the most important company in Office and Enterprise 2.0 in terms of behavioural change, worklife balance and so on. RIM manages you 24 hours a day. Talking of the crackberry check out this stunning iPhone like skin (via @ferdy).

I was also really impressed with how quickly the RIM guy got the potential of Twitter. Straight away he said –

oh it will be more interesting when its processing machine events.

Indeed it well. Bing! Lightbulbs go off. We also had great participation from Bill Pfleging and Minda Zetlin, authors of The Geek Gap.

Map meets ABAP: 8.1 billion reasons to check out our session

We were also really pleased to have Steve Citron-Pousty from deCarta, the location based service data provider behind Ask.com, Qualcomm, Hotels.com Verizon, Sprint and many others, come and talk about how to develop map-based applications. i expected a pretty good crowd given the news Nokia is buying Navteq for $8.1bn.

He was really good – hacking throughout the preso. Oh he uses Netbeans! Only six people in there – but two were from SAP, and one from a CRM consultant. Seeing a deCarta SAP relationship emerging before my eyes was a real high point, and that’s when I began to relax. I would like to give a big shout out to Darrel Merryweather from SAP for sorting out some data to mashup (the advantages of jetlag). It was great to see Yariv Zur from SAP’s Israel-based UI team come along and we also got to meet his boss Filip Mirovski.

Yariv blogged it. Pretty funny, I don’t get called dashing too often!

The session was very interesting, took down notes with all the questions from the people and will try to bring them into our documentation people. One cool thing which happened during the session was meeting up with James Governor, from RedMonk. I’ve been reaing this guy’s blog and (don’t tell anyone), actually quoting him in some of the strategy documents I’ve been writing lately. I really imagined him as a stodgy British fifty-ish analyst and found this dashing blond blogger (sorry, James).

Zellerity: Adobe meets SAP

Matthias Zeller came and talked to Adobe and SAP integration- this was a sell out. Thanks Matthias. Matthias is doing some interesting work thinking about Adobe as front ends for business analytics. I promised to put him in touch with BMC – which is rewriting its analytics using Adobe Flex – tres cool!

Dan, Thomas and legacy SAP technology generating Flex

Dan McWeeney, who we interviewed for RedMonkTV a little while ago, is a real rockstar. wii meets SAP. He gave a great presentation about his open source libraries. Thomas Jung also showed off using SAP’s BSP to generate Flex. cool. Interesting because SAP wants to its customers to stop using BSP, but this approach could make developers with BSP skills very productive.

some more thoughts on SAP and dynamic scripting languages here and here and SAP Network Blog: Are Web Dynpros and Ajax Related? 

I will finalise this post once Technorati has indexed my tweets.

All about the meet

All in all, I think our participation at TechEd was a success. Its fantastic to have a RedMonk track at Sun and SAP’s developer events. But the real insight for me was that quality of interaction is far more important than quantity. That’s a lesson which might even have some value for the SAP Developer Network.  We wanted to talk to non-traditional SAP integrations. We succeeded in that goal, for sure.

Next step Munich, where the session I am really excited about is SAP WordPress integration! On SDN blogs here.

Technorati Tags: BSP – ABAP – SAP – RIM – Blackberry – TechEd – Bose – Adobe – Flex