SAP TechEd Community Day next week, Oct. 1st, 2007

As mentioned last month, next week James and I will be in Las Vegas for SAP TechEd. As part of this, we’re helping run and facilitate a track in the TechEd CommunityDay. Check out the Community Day wiki for a list of all the sessions, not just RedMonk.

Not having known to attend this even last year when I starting going to SAP TechEd, I don’t know first hand what to experience. But, from the conversations I’ve had and what I know, it looks like it’ll be a mix between a barcamp and a slightly structured developer-ish conference.

While SAP has done some planning ahead for the different sessions, flexibility is built into the system leaving open slots for attendees to decide the day-of what they’d like to have and/or participate in. In that respect, I suspect it’ll be similar to the JavaOne RedMonk Community Day track which was great to attend due to the people and content covered. The open, group-style format allowed for a lot of high-bandwidth conversations rather than presentation-driven broadcasts.

Sessions

Leading up to Community Day, we’ve had a lot of volunteered assistance from Craig Cmehil, Ed Herrmann, and the organizer of the entire even, Mark Finnern. Thanks to Ed and Craig, it looks like we’ll have a nice panel on the topic of Business 2.0 manned by several attending Enterprise Irregulars: Jeff Nolan, Dan Farber, Craig Cmehil, and Denis Browne…co-moderated by James and myself.

In addition to the Business 2.0 panel, we have plans for:

• RIAs in ABAP, Community Driven Developments – done by Dan McWeeney. This is one of my favorite topics: using brand-new technology to open up older, legacy technology, esp. getting access to the “dark data” and processes in enterprises.
• Adobe AIR, Deploying rich internet applications on the desktop – done by Adobe’s Matthias Zeller. As you, dear reader know, I keep a close eye on the RIA and AIR world, so I’m always interested to see what happens when the thinking and technology is brought to other domains. This session, of course, goes well with the idea of RIAs in ABAP.
• deCarta Mapping and SAP – done by Steven Citron-Pousty, who says: “he idea is that I will give a short (10-15 minutes) presentation on mapping and using the deCarta API and then we all proceed to hack adding maps to SAP applications. Our javascript api and XML over HTTP services are easy enough that I think having SAP experts with laptops around means we could build some cool applications.”

For a sort of preview into the cutting-edge, RIA-in-SAP stuff you can expect, check out the below episode of RedMonkTV with Eddie and Dan:

RedMonkTV – Get Filmed!

In addition to all this, we’ll of course be recording as much video as possible. Capturing open conferences on tape is tough audio-wise, but I’m hoping to be able to pull people aside for short interviews.

Typing this up, the exciting thing for me is that the people listed above and others we’ve been working with behind the scenes are a large part of what I’d call “the RedMonk community members in SAP-land.” That is, it appears that we’ll have a nice chunk of the RedMonk community present in one room.

RedMonk in Las Vegas!

So if you’re going to be at SAP TechEd or just in Las Vegas next week, come on by or call me up. I’ve already got one of my high-traffic Twitter-buddies, @ThinGuy on the mental list to hang-out with. There’ll be plenty of SAP and RedMonk folks around, so it should be a great buffet of Web 2.0’ish hanging out offline ;>

If my luggage gets through, we’ll have plenty of RedMonk t-shirt and stickers to give away as well.

Also note that we’ll be doing another RedMonk track for Community Day during SAP TechEd EU (Munich) in just a few weeks, so there’s another chance to get on the fun-train.

Disclaimer: SAP, Adobe, and Sun are clients.

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