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SAP HANA Studio for Mac
Who would have thought. A full featured native Mac version of a SAP development tool. Well, it’s here now. Check this page for the download of SAP HANA Studio Developer Edition (version 1.00.56) for Mac OS X.
Please please please let this be the first of a whole range of MacSAP apps! Having to fire up Parallels every time I want to use SAP GUI or one of the BusinessObjects tools is soooo annoying. SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio would be a nice candidate to be ported next.
https://twitter.com/schmerdy/status/350099669398978562
Posted in: Featured, SAP HANAPersonal Intelligence: BI on yourself
This post was initially published on the Interdobs blog.
In the world of Business Intelligence (BI) we try to figure out what the state of an organization is and how we can make it work smarter. We can measure its business pocesses, transform this data into information and take appropriate actions. To support this we can use a toolset like the SAP BI portfolio, which provides a platform where information can be collected and combined (the data warehouse) and a reporting environment in which this information can be displayed with for example analysis reports and dashboards.
Until a few years ago this kind of technology was only available for (large) companies. But, nowadays we do business intelligence-like things in our own home. Let’s call this Home Intelligence. For example there are a lot of applications available in which you can upload your bank transactions. The app wil arrange the income and expenses into different categories (groceries, mortgage costs, telephone charges). It is quite easy to manage your finances and find out where some money might be leaking. Another example is the Smart Meter, which can track your home’s energy consumption in detail. The effect of turning the heater up or down will be directly visible now.
SAP StreamWork (12Sprints) videos
SAP recently published a bunch of videos (promo’s, introductions, tutorials) on its collaboration platform SAP StreamWork, formerly known as 12Sprints. You can find them in the SAP Streamwork YouTube channel.
Below I put the cool promo video and a proof-of-concept video of SAP Streamwork integration with a SAP BPM purchase order process.
Posted in: Featured, New technology, SAP
Easy Lifehack: Shared calendars
It’s almost 2010 and I still see people manually adding ‘standard’ calendar events to their iCal, Outlook or whatever calendar app they use. For example the yearly (school) holidays, but even more frustrating the numerous matches of their favorite sports team! With the upcoming FIFA World Cup in South Africa I expect to see a lot of this unnecessary data entry work being carried out in the next few months.
Let’s end this now and start using ‘shared calendars’. A shared calendar means that you publish your calendar from your calendar app to the web so others can read (not write to!) your calendar. The best thing is that the calendar ‘receivers’ are able to get all the updates automatically.
To get started with these shared calendars, have a look at iCalShare and MarkThisDate. Choose your calendar, click ‘Add to Calendar’ and pick your calendar app from the list. On my Mac iCal opens and asks me if I want to subscribe to this calendar. According to this article subscribing a calendar to Outlook seems to work in the same way. Nice!
The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
Being an Apple fan/evangelist for almost all my life I experienced numerous introductions of cool new Apple products. Since the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in 1997 he delivered most of these product launches in his famous keynote speech (Stevenote) at MacWorld or WWDC. Anyone who has ever watched one of these events will admit that Jobs’ presentation skills are outstanding. Somehow he is able to deliver a performance that will fascinate you from the first until the last minute.
Now move over to the world of SAP and probably 80% (or more) of the presentations we attend. I watched the Vienna SAP TechEd keynote a few weeks ago through the live video stream. The speed of the presentations was very low and the slides were boring and stuffed with text. After a while people in the audience started to write tweets like:
Keynote #sapteched09 about speed of change? In stead of ppt with figures I like to see real SAP stuff, come on.
OK, we get the business case. Can we move on how attendees can use SAP technology 2 implement the business solution?
Ouch. Not good.
Luckily for us (and the guys at SAP) Carmine Gallo, a BusinessWeek columnist, wrote a great book on how to give a presentation like Steve Jobs. The book is overloaded with concrete examples from keynotes from the past. For example how to keep your slides simple and visual and why you should never, ever, use bullet points in your slides (it is actually the least effective way to deliver information). If Jobs starts talking about the Apple 2009 results, the slide simply says “2009”.
Gallo also shows that Jobs uses tons of short Twitter-like headlines that are easy to remember. At the introduction of the iPod, Jobs could have said something like:
Today we are introducing a new, ultraportable MP3 player with 6.5-ounce design and a 5 GB hard drive, complete with Apple’s legendary ease of use.
Instead he said:
iPod. 1000 songs in your pocket.
Feel the difference?
I found this video of Gallo in which he outlines the key topics of the book while showing some examples from actual Steve Jobs keynotes. You can find more info at Gallo’s BusinessWeek blog, at The Cult of Mac or at Amazon.
Posted in: Books, Featured
