#49: SAP TechEd vs ASUG Tech Connect, Odoo, CDS, GitHub AI

In this issue:

• TechEd / Tech Connect: It’s The Stories

• Odoo Redux

• ABAPosaurus Goes to Virtual TechEd

• Faster Horses of CDS

• AI Iron Man, or AI Thanos?

• Tech Connecting: Mission Accomplished

As always, thanks for reading!

TechEd / Tech Connect: It’s The Stories

Ben Wyatt gets me

I think stories are one of the fundamental units of human understanding. They facilitate deeper understanding and bring people together. Package up information in a story, and you’ve got little nuggets of knowledge and an empathic ocean for them to swim in. When you hear a story you can imagine yourself in that situation, and your experience is magnified. Watch the Scott Hanselman video below for a few great examples of weaving storytelling into a presentation.

I watched a bunch of SAP TechEd 2023 virtual sessions, and I attended ASUG Tech Connect 2023 in New Orleans last week. I sat through roadmap sessions, technical detail sessions, and customer story sessions - and I’m ready to call it. Customer stories are far and away the best use of time at a conference.

Presenting the Paul Modderman Memorial 2023 Boring Enterprise Nerds Official Best Kind Of Conference Session Ranked List, Platinum Plus Cool Ranch XTREME Edition:

1. ✨ Customer stories without vendors as co-presenters ✨

2. Customer stories with vendors co-presenting

3. Hands-on learning

4. Keynote sessions that hit on cool techie announcements

5. Show-and-tell sessions that feature a vendor clicking through their own slide deck and their tool

6. [Skip a billion trillion other kinds of sessions]

7. Roadmaps 🥱

Snark aside, it’s generally true that any session can bring huge value to attendees. But experiencing knowledge anchored to a person’s story, and shared with those around you in conversation? That will bring you more than any thirty-thousand-click hands-on.

I’m glad that Tech Connect returns in 2024, and I’m hoping that TechEd does too. Organizers, I beg you: do everything in your power to get customers to stand up and share their stories. Everyone will be the better for it. PM

Odoo Redux

SHOTS FIRED

Maybe it's the name? Whatever it is, I'm back on the subject of Odoo. I love learning about it.

Odoo 17 hit the shelves recently, and I'm impressed with the features they're delivering. You can use an industry library to install apps and configuration for your specific business, have your customers order and pay by QR or self-service kiosks, get ChatGPT functionality built in for revising text blurbs, and - really really cool - a scraper to transform an existing website into an Odoo-managed website. (And other stuff.)

I like the redesign. If I've learned anything over the years fighting ERP software, it's that the UX often takes a backseat - if it's even allowed in the car - to under-the-hood features. But the impact of improved UX for ERP simply cannot be overstated. People get 💩 done when they can actually use their biz apps. 

I've explored some other open-source ERP/CRM solutions in this newsletter, and I really think the market can grow. I spend a lot of my time in a different world, and I'm seeing that S/4HANA is like…if you need it, you need it. If you don't, you REALLY don't. PM

ABAPosaurus Goes to Virtual TechEd

Back in the days, when SAP TechEd was in Las Vegas, I used to write “ABAPosaurus goes to TechEd” posts on SAP Community (here is the one for 2017 and 2018). This year, ABAPosaurus stayed at home and attended TechEd virtually. Oh well.

It’s interesting to observe how the hot topics changed over the years: Big Data, UX, IoT, blockchain, SAP Leonardo came and went. This year, the official hot topics were: AI, Enterprise Automation, Cloud Transformation (whatever that is), Pro-Code Development (so, development?).

While in-person TechEd events had lots to offer, the virtual one seems to suffers from some type of online content fatigue. I felt like Paul Giamatti’s character in Sideways movie with his famous quote: “I’m not drinking any f*g Merlot”. My Merlot was SAP BTP, ABAP Cloud and Extensibility. If anyone orders that, I’m leaving. (If you’re not fed up yet, I do recommend Delve into ABAP Cloud on SAP BTP, ABAP Environment - AD181v .)

My main TechEd surprise wasn’t AI or a huge list of announcements but how come Integration Suite is suddenly part of everything? The comments in Busting Myths in SAP Integration Suite - IN226v session looked almost like a random collection. Yet somehow it all leads to Integration Suite. This thing is like Petyr Baelish of SAP world. Seemingly benign successor to utilitarian SAP PI/PO product was mentioned in like 75% of sessions on “hot topics” without being a hot topic by itself. If GoT taught us anything, this is the one to watch out for. Wild stuff. JP

Faster Horses of CDS

When SAP HANA database came about, the famous quote about faster horses was thrown around a lot. Maybe HANA is more than a horse but “faster” is what every customer certainly expected. And its performance is undoubtedly amazing compared to what we were used to. But oddly enough, the frequent question developers get from S/4HANA customers is: “why is this so slow?”

Well, turns out that HANA can calculate very fast how many orders were placed in Germany or USA sales division. But in reality, business users want to know how many orders were placed on a Tuesday, with an attachment, have not invoiced yet, and include a freight charge. Unless it’s the year of the Dragon or the moon is in Aries, in which case the logic is completely different.

These requests typically involve ABAP CDS views. And while most ABAPers have gotten familiar over the years with troubleshooting performance issues of ABAP programs, CDS view performance remains rather mysterious, even to me. Fear not, blog post series CDS View Performance Best Practices has great recommendations on this subject. I’ve also read the performance chapter in 3rd edition of Core Data Services for ABAP book (compliments of SAP Press online subscription) and I think there are mostly good news for experienced ABAPers.

ST05 is still there and CDS execution plan can be accessed from it directly. Good general SQL practices still apply, HANA or not. I also find that AMDP table functions are a great option when conditions get too convoluted and I actually felt more “at home” working with them.

While most of our classic ABAP performance knowledge transfers well to the HANA world, it’s important to keep exploring new tools and new features. I leave you with two more helpful links for this: blog post Feature Matrix: Data Modeling with ABAP Core Data Services and handy-dandy CDS cheat sheet. JP

AI Iron Man, or AI Thanos?

GitHub Universe happened last week. If you haven't seen any of the announcements, check out the killer day one keynote. From the keynote, I'm left with huge excitement…and not a little bit of apprehension. My career is in software, and the seismograph readings are off the chart for what the next few years might deliver. 

But! I'd like to point readers to the Scott Hanselman main stage talk. Scott is an amazing speaker, and you can tell he laser-focuses on clarity when he prepares. Here are some of the things I took away:

• We must be intentional about AI usage in applications. It deserves attention to detail. It deserves design for human understanding. 

• Not having a high-level understanding of large language models leads to anthropomorphism. The models carry baggage of…seeming human-ness. Seeming alive-ness. If you're not careful, your users can be drawn to wrong conclusions. 

• "People are thinking about these things, but not enough people…make sure that you are being intentional and deliberate and responsible in your use, your consumption, and your promotion of AI." Couldn't be better said. 

The current generation of AI is going to take longer to soak into enterprise software than into consumer experiences. But it might have a larger impact in the enterprise space. I'm not talking about the latest version of purchase req approval NOW AVAILABLE IN CHATGPT ENTERPRISE PLEASE MAKE IT STOP - I'm talking about when enterprises focus their core business processes through the AI lens. 

The title of the talk is "AI: Superhero or super villain?" - but I think Scott is saying that we, the creators of AI tools, are the ones who actually make that choice. PM

Tech Connecting: Mission Accomplished

Folks, this is the week when you finally stop seeing the pesky “join us at ASUG Tech Connect!” messages. We’ve done it! Phew. The session Paul and I presented ‘The SAP Skillpocalypse: How To Not Become Extinct’ was about upskilling. It featured our patented Architectural Model of SAP Skill Development (tm), which Paul hinted at in the previous buttress story.

Paul shares his thoughts on Tech Connect in another story in this issue, so my take will be short.

It’s funny that TechEd has “Ed” in the name but is really quite a bit of marketing. ASUG Tech Connect had no “Ed” in the name but was I think exactly what TechEd was supposed to be.

There was also a stark contrast between SAP’s “AI, AI, AI, and did we mention AI?” TechEd messaging and mostly “wait, so how do we move to S/4HANA?” attendee vibe. And I don’t mean it in a shade-throwing way but just as a statement. Learning is supposed to be non-discriminatory. Making good use of what you have is not less important than hearing about “event mesh cloud microservices”. Good for ASUG for pulling this event together and I look forward to more in-person events. JP

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