Adobe
SDN Day was Great!
I just came back to my hotel room in the Venetian after a long day at the SAP Developer Network day. It was great. Mark, Craig and team organized an excellent event with the right mixture of organized sessions and freestyle activities and meetings.
Mark Finnern kicked the event of with references to Burning Man and Foo camp.
After that a networking session allowed everyone to meet different members of the SDN community. Juergen, James and I started to get ready for the Flex hands-on workshop. In our two workshops we had about 50 attendees who brought their laptops to install Flex Builder and start developing Rich Internet Applications with Flex.
Here is James Ward demonstrating Flex Builder.
The hands-on sessions were very productive and we got a lot of positive feedback on the Flex Proof-of-Concept application which we developed with RoundArch (a Rich Internet Application for customer support linking back to an SAP application).
During the breaks I met Robert Scoble and later he did a brief interview with me talking about all the activities between Adobe and SAP. This should be available soon on the SAP channel of PodTech.net). I invited Robert to meet in Palo Alto or San Jose to give him a demo of all the work we have been doing with SAP on improving the user experience. Later in the day Robert also interviewed Shai.
We had also a lot of interest in the SDN sessions on SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe presented by Juergen Hauser, Les Woolsey, Blair Powell and Mohan Bethur. We are off to a great start and I expect a lot of people in our sessions and our booth during the next days at SAP TechEd.
Finally SDN Day closed with a party at the Hofbrauhaus in Las Vegas. Below is SDNer Harald Reiter and me enjoying a Weissbier. We had a lot of fun on our table and Mark, Craig and Thomas stopped by as well.
Its time to sleep and prepare for another big day tommorrow. I will present Interactive Forms with Markus Meisl as well as Apollo and the Adobe Engagement Platform as part of the SAP Client strategy presentation. Finally and most importantly I need to mentally prepare for the Demo Jam tomorrow evening. If your at SAP TechEd please support me with a lot of noise!
SAP TechEd Final Countdown
The last days have been pretty hectic. I am getting ready for SAP’s number one tech event the SAP TechEd. This meant installing SAP Web Application Server on VMWare, getting the demos ready, figuring out who needs to go to which workshop, preparing for the Demo Jam and many more things. I am flying to Las Vegas on Sunday and expect a long night since I still need to get an SAP Web AS ABAP server installed on a machine which is hopefully waiting for me in the hotel. I do not have a monitor yet, but hopefully someone can help me out (if you know where I could use a Monitor in the Venetian Hotel on Sunday afternoon/evening please let me know. Even better let me know if you have a box with the Web AS 6.40 ABAP stack which I could use for the SDN workshop).
I am very excited to meet Robert Scoble who will be at SDN Day (the SAP Developer Network Event the day before TechEd starts officially). He will do interviews for PodTech (Until today I did not realize they have an SAP Channel, cool!).
So here is a summary of the Adobe content at SAP TechEd and SDN Day we have lined up….
– Two hour hands-on workshop (bring your laptop) to develop Rich Internet Applications with Flex and connect them to SAP (if I can get the ABAP Server running 😉
– Four session around Interactive Forms at SDN Day, meaning talk to our developers about the technical details of SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe
– Demo Jam – Yes I will compete with a demo showing live coding in Flex Builder developing a cool Flex app connection to SAP in 6 minutes (Please support me with a lot of noise 
– 12 (!) presentations and workshops featuring Interactive Forms in SAP NetWeaver. This is a great opportunity to get educated on one of the hottest technology in SAP NetWeaver
– Exhibition Pods: We have one booth (booth #1) which features everything you want to know about Interactive Forms and allows you to talk to the experts (no sales or marketing people allowed on our booth!) and one pod (pod #1) in the NetWeaver village featuring Adobe Flex technology. It is great to be twice #1
Well I better get some rest before the crazy days start!
P.S. One more update – I will present the Adobe Engagement Platform and Apollo as part of SAP’s session “Next Generation of Client Technology for SAP“. We are absolutely dedicated to bring rich and engaging user experiences to SAP customers.
Crossing the Chasm by Giving Away Software for Free?
Over on FlexLive.net Zee is discussing ideas how to increase the adoption of Adobe LiveCycle software. LiveCycle is Adobe’s product family of J2EE server software for forms and document creation and management in the enterprise.
Zee writes…
“Well, first the product managers have to realize that grass-roots adoption matters even for enterprise prodcuts…
Hopefully, core products in the LiveCycle lineup such as the form server and the workflow engine could all be made free by the LiveCycle 8 release.”
I agree that it is important to ensure that enterprise developers get easy access to the software for evaluation and prototyping through a Developer Network. However the decision to introduce new enterprise software applications in a productive evironment includes other factors. I would argue the license fee of enterprise software is typically only a minor factor in Total Cost of Ownership considerations.
An important element to enterprise adoption is the requirement that the new software integrates seemlessly with existing enterprise applications (what I like to call “being a good corporate citizen”). IT departments are busy maintaining and updating existing software; Introducing new software means stress and uncertainty.
Making it easy to deploy, integrate and maintain the software in an existing infrastrutcure will lower the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership of the software) and therefore make a decision to introduce new technology easier.
Therefore Adobe decided to partner with other enterprise software companies. Specifically our strategic partnership with SAP is an important element to accomplish wide adoption of LiveCycle… and yes I am biased since I am the Product Manager for the SAP Adobe partnership. Over three years ago we started to work with SAP to tightly integrate forms functionality into SAP applications. I actually spent two years in the SAP headquarter in Walldorf to facilitate the integration and evangelize Adobe software.
Today SAP is shipping core componets of LiveCycle (incl. the LiveCycle Designer and modules from LiveCycle Forms) as part of their SAP NetWeaver application platform. It is called SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe and actually is included in the default installation of the SAP Web Application Server. Interactive Forms provides the infrastructure for both print forms (e.g. invoices, orders, paystubs, tax forms) as well as interactive PDF forms in SAP applications. SAP is currently migrating over 2000 print form templates from legacy technology to Adobe based forms technology (about 900 forms are already migrated and available with mySAP ERP 2005). It is just a matter of time (since it takes SAP customers a number of years to upgrade to new releases) till every SAP customer will use Adobe forms technology. Given that SAP owns the majority of the enterprise software market I would argue that this is a pretty good strategy to cross the chasm.
So to a degree we are actually already executing a twist of Zee’s idea. The core forms technology is delivered free to all SAP customers as part of SAP NetWeaver. The license allows SAP cutomers to use the technology free of charge for print forms. Only if customers want to use interactive PDF forms in a production environment they require an additional license (which is distributed by SAP).
Finally since Interactive Forms is based on LiveCycle Forms technology other products like LiveCycle Policy Server or LiveCycle Barcoded Forms will be of interest to SAP customers as well.
“I doubt any LiveCycle product manager would be reading my blog, but like I said, grass-roots matters.”
Well, I am reading your Blog and I also forwarded it to the LiveCycle Product Management team.
Kevin Lynch on the Adobe Engagement Platform
Kevin Lynch recently disucssed the Adobe Engagement Platform with Knowledge@Wharton
And that is the core of what we’re trying to enable people to do — engage effectively. That’s what bringing our software together is about. All of our tools, our servers, our client [software], and [our developer] frameworks — all that stuff is to help people engage better.
And so we call that the “Engagement Platform.” It’s basically the collection of software you can use to create these experiences and engage people.
Kevin Lynch on Adobe’s Plans for a New Generation of Software – Knowledge@Wharton
technorati tags:Adobe, Technology, Web2.0
