(Unfortunately, no embed option. SAP still has something to learn how to let go…)

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Working on Duet, a joint effort of SAP and Microsoft, has been an amazing experience.
During my work at SAP I’ve had the chance to appreciate the software industry from in non technical aspects (business, strategy, project management), to work in a truly global organizations that requires daily contact with colleagues around the globe and to travel quite a bit…
Undoubtedly, I owe SAP the credit for helping me "grow up" professionally and expanding my knowledge and interests beyond core development skills.

However, for a while now I’ve had this growing anxiety for doing something else.
Through blogging, friends and various web 2.0 sites\gatherings, I’ve had the chance to meet a lot of interesting new people that opened the door on many new (risky?) opportunities…

Trading my secure, salaried job for an unknown is a scary thing to do, and yet, it’s something I must do in order to be able to fully and wholeheartedly explore the different alternatives out there. And so, I have officially resigned from my position at SAP. It would be unfair to my colleagues, SAP and myself to do anything less.

What’s next? I’m not entirely sure…
I’m looking into internal opportunities within SAP as well as external opportunities, I’ve got several startup ideas that I’m exploring with partners and of course there’s that Computer Science degree I should finish already (and make the folks happy).

In any case, I’m sure there’s an exciting future ahead and I invite you all to read along and find out with me…

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So, if you want to create a screen saver with Visual Studio 2008 here’s a template for you:

Installation Instructions

1. Download the zip file.
2. Copy the zip (do not extract) to <My Documents>\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ProjectTemplates

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Here are some of the comments:
Michael Krigsman, Nick Carr, Jason Wood, Dennis Hewlett,  Ed Hermann, George Ou, Ross Mayfield, Susan Scrupski,
Ian Joyce, Anshu Sharma, Craig Cmehil, Sadagopan, Vinnie Mirchandani,  Stowe Boyd and Alan Patrick, and Thomas Otter. (see Techmeme for more)

I think the Damn proud to be “un-sexy” post by Vinnie Mirchandani exposes the root problem in SAP and in enterprise software in general:

..Yes, we will never have the glitz of  following a Facebook or Twitter or an iPhone, but the software and other technologies we cover cut checks, invoice customers, design products, manage supply chains, keep the wheels of commerce turning.

Aren’t you glad some of us find that sexy -)”

I have to side Thomas on this one. So what if enterprise software runs complex business processes and has to support standards, laws and regulations? Does it mean that the interface to these process has to be complex?

Why do I need a PhD in economics to be able to fill out an SAP expense request? Or a dedicated HR person that will file my vocation and attendance information into the ERP because its too complicated for the untrained to do so (and I’m a tech guy, imagine what its like in low-tech companies)? How can we let “enterprise” be an excuse for over complicating even these simplest processes?

Google is a great example for hiding complexity. I can’t even imagine the cloud computing hell, the algorithms and the army of computer science PhD that make Google work, and yet, all that complexity is hidden behind a simple text box where I just need to write my search term and get instant results. Simple, effective and usable by anyone without the need for special training.

Amazon too, have a simple, friendly interface tailored per customers needs. Behind this interface Amazon has to process and store a huge amount of data and manage complex business scenarios – supply chain management, invoicing, etc. – in a reliable and secure manner, etc.

Even look at personal banking applications like Mint and Leumi. They provide reliable banking expertise wether you’re a simple user, a day trader or a professional broker.

So what makes enterprise software different? If the above companies can make engaging and intuitive software while still enabling execution of complex business processes in a reliable and secure manner.
New business software disrupters, like SalesForce.com, are taking advantage of the simplicity and ease of customization features we see in consumer applications.
Enterprise software makers like SAP, still stuck somewhere in the 80s computing age, need a serious change of mindset in order to be able to continue competing. The current way of doing things doesn’t lead to anywhere…

So, maybe Vinnie is proud to be “un-sexy” but I’m damn tired of getting the evil eye (at best) whenever I tell someone I work for SAP…

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Be sure to check out the Duet: An Enterprise S+S Offering From Microsoft And SAP session”:

Duet: An Enterprise S+S Offering From Microsoft And SAP
Chris Keyser (Microsoft)
Burra Gopal (Microsoft)
Adi Kavaler (SAP)

[Video] . [Slides] . [Transcript]

Other topics include:

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Looking forward to a very interesting visit…

Anyone has some good tips on things to do in the Seattle area?

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The Colgate Twins have done it again…

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Fort Worth, Texas-based Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad had already pushed its decades-old legacy systems to the limit, and with the railroad industry expecting rapid growth, the company decided it was time to upgrade, according to Jeff Campbell, BNSF’s vice president of technology services and chief information officer.

The only question was: SAP or Oracle?

The final nail in Oracle’s coffin may well have been Duet. While SAP and Oracle both had advantages in other areas, BNSF felt Oracle couldn’t match Duet’s functionality.

“Our casual users are very good at, and very familiar with, the Office environment,” Campbell said. “To be able to utilize that platform — as time goes on and more functionality is available in Duet — makes it much easier for the end-user experience.”

Check out the full article…

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What are Bounded Items?

A bounded item is a simple Outlook item, which can be an email, appointment, contact etc. with an attached schema that defines it as a specific presentation object (presentation objects discussed in the previous post) and carries the business data related to that object. We call this a payload.

The payload is an encrypted XML containing the presentation object reference and business data mentioned above and attached to the Outlook item as a custom property.

For example, a payload attached to a contact item that represents a CRM customer would probably contain data such as the customer’s ID, company he works at, etc.

Before we examine how this payload is built, maintained and displayed to the user we first have to take a step back and understand how its schema defined. Or to be more accurate, how we define a presentation object.

Bound Item Definitions

If you remember the metadata illustration from the first post, one of the key parts in a presentation object’s metadata definition is its Data Definitions as displayed in the illustration:

A presentation item’s Data Definitions contain the following information:

1. Presentation object name- A unique resource name identifying this presentation object type
2. Outlook definitions -Specifies the Outlook item type this objects relates to and its default folder location.
3. Synchronization behavior – Type of synchronization used to synchronize to the backend.
4. Business Data Schema – A schema for the business data this object carries with it
5. Data Mapping to\from Outlook Properties – A set of mappings that define how the Outlook item’s default fields (Such as Subject, Location, Start\End Time) map to\from values in the item’s business data.

If we look at a definition for a CRM Customer object again, its name would be something like "urn:sap:duet:crm:customer" and its business data would probably contain name and contact information (address, phone numbers). This data would be mapped to the relevant Outlook fields (phone numbers to Contact item phone properties, address to the Contact item address property etc.) so that when the user edits the object the changes will be propagated back to the business data payload (and eventually to the backend).

This data definition, termed Bound Item Definition looks like this:

<BoundItemDefinition Name="urn:sap:duet:crm:customer" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/OBA/2005/BoundItemDefinition">
  <Outlook DefaultFolder="CRM Contacts" MessageClass="IPM.Contact" />
  <Synchronization>
    <Behavior>Always</Behavior>
  </Synchronization>
  <Properties>
    <Property Name="Crm.Customer.FirstName" Type="String">
      <Behavior>OutlookToXml</Behavior>
      <Outlook Name="FirstName" />
      <Xml XPath="/ns0:CRMContact/Name" Namespaces="ns0='urn:sap:duet:crm:customer'" />
    </Property> <Property Name="Crm.Customer.LastName" Type="String">
      <Behavior>OutlookToXml</Behavior>
      <Outlook Name="LastName" />
      <Xml XPath="/ns0:CRMContact/ns0:LastName" Namespaces="ns0='urn:sap:duet:crm:customer'" />
    </Property>
    ...
  </Properties>
  <XmlTemplate>
    <s0:CRMContact xmlns:s0="urn:sap:duet:crm:customer">
      <s0:FirstName>String</s0:FirstName> <s0:LastName>String</s0:LastName> <s0:FileAsName>String</s0:FileAsName> <s0:Comapany>String</s0:Comapany> <s0:JobTitle>String</s0:JobTitle>  ...
    </s0:CRMContact>
  </XmlTemplate>
</BoundItemDefinition>

Binding an Item

The process of binding an item is where we take a regular Outlook item and mark it has a presentation object. Basically we’re taking a regular Outlook item and marking it as a presentation object. The item’s behavior and schema for the business data attached to it are according to the presentation object’s data definitions. When binding an item the Duet platform adds 3 custom properties to the item:

1. BoundItemId – A unique ID to represent this bounded item.
2. BoundItemType – The type of presentation object that the item represents
3. BoundData – The business data the item carries (payload).

In our example, a bounded IPM.Contact object representing a customer would have urn:sap:duet:crm:customerIn as its BoundItemType and the following XML as its BoundData:

<s0:CRMContact xmlns:s0="urn:sap:duet:crm:customer">
  <s0:FirstName>Eran</s0:FirstName>
  <s0:LastName>Kampf</s0:LastName>
  <s0:FileAsName>Kampf, Eran</s0:FileAsName>
  <s0:Comapany>SAP Labs Israel</s0:Comapany>
  ...
</s0:CRMContact>

The values in the BoundData are populated according to the data mapping rules specified in the bound item definition for our customer object.

Security Considerations

The BoundData can contain confidential information. Once retrieved from the backend systems we would like to limit access to it specifically to the user who got the information. Otherwise, sensitive information which is part of the user’s item can leek if, for example the user forwards the item to someone or if an IT administrator (or anyone else who has access to the user’s mailbox) looks at the item.

We use DPAPI to encrypt the BoundData using the current user’s credentials so that only the Duet user who received the data can decrypt it. This way, even if someone else gets hold of the BoundData value he has no way to decipher it…

This also means that when forwarding a Duet item the receiving side will not have Duet information available and will see the item as a regular unbounded Outlook item. I’ll discuss how forwarding of bounded items is performed in a future post dedicated to forwarding…

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Presentation Objects

The Duet metadata defines business objects and how they interact with the user and the backend system. I like to refer to such objects as “presentations objects” because unlike the backend Business Objects that make sense to backend developers these are objects that make sense to the user.
For example, information about a person’s salary, compensation and HR information may be represented as several different business objects on the backend (or on several backend systems, maybe even from different vendors). The end-user, looking at a contact information on his Outlook doesn’t have to know about all the different backend and business objects that were used to aggregate the information on his screen.

Therefore, the Duet metadata defines such presentation objects - the information they carry, how this information is aggregated to and from the backend system(s)and how they interact with the user in his Office environment. So, from an abstract point of view, an application’s metadata structure is somewhat similar to this:

DuetML

All the UI components in Duet are defined by a markup language – DuetML. Each UI component displayed to the user is actually represented by an XML defining the UI and a .NET assembly codebehind defining the logic behind the UI. Basically this mechanism is a lot like WPF’s XAML but with several key differences:

1. DuetML is based on top of WinForms and has very limited UI capabilities specifically designed for Duet’s UI screens
2. XAML gets compiled (to BAML) during design time while DuetML is interpreted during runtime.
   This gives us a lot of customization & translation capabilities on the server where we process the DuetMLs before sending them to the user (I will probably have to dedicate a whole post specifically to discuss business customization and localization)

In fact, DuetML’s schema was designed to closely resembles XAML to allow transition to XAML in the future…

So, Why Use Metadata?

Simplified solution development. The metadata-based architecture makes it possible to develop declarative business solutions. Because solutions are defined in metadata, developers can build simple, powerful solutions with little or no coding using pre-made common solution building blocks. Advanced developers can use .NET further customize their applications and add new features.

Centralized deployment. In order to run Duet solutions all the clients need is the Duet runtime which is a generic add-in that runs inside the Office applications and can load and interpret the metadata fetched from the server. The different solutions are deployed on a central server and do not require additional installations on the client.

Enhanced customization capabilities. Declarative approach also allows enhanced customization capabilities as customizing the application simply means editing its metadata. Duet’s ACE (Application Configuration Environment) goes a step further by allowing providing a configuration environment that allows the business administrator to apply such changes without requiring knowledge about the metadata and code behind a solution.

Automatic generation and modeling. A declarative approach for defining solution is the basis for enabling modeling and automatic generation of solutions. Imagine that you could quickly select some objects from the backend, define the matching object in Outlook and the data you wish to see and a solution will automatically be generated for you? And imagine you could customize such a solution using a visual programming tool such as Visual Composer (Microsoft Popfly, Yahoo Pipes style of development for you non SAPers)

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There are only a few active Duet bloggers out there but it seems that I’m the only one blogging from the dev team.
Sadly, so far I haven’t taken advantage of that to write some cool posts about the technology behind Duet.

I’ve decided to change that with a series of posts about the technology behind Due (and the first post will follow shortly after this one)

But first, a brief introduction:

Who am I?

My name is Eran Kampf and I’m a senior .NET developer and part of the Duet Platform group located at SAP Labs Israel.

What is Duet?

Duet is a product, jointly developed by SAP & Microsoft, that aims for a seamless access to SAP through Microsoft’s Office platform.

What’s it like working on Duet?

I guess this T-Shirt pretty much sums things up:

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Here’s the presentation’s abstract:

Duet Software: Supercharge Productivity with the Workplace of the Future

Information workers constantly toggle between enterprise applications, personal productivity software, and devices to answer their immediate question or complete their current task. The result affects productivity, decision making, costs, and compliance. The wait for a new workplace is now over. Learn about the existing and planned functionalities of Duet software to connect Microsoft’s people-ready world to SAP’s enterprise-ready world.

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I’ve pasted the job description and requirements below. Feel free to contact me if you’re interested…

General Description

• Take part in the definition of Duet platform architecture
• Report to the OSP Duet Enablement development manager
• Be part of the platform architects forum lead by the platform architect

Job Description

• Lead architecture related activities within the OSP Duet Enablement group.
• Be responsible for the technical quality and completeness of the design of the sub systems under the group responsibility
• Identify new infrastructure components which are part of the group’s domain and promote their implementation
• Be involved in defining and applying development standards
• Work with other SAP parties (internal customers and suppliers).
• Participate in the strategic discussions on the future directions of the product

Job Requirements

• More then 6 years of development experience, of which at least 3 years proven experience in software design / architecture definition in large scale development projects
• Deep & Wide Knowledge of Microsoft Technologies
• Experience in the complete development lifecycle
• Experience in working in a global environment
• An academic degree in Computer Science
• Experience in User Interface development – Advantage
• Knowledge in J2EE technologies – Advantage
• Excellent interpersonal + communication skills (Hebrew and English)

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Today at Sapphire SAP & Microsoft announced the extended roadmap for Duet 2.0 and Duet 3.0.

The key messages of this roadmap are:

1. Microsoft and SAP will extend their Duet partnership with two more major versions aligned with the next generation of Microsoft’s Office and SAP’s Business Suite.
2. Planned Duet features for Duet 2.0 and 3.0:
   1. More advanced Duet scenarios to enable all information workers in the enterprise
   2. Enhanced Duet tools and platforms package to enable customers to develop their own scenarios for Duet.

For more information check out the press release at http://www.sap.com/company/press/press.epx?pressid=7607.

In addition, together with HP, SAP and Microsoft also announced Duet Appliance – a pre-installed and configured Duet solution based on HP servers. You can see http://www.sap.com/company/press/press.epx?pressid=7577 for more information.

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This one goes straight to my reader’s subscriptions list…

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Check these posts out:

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Alan talks about this new page in details…

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Behind the sheeps…

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“Using our newfound shiny object, we just had to experiment and introduce the Wii to the enterprise. We decided to integrate the Wii remote with an existing Ruby on Rails application connecting to an SAP BW backend. More information on the Rails application developed by Dan can be found here. The application is a resource planner that enables a manager to easily view and plan his upcoming projects, requirements, and available resources with an easy to use drag and drop interface, while utilizing SAP BW planning cubes for it’s model.”

I’ve been trying to push ideas like this for some time now and I’ve also written before about the need for enterprise software to sue some of the new innovations in the consumer entertainment market.

Thomas also mentions the my team on the SAP Developers Challenge. This is kinda encouraging since I didn’t think anyone will remember us as the SAP executive judges didn’t seem to care about the idea and we lost the people’s choice by a matter of few single votes (some say we actually one, no one actually counted the votes so its hard to tell).

What we did at the SAP developers challenge a demo demonstrating the possibility of exposing enterprise information through a FrontRow\MediaCenter UI using different remotes (Wiimote included).
It must have not been such a bad idea if our customers are actually starting to do this sort of stuff too

Anyway, Some demo screenshots to feed your appetite:

And who knows, maybe the next versions of Duet will go beyond Office and integrate with Microsoft’s Media Center?

Technorati : BW, Enterprise, SAP, Wii, Wiimote, sap blogger

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Technorati : bpx blogger, sap, sap blogger, sdn, sdn blogger

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“Sadly for the enterprise, though, innovation has flowed primarily from the consumer side. Multiplayer games, slick cell phones, TiVo, the iPod, MySpace, YouTube, and other killer apps have redefined the state of technology.”

And where is SAP in all of this? As this is one of company’s main pain points, I’m am glad to see it is making some effort in this direction.
From mainstream projects like Duet which makes the use of SAP transparent to the information worker, new design methodologies and the adoption of emerging technologies like Widgets to even more experimental stuff like SecondLife commerce and MediaCenter-like frontend UI at the recent SAP Developers Challenge, we’re certainly making enterprise software much more appealing…

Technorati : Design, Duet, Mendocino, SAP, Widgets

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Some more information on enterprise widgets soon…

Technorati : SAP, Widgets

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