Parade of Customers (TechEd 2016 Day 2)

Jelena · ‎09-21-2016

Folks,

Today started bright and early with the session UX115 "Mobile Apps @ Duke using SAP Fiori". I picked this session not out of interest for Fiori but rather to ask the speaker why the heck are we not seeing the Duke people or, as they call themselves, “Dukies” (I’m not making this up!) at our local NC/SC ASUG chapter meetings.

On the 15th we were supposed to see a demo and, sadly, it did not work. Since I happened to download the Duke app on my iPad, very mentorly I jumped in to help and attempt to connect iPad to the projector. At an event in Australia I’ve seen the local IT guy do that and it looked very simple. But, unfortunately, my “abracadabra” didn’t want to work either. Since there was no help desk to call and the audience members weren’t interested in troubleshooting this either, I had to throw in a towel. Hopefully, I managed to shame the speaker into coming to the ASUG meetings, so it’s possible we get our revenge against the machines.

After that I almost bailed out of the previously planned session UX112 (Enabling Real-Time Decision Making with the Latest Technology from SAP) but there was absolutely nothing else to do. And what do you know - it actually turned out to be a good session from both content and delivery standpoint. I’m not a BI person but wasn’t bored at all. This was an ASUG presentation, so the members might want to search ASUG website for the slides.

Then there was a “customer” keynote delivered by Irfan Khan wearing a very cool jacket (see the picture below). Not many people could pull off this pattern without looking like a clown, I’ll tell you that.

The keynote was kind of meh but sounded cohesive, started on time and even ended 5 minutes earlier. With yesterdays note being off by just 5 minutes I sure hope that the era of self-indulgent extended speeches is now officially over.

Four customers were presented as SAP technology adopters we all should look up to. Not sure what exactly drives the customer choices in these keynotes but, for example, in my home state of North Carolina Lenovo is mostly famous for their layoffs. (Read below on my experience with their laptops.) And ConAgra Foods… Well, I’ll just say that in the foodie circles, “brands that America loves” is not exactly an endorsement. “Chef Boyardee”, anyone? Bleh. What happened with all the cool and wholesome SAP customers? Makes one wonder…

Before lunch I stopped by the networking session NET38892 but, unfortunately, could not hear a single thing. The basement location this year is really awful because the sound bounces between the concrete floor and low industrial-style ceiling. Now I’m rather worried about my own session tomorrow. Yikes.

TEC212 (Goodyear’s Upgrade and Migration with SAP Landscape Transformation) turned out to be a lot more technical than I thought and I ran away to the show floor. The souvenir pickings were rather slim but, just like last year, EPI-USE did not disappoint. So I bestow upon thee my Cutest Swag of the Day Award.

My last session was hands-on UX262 (Adapt SAP Fiori and SAP S/4HANA Suite Apps to Your Business Needs Quickly). It wasn’t as crowded as expected and I even got the whole laptop to myself. The instructions were easy to follow and everything worked fine after one error was resolved in the beginning. I’m not quite sure if moving the fields and adding pop-ups necessarily qualifies as “adapting to business needs” (SAP clearly has not met our business users). But since even I was able to complete all the steps in just one hour let's call it success.

Oh, one thing. In the beginning, I needed to copy-paste some URL and user/password from a document into browser and for some reason the familiar Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V combination did not work. After some head-scratching I realized that I was pressing Ctrl-C without even looking at the keyboard. And, dig this, turns out that on the laptop used in the session some digital innovator decided to switch places Ctrl key and Fn key. Can you guess the laptop brand? Yeah, those guys from the keynote. Ugh.