1 00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:05,280 We are at SAP TechEd 2008, and would you like to introduce yourself, special guest? 2 00:00:05,280 --> 00:00:06,860 I think I could. 3 00:00:06,860 --> 00:00:12,520 The name is Craig Schmayhill, and I am the community evangelist for the SAP Developer 4 00:00:12,520 --> 00:00:20,720 Network, which is SAP's mega development community...I mean, I'll give you the marketing spiel. 5 00:00:20,720 --> 00:00:27,760 We got like 1.4 million registered users, 6,000 messages daily, 15 to 20 weblogs a day, 6 00:00:27,760 --> 00:00:30,120 and like 11,000 wiki pages created. 7 00:00:30,120 --> 00:00:35,440 And you have the classic developer community, the BPX community, and now the business objects 8 00:00:35,440 --> 00:00:36,440 community, right? 9 00:00:36,440 --> 00:00:37,440 Yeah. 10 00:00:37,440 --> 00:00:38,440 Is that all of them now? 11 00:00:38,440 --> 00:00:39,440 No, we've got a couple others. 12 00:00:39,440 --> 00:00:44,680 We've got the IVN, which is the Industry Valley Networks, we've got the ESC, which is the Enterprise 13 00:00:44,680 --> 00:00:51,560 Services Community, and we've got at least two or three others, but they all range in size 14 00:00:51,560 --> 00:00:57,440 from one of them is like 20 people, and it's like an advisory board, all the way up to SDN 15 00:00:57,440 --> 00:00:59,800 being the largest with over a million users by itself. 16 00:00:59,800 --> 00:01:04,120 The Clubhouse actually, though, started in 2004 in San Diego, so this is the fifth year 17 00:01:04,120 --> 00:01:08,680 of having a Clubhouse in the U.S. Europe will be the fifth year as well, and then India will 18 00:01:08,680 --> 00:01:09,800 be the fourth year. 19 00:01:09,800 --> 00:01:10,800 All right. 20 00:01:10,800 --> 00:01:14,240 So we've had a lot of experience with the Clubhouse, we've done a lot of different things. 21 00:01:14,240 --> 00:01:19,440 We think we have a model that works this year because we've got, I guess, more or less a 22 00:01:19,440 --> 00:01:21,040 true representation of the ecosystem. 23 00:01:21,480 --> 00:01:21,640 Yeah. 24 00:01:21,680 --> 00:01:25,840 Because it's not just SDN, it's not just BPX, it's all of them together. 25 00:01:26,220 --> 00:01:29,460 And it's a little bit of marketing stuff, it's a little bit of customer stories and things 26 00:01:29,460 --> 00:01:29,760 like that. 27 00:01:29,960 --> 00:01:32,520 But at the same time, we've got a demand for that. 28 00:01:32,520 --> 00:01:36,200 Even from our hardcore developers, they're like, well, who else is doing this? 29 00:01:36,620 --> 00:01:36,720 Right. 30 00:01:37,000 --> 00:01:42,160 And so the Clubhouse is more or less what we refer to as the physical representation of 31 00:01:42,160 --> 00:01:43,260 our online community. 32 00:01:44,120 --> 00:01:46,240 And this is where all the guys come together. 33 00:01:46,640 --> 00:01:49,700 You know, we've had comments from, can I just come to the Clubhouse? 34 00:01:49,780 --> 00:01:54,940 I get more value from the Clubhouse than anywhere else to, you know, as long as it's not one 35 00:01:54,940 --> 00:01:59,280 of those SAP mentors giving a hands-on session, I want to come to the Clubhouse to talk to 36 00:01:59,280 --> 00:02:04,900 them to, wow, after going to 20 of the hands-on sessions, I wanted to come down to the Clubhouse 37 00:02:04,900 --> 00:02:08,120 and talk to a bunch of my other colleagues who were here going to 20 others. 38 00:02:08,700 --> 00:02:09,820 And 20 is an exaggeration. 39 00:02:09,920 --> 00:02:13,300 I think most people will get about six or seven, you know, in a week. 40 00:02:13,560 --> 00:02:15,460 Because, I mean, some of them are two or three hours long. 41 00:02:15,960 --> 00:02:20,320 And they use the Clubhouse as the central meeting point to then exchange notes. 42 00:02:20,720 --> 00:02:24,700 So you get five guys from the same company, and they just disperse in different directions 43 00:02:24,700 --> 00:02:30,040 and then concentrate in the Clubhouse to then share all of what they've learned that day 44 00:02:30,040 --> 00:02:31,260 and the whole week and everything like that. 45 00:02:31,260 --> 00:02:31,280 Right. 46 00:02:31,280 --> 00:02:34,100 It's also a nice place to hang out is one of the things you're getting at. 47 00:02:34,140 --> 00:02:34,460 Oh, totally. 48 00:02:34,700 --> 00:02:37,820 Instead of having to, as we can see in the background, just sit in the conference hallway. 49 00:02:37,960 --> 00:02:40,880 You know, a lot of people say, well, you know, the hallway is where the hallway demos 50 00:02:40,880 --> 00:02:41,420 take place. 51 00:02:41,440 --> 00:02:41,700 Right. 52 00:02:41,980 --> 00:02:43,820 Well, that's what we set up the Clubhouse for. 53 00:02:44,440 --> 00:02:44,620 You know. 54 00:02:44,660 --> 00:02:44,940 Exactly. 55 00:02:44,940 --> 00:02:46,500 It's got a perfect environment. 56 00:02:46,660 --> 00:02:47,700 Plus, it's got Wi-Fi. 57 00:02:47,820 --> 00:02:48,620 It's got coffee. 58 00:02:48,840 --> 00:02:50,740 It's got couches and chairs. 59 00:02:50,960 --> 00:02:51,480 And plugs. 60 00:02:52,060 --> 00:02:53,160 It's like the hallway con. 61 00:02:53,360 --> 00:02:53,580 That's what it is. 62 00:02:53,580 --> 00:02:55,180 It's the hallway con inside of a room. 63 00:02:55,180 --> 00:02:55,940 Since last year. 64 00:02:56,360 --> 00:02:59,700 I mean, what would you say in the community, like the new things that have been going on? 65 00:02:59,700 --> 00:03:04,580 One, which Red Monk is sponsoring this year, is the Rich Internet Application Hacker Night. 66 00:03:04,700 --> 00:03:07,100 Now, last year we threw it together, very last minute. 67 00:03:07,300 --> 00:03:09,740 You know, it was like two, three weeks before the event started. 68 00:03:10,260 --> 00:03:12,520 And we had like 25, 30 people show up. 69 00:03:13,020 --> 00:03:14,460 And that's all we really planned for. 70 00:03:15,160 --> 00:03:16,860 It was an instant success. 71 00:03:17,220 --> 00:03:20,120 I mean, this is SAP showing brand new UI technologies. 72 00:03:20,320 --> 00:03:22,620 Adobe showing brand new UI technologies. 73 00:03:23,620 --> 00:03:28,380 And now we've got, this year we've got Red Monk there helping lend support with information, 74 00:03:28,820 --> 00:03:30,360 looking into the RIA world. 75 00:03:30,760 --> 00:03:36,020 And we've got CogHeads showing up to show some of the interesting stuff they've done with RIA and SAP. 76 00:03:36,860 --> 00:03:41,240 And, I mean, this is stuff that's not even approved for public consumption. 77 00:03:41,380 --> 00:03:45,940 But, you know, we got total approval to show the SAP stuff here. 78 00:03:46,640 --> 00:03:51,080 And, you know, Adobe's going to give us deep peeks at Genesis and other stuff that they're working on. 79 00:03:51,080 --> 00:03:59,520 So, I mean, it's, I guess you could call it like the nerd location to be Wednesday night is come to Hacker Night. 80 00:04:00,060 --> 00:04:02,800 It's pizza and beer type environment, but it's hands-on. 81 00:04:02,960 --> 00:04:05,800 You know, we're going to do a couple demos, and then we're going to go hands-on. 82 00:04:05,860 --> 00:04:07,480 And people are going to actually try stuff out. 83 00:04:07,620 --> 00:04:10,340 So, that's one of the big things that we've picked up this year. 84 00:04:10,480 --> 00:04:12,420 And we've decided we're expanding it to every little bit. 85 00:04:12,420 --> 00:04:17,060 In the online world of the community, like how big do you think, how much involvement is there in RIA stuff? 86 00:04:17,180 --> 00:04:19,640 Like is it an interesting topic, or how's that working out? 87 00:04:19,640 --> 00:04:21,540 You know, it's a constant topic. 88 00:04:22,060 --> 00:04:25,920 You know, it started, we had stuff on PHP, Perl, and Python, and Ruby. 89 00:04:26,540 --> 00:04:31,400 You know, the open source connectors for these four languages are inside the community being discussed. 90 00:04:31,740 --> 00:04:35,300 Piers Harding, who created three of the four, did it all through the community. 91 00:04:35,480 --> 00:04:41,440 It got direct interaction with the RFC library folks inside of SAP through the community. 92 00:04:42,280 --> 00:04:47,240 So, we've had a constant presence around these types of languages and these types of technologies. 93 00:04:47,400 --> 00:04:54,540 And what we've noticed and seen is a drastic increase from 2006 into 2007 with widget-type technology. 94 00:04:55,100 --> 00:05:00,220 And from 2007 to 2008, we're seeing more and more of the richer widget-type environment. 95 00:05:00,520 --> 00:05:01,400 Air is coming up. 96 00:05:01,540 --> 00:05:02,380 Flex is there. 97 00:05:03,060 --> 00:05:04,420 Flash stuff is coming in. 98 00:05:04,640 --> 00:05:06,540 The widget stuff is getting more and more complex. 99 00:05:06,720 --> 00:05:11,980 We're seeing things that are being done with widgets that, you know, frankly, I think two years ago, nobody would have thought possible. 100 00:05:12,440 --> 00:05:14,820 And we're seeing that constantly inside the community. 101 00:05:15,340 --> 00:05:17,080 Number-wise, we're not huge. 102 00:05:17,520 --> 00:05:18,420 We're definitely not huge. 103 00:05:18,780 --> 00:05:20,140 But it's constant growth. 104 00:05:20,160 --> 00:05:23,000 So, what are people using those widgets or IA things for? 105 00:05:23,100 --> 00:05:24,500 I mean, what do you see them doing with it? 106 00:05:24,500 --> 00:05:32,040 We've got widgets that are connected to the BI platforms, to the business intelligent platform, pulling data out of, like, sales data. 107 00:05:32,040 --> 00:05:34,600 And so, I mean, are they making, like, graphs and charts or, like? 108 00:05:34,600 --> 00:05:37,100 Graphs, charts, but it's not only the graph charts aspect. 109 00:05:37,320 --> 00:05:42,760 It's the idea that you get an initial piece and then you can drill down into each individual piece. 110 00:05:42,900 --> 00:05:51,620 It's a sales guy in the field and he's not sure what he needs or he needs the data, but he doesn't want to take, you know, mountains of paperwork with him or something like that. 111 00:05:51,900 --> 00:05:53,820 He's got a widget now that he can work with. 112 00:05:54,380 --> 00:05:54,480 Right. 113 00:05:54,480 --> 00:05:55,020 And he drills in. 114 00:05:55,080 --> 00:05:56,600 He says, okay, West Coast, boom. 115 00:05:57,340 --> 00:05:59,560 You know, these types of sales, boom, boom, boom, boom. 116 00:05:59,800 --> 00:06:18,100 And all of a sudden, inside of his meeting, on his mobile device, you know, or his iPhone, mobile device, laptop, or wherever, he's getting the drill down data that he needs without going through the complicated process of logging into the system, pulling this report, generating that report, or anything like that. 117 00:06:18,280 --> 00:06:20,620 They're making it easier for these guys to do what they do. 118 00:06:20,620 --> 00:06:24,720 Other things that have been happening, they created a, from the BPX side, they created a book. 119 00:06:25,300 --> 00:06:25,620 Right. 120 00:06:26,080 --> 00:06:29,780 This process first, and they did it all inside of the wiki environment. 121 00:06:30,760 --> 00:06:32,520 I mean, completely inside of the wiki environment. 122 00:06:32,680 --> 00:06:33,900 So, they wrote the book there. 123 00:06:34,060 --> 00:06:34,780 It's now available. 124 00:06:34,920 --> 00:06:37,800 You can download the PDF for free from Amazon and all of this. 125 00:06:37,820 --> 00:06:40,340 We've got a profile area where we're helping people. 126 00:06:40,480 --> 00:06:42,460 I mean, a community of 1.4 million people. 127 00:06:43,140 --> 00:06:44,960 All of a sudden, how do you find one person? 128 00:06:45,680 --> 00:06:47,760 So, we've got this whole profile set up where we're at. 129 00:06:47,760 --> 00:06:49,380 And are those like the business cards or? 130 00:06:49,380 --> 00:06:53,080 It's kind of like the business card, but what we decided was we want to give them free form. 131 00:06:53,840 --> 00:06:55,760 We'll give them a template, but we want to give them free form. 132 00:06:55,840 --> 00:06:56,780 So, we use the wiki. 133 00:06:57,200 --> 00:06:57,440 Right. 134 00:06:57,840 --> 00:07:00,280 And they get a free form environment to create basically. 135 00:07:00,480 --> 00:07:02,660 It's like the old GeoCities of old. 136 00:07:02,880 --> 00:07:04,900 You know, you get your own little personal home page. 137 00:07:05,020 --> 00:07:05,140 Yeah. 138 00:07:05,300 --> 00:07:10,100 Now, what we've done, though, is because not everybody's comfortable with navigating the wiki, 139 00:07:10,340 --> 00:07:13,280 is we created an air app to do it for them. 140 00:07:14,100 --> 00:07:15,180 Oh, right, right, right. 141 00:07:15,180 --> 00:07:15,940 So, we linked all this. 142 00:07:16,060 --> 00:07:21,000 So, the air app, we're actually going to release the entire project archive to the community for them to work on. 143 00:07:21,380 --> 00:07:25,200 And, you know, as we realized, we didn't create a profile viewer. 144 00:07:25,580 --> 00:07:28,640 We created a wiki navigation system. 145 00:07:28,640 --> 00:07:39,680 And tying the air and the flex and the, you know, the RI technologies, we're tying them into practical uses of our own environment, but not necessarily our own technology. 146 00:07:40,000 --> 00:07:40,120 Right. 147 00:07:40,240 --> 00:07:42,340 So, we're seeing various different offshoots. 148 00:07:42,500 --> 00:07:43,740 You know, we're seeing people use it. 149 00:07:44,300 --> 00:07:50,160 You know, we're seeing flex widgets created for countdown timers for SAP, you know, tech ed events. 150 00:07:50,260 --> 00:07:54,160 And then, all of a sudden, somebody goes, well, God, I can do that for other stuff. 151 00:07:54,220 --> 00:07:55,660 We've got this point recognition system. 152 00:07:55,820 --> 00:08:00,100 A lot of people, you know, a lot of people are like, well, I don't know, points and all this. 153 00:08:00,140 --> 00:08:00,620 But, you know what? 154 00:08:00,880 --> 00:08:04,840 It's a great way of tracking some friendly competition. 155 00:08:04,940 --> 00:08:05,200 Right. 156 00:08:05,500 --> 00:08:06,460 Activity, it seems like. 157 00:08:06,460 --> 00:08:06,740 Activity. 158 00:08:07,280 --> 00:08:11,320 And it's also a great indicator for somebody like me who's got such a broad area. 159 00:08:11,320 --> 00:08:14,680 I mean, there's like 85 topics that I've got to keep my eye on. 160 00:08:15,120 --> 00:08:19,500 And it's a great way for me to track increases, spikes in activity. 161 00:08:20,060 --> 00:08:21,360 And lulls in activity. 162 00:08:21,820 --> 00:08:25,500 And what we decided to do was we're going to take those points. 163 00:08:25,640 --> 00:08:27,220 We're going to stick them in a bucket for the year. 164 00:08:27,540 --> 00:08:35,180 And if we reach certain levels, 2.5 million, 3.5 million, we're going to give a set amount of money to the World Food Program. 165 00:08:35,180 --> 00:08:37,540 First milestone, 2.5 million. 166 00:08:37,820 --> 00:08:40,600 We're going to give $100,000 or euro or dollars. 167 00:08:40,760 --> 00:08:41,540 It's $100,000. 168 00:08:41,860 --> 00:08:43,520 We're going to give it to the World Food Program. 169 00:08:44,480 --> 00:08:49,060 So, in Berlin, you know, I think we've hit the 2.5 now. 170 00:08:49,860 --> 00:08:53,860 But, you know, I always like to wait a week or two to see how things level out. 171 00:08:54,120 --> 00:08:58,400 You know, because sometimes it's, you know, something was, you know, points were there. 172 00:08:58,580 --> 00:09:01,400 But then the person decides, you know what, I didn't like it, so I'm going to remove it. 173 00:09:01,960 --> 00:09:02,660 Oh, right, right. 174 00:09:02,940 --> 00:09:03,780 You know, it's like in the wiki. 175 00:09:04,020 --> 00:09:08,000 You know, you create a whole wiki area and then you say, you know what, not what I wanted. 176 00:09:08,240 --> 00:09:09,980 Let's get rid of it and start again. 177 00:09:10,080 --> 00:09:11,680 And with the wiki environment, it's easy to do. 178 00:09:11,940 --> 00:09:15,620 So, you know, I always like to wait a week or two to see things level out. 179 00:09:15,680 --> 00:09:17,800 But it looks very, very promising for that. 180 00:09:17,880 --> 00:09:18,580 So, we're pretty excited. 181 00:09:18,600 --> 00:09:18,780 Well, that's great. 182 00:09:18,860 --> 00:09:20,960 Well, thanks for getting us updated on what's been happening. 183 00:09:21,040 --> 00:09:21,320 Yeah, thank you.