In true Web 2.0 fashion, I’m attending the SAP TechEd event in Berlin by watching the virtual TechEd stream, with live coverage of the main keynotes and interviews in key areas. You can watch a replay yourself on the Virtual TechEd site.

The session started off with the new (excellent) “run better” SAP ad, featuring a wide selection of SAP customers:

Mark Yolton then stepped up on stage to welcome the crowd and members of the SAP Community Network. He emphasized the importance of people and community at the event — 15,000 attendees across the four locations, with over a thousand hours of lectures and on-hands sessions.

Next up was SAP CTO Vishal Sikka, who kicked off with a message designed to combat the positioning of various SAP competitors including Oracle: “People are looking for solutions, not stacks”. It’s now about the ecosystem, and it’s not possible for an ecosystem to come together on a single stack. Organizations need “non-disruptive” change. A stable core is important, but there has to be continuous evolution on top.

Vishal reiterated some of the messages from previous years, including the notion of “timeless software”, that allows you to innovate even with older platforms.

Vishal emphasized the continuing importance of SAP NetWeaver: “It’s the foundation of what we do”. He went over some of the numbers: 18,000 NetWeaver customers, 10,000 using BW, and 6,000 using the SAP Portal, many with more than 100,000 users, including the SAP community network itself with over 2 million members. “It’s alive, it’s kicking, and the numbers tell us that it’s not only being used to run the core infrastructure, but also extending it to their non-SAP applications. It’s strategic to our customers, and so it’s strategic to us.”

Vishal then invited Bjoern Goerke, in charge of the SAP NetWeaver platform, to discuss the new NetWeaver 7.3, due out later this quarter.

Bjoern explained how the NetWeaver team were delivering innovation without disruption into existing landscapes. Everything is now on the same release level, worked hard on maintainability, scalability, and performance – for example, reducing the downtime needed to install enhancement packs from several hours down to just a few minutes.

Next Vishal talked about the importance of Business Intelligence, and the upcoming release of SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 (project name “Aurora”). For the first time, all the clients tools have a common look and feel, and there’s improved integration with SAP Netweaver (identity management, BW, etc.).

The next subject was mobility. With Sybase, SAP is now the clear leader in enterprise mobility. There are now more than 4 billion mobile devices in the world, and Sybase is essential to using them. Over 2 billion messages are sent through Sybase systems every day (SMS, etc.), and Sybase recently crossed the threshold of a trillion messages through their servers. And Sybase also brings other great technology – their CEP (complex event processing) platform, the ASA and IQ databases will all be integrated into the NetWeaver framework.

He then invited Sam Yen on stage to show you how NetWeaver, BusinessObjects, and Sybase can work together.

The demonstration scenario was a series of Norwegian oil rigs, where there are sensors recording almost 600,000 events per minute, but there’s very low bandwidth between the rigs and the central offices, so  a lot of the processing has to be locally, and intelligently.

Suddenly, the oil production drops, and we can see the information in real-time using an Xcelsius (now BusinessObjects Dashboards) dashboard.

Let’s drill into the detail. We can see that Gate A was in the danger zone, and has been shut down.

What’s going on behind the scenes? Here’s the CEP development environment, that lets people easily create and change the real-time events that they would like to track and monitor

This is a very real need in oil and gas organizations today, but it takes a lot of painful programming. Because these systems are connected to NetWeaver, people can have these types of dashboards, running on top of Event Insight, as part of their enterprise portal.

Sam demonstrated the new SAP Enterprise Workspace, that users can customize with their own content, without any help needed from IT.

For example, he added the previous Event Insight dashboard, by choosing from the available applications…

And then simply dragging and dropping the module into the workspace.

Users have full ability to customize their experience including information from the outside world, etc.

Another example could be choosing vendors based on their carbon footprint. We look at the list of vendors:

And then he added a a sustainability module, using the functionality available in Carbon Impact.

Here’s the current version of Carbon impact shown within the portal:

Soon, SAP will be extending this functionality, with some of the products from the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center, such as Social Intelligence, in this case used in order to find sustainability experts inside my organization. People can easily do a search:

Find out how they are related to the rest of the organization:

And then invite them into the Enterprise Workspace.

Sam explained that the same portal and content can be made available for business partners outside the organization – Enterprise Workspaces in the cloud:

Vishal Sikka then moved from the improvements to existing products, such as NetWeaver, and BusinessObjects, to “New Horizons”, the new possibilities available in the future, with cloud computing, mobility, and in-memory computing: “On the one hand, we need continuous evolution. On the other hand, there are new possibilities – how to we bring fundamentally new solutions to the existing landscapes?”

Vishal outlined three big changes to technology possibilities:

(1) Cloud. There have been advances not only virtualization, but also in the ability to provision new services in public clouds. We need have the integrity of existing systems, AND improve the ease of consumption. How can we do that?

SAP want to bring the benefits of cloud computing to everyone, and the flagship product is Business ByDesign, which is not only a full suite for mid-size companies, but also the basis of the applications that SAP will deliver in the cloud.

Having a cloud platform lets us build applications, such as SAP StreamWork for collaboration and Carbon Impact, which runs on the Amazon Cloud.

(2) Mobile. Mobile internet use is already seven times the use of broadband. There are lots of new devices poised to join the market, including the RIM “PlayBook”. Users want a great experience. Vishal: “The screens want to be liberated from the tyranny of the desktop!”. What is possible?

There’s the Sybase Unwired platform that allows you to write applications once and deploy them to multiple platforms. And beyond the mobile devices, there are other platforms, such as SharePoint, Facebook, and Lotus Notes. The Gateway project was designed to make it easier to access SAP applications from these environments, as well as existing SAP systems back to R3 v 4.6C. It will be generally available later this year – you can already sign up for the ramp up program.

Microsoft and Cap Gemini recently worked together on an HR system for Microsoft that used the new Gateway functionality.

Representatives of the two companies explained that it enabled them to easily and quickly implement a new HR hiring application – something that is a critical application for Microsoft.

They explained that the application took about one-sixth of the time it normally would have done to implement, thanks to the Gateway functionality.

Sam Yen came back on stage to give a demonstration of the technology working together

He showed the end to end traceability of the SAP application within a SharePoint portal:

He explained that Gateway makes it easy to consume SAP data, no matter what front end you are using – for example, using a Macintosh.

Sam showed how you could create and start consuming SAP data on an iPad in less than two minutes. First, you choose the data you want to expose:

And in what form you would like to expose it:

Then you can use the standard Apple environment to compile an application:

And make it available to the iPad – in this case a simple employee search using information from the SAP HR database:

The last topic was in-memory computing, described by Vishal as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”.

He explained that the current hardware possibilities were pretty much unimaginable ten years ago. With multi-core processing, software vendors have to rewrite their software to take advantage of parallelism, but once they have, the possibilities are amazing: real-time access to information, at a lower cost.

He gave an example of what’s possible, explaining that at a previous event in Berlin, in July, the CTO of one of the largest CPG companies in the world had challenged him to help them predict demand for their products at a row level – they had 460 billion records. Vishal put a team on it, and found that not only was it possible to access the data, it could be done 20x faster than anything the customer had previously tried. 460 billion records of data was about 45 terabytes. Compressed into a column database, it was around three to five terabytes. They put together a machine with ten server blades for around $530,000 using standard Intel parts.

The new HANA product is available for ramp up on November 30th, and he invited the audience to take part. One of the first customers is already in a pilot, running live. Vishal explained that the future direction is to “revitalize our entire product portfolio, starting with new applications – planning, forecasting, simulations”. He gave the example of utility companies using it to monitor and react to information from smart meters in real time.

Sam Yen came back on stage to give some examples.

The first was accessing over 4 billion rows of data in less than 0.03seconds, using HANA and the BusinessObjects Explorer front end.

The second example showed how you can get real-time access to live application data. He showed an SAP internal application for pipeline data. Here’s the initial view, seen on an iPad using BusinessObjects Explorer for iPad:

He then went into the SAP system to change some of the pipeline values, in a database containing half a million records. The data is then replicated to the HANA box in real-time using Sybase Replication services.

The simulation would normally take several hours to run, but now the data is reflected on the iPad in seconds:

Vishal finished with a high-level summary of the themes of his presentation: Innovation without disruption, through the new NetWeaver and BusinessObjects products, and the new possibilities afforded by the cloud, mobile use, and in-memory analytics.

It’s now official: SAP has released its brand-new Web 2.0 product called StreamWork. The project was initially called “Constellation” within SAP, and was first exposed to beta customers on the web site 12sprints.com, as covered in earlier postings on this site.

Why the name? It’s a variant on “workstream”, which according to Wikipedia is:

“A flow of output, the activities and transactions, that a worker produces as they go about their daily work activities. Workstreams are flows of largely unstructured data that workstreaming technologies seek to capture, document and repackage in more intelligent ways benefiting individual workers, managers and corporations.”

And the article goes on to say:

“…tapping into and mining these workstreams presents tremendous opportunities to companies in terms of collaboration, agility and collective intelligence.”

Other research seems to back this up. According to a study by Frost & Sullivan, 36% of company performance is determined by organizations’ “collaborative index”:

“This is more than twice the impact of a company’s strategic orientation (16%) and more than five times the impact of market and technological turbulence influences (7%). This is a key finding because it empirically demonstrates that increased high-quality collaboration can improve business performance.“

The Power of Collaborative Decisions

Every person in every organization makes many decisions every day. Many of these are so small that we don’t even recognize them as decisions. Every time a sales person calls a customer, she is “deciding” to prioritizing that activity over everything else she could be doing. Of course, a sub-optimal decision may not make much difference. But over time, and across a large organization, these small decisions pile up and have a huge influence to corporate performance.

Of course, computer systems have been promising Improved business decision-making since at least the 1950s, by providing more information about company operations. And they have largely delivered, enabling corporations of breath-taking complexity. But you can give everybody the same facts, and still end up with completely different views about what the data means, and what should be done about it (just look at any group of rival politicians!).

Decision-making is a core business function of every organization, and has been extensively studied by scientists and management theorists. But despite all the advances in theory, real-life decision-making is still dominated by people, personalities, and endless emails and meetings.

Decisions still tend to be made in messy, non-repeatable, “are-we-really-sure-about-this?” ways, relying heavily on “gut feel”. People often spend more time and effort making decisions as they do on actually trying to execute them, and reviewing / reversing decisions that have already been made (every new politician and executive feels honor-bound to reverse the decisions of their predecessors).

Collaboration or “Enterprise 2.0” platforms, including Jive and Cubetree and Google Wave have helped, by letting employees work together on projects, but they typically don’t directly support goal-oriented decision-making.

Introducing SAP StreamWork

StreamWork helps you bring together:

• All the right people needed to make a good decision (executives, influencers, experts), across different corporate functions and geographies
• All the information relevant to the decision, from inside or outside the organization, both qualitative and quantitative, objective and subjective (and reformat it, if necessary). Integration with Evernote and Scribd makes it easy to upload and share documents.
• All the right methods that should be brought to bear in order to consider all the aspects of the decision (cost/benefit analysis, SWOT analysis, Pro/Con charts, responsibility matrices, etc.)

See this link for a summary of StreamWork features and view the StreamWork YouTube Channel for an extensive set of how-to videos.

By putting all this in one environment, and letting people collaborate and comment and add data and add documents, and explain their reasoning, organizations get:

• More clarity about why decisions are being made
• More engagement from employees, who can see a direct link between their suggestions and the final result
• More commitment to decisions (research shows that we care more about fair process than we do with final decisions. If we feel our voice has been heard, we’re far more likely to comply with the final choice, even if we didn’t agree with it)
• Better results. Measurement and tracking of the decision-making process, allowing you to optimize the process over time (faster decision cycles, better outcomes)

On-Demand, Extensible Architecture

StreamWork uses an on-demand architecture, so you can be productive immediately without any software installs, and you can easily invite people from inside or outside the organization without having to worry about access problems. And it provides an open REST API, making it easy to extend StreamWork functionality and integrate with other systems.

Here’s a look at some of the add-ons that have already been built, including integration with InfoView, Text-to-query, Android, YouTube, and others.

Here’s a great example of the integration possibilities from OffiSync:

And SAP is busy integrating other prototypes such as Gravity, covered in an earlier post, with StreamWork.

Pricing

The basic edition is free, with up to five activities, 250Mb of storage, and the unlimited ability to collaborate in others’ activities. The Professional Edition costs $9/month for up to 100 activities, 5Gb of storage, and more control over user security. An Enterprise Edition is in the works, with more details to be announced later this year.

Sign up Now!

Signing up for StreamWork is easy and free — click here.

Other Coverage and Links

• Alex Williams, ReadWriteWeb: Does StreamWork Give a Picture of SAP’s Future?
• Bob Thompson, Customer Think: Will StreamWork get SAP out of its Innovation Funk?
• Chris Kanaracus, IDG News: SAP’s ‘Virtual War Room’ Tool Gets a Name: StreamWork
• Jon Brodkin, Network World: SAP Targets Online Collaboration Market with StreamWork
• Larry Barrett, Datamation: SAP Debuts Cloud-Based Collaboration Apps
• Xavier Lanier, GottaBeMobile.com: Evernote’s Incorporated in SAP Collaboration Tool
• B-Eye-Network: Formerly Known as 12sprints, SAP StreamWork is now Generally Available
• Rich Hoeg: 12Sprints Tutorial

I believe SAP is an under-appreciated leader in the Web 2.0 space, and this blog attempts to explain why. First, I should first point out that there are three distinct categories you can talk about SAP interacting with Web 2.0 technology:

• Web 2.0 by SAP – Web 2.0 products and services SAP provides to customers
• Web 2.0 with SAP – how SAP uses Web 2.0 techniques to interact with our customers and partners
• Web 2.0 at SAP – how SAP uses Web 2.0 technology within SAP

Let’s look at each of these in turn:

Web 2.0 by SAP

The term Web 2.0 means different things to different people, but generally people use it to encompass one or more of the following categories:

Easy, Powerful Interfaces

Web 2.0 products have simple, interactive, attractive, and intuitive interfaces that let people access information and carry out tasks without training.

SAP is a strong believer in design thinking across all aspects of the product solutions. Technology examples include:

• SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Accelerated, that lets you browse through billions of rows of corporate data as easily as you browse the web, using innovative memory-resident analytics coupled with an interface that automatically proposes appropriate analyses.
• SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius, providing attractive, interactive dashboards that can be seamlessly integrated into everyday business activities. For example, a presenter can show the effect of changes to forecasted variables in real time, directly within a PowerPoint presentation.

On-Demand, Mobile, and Cloud Computing

Web 2.0 applications are available on-demand, with a variety of different devices, with an internet-based platform that scales smoothly as demand grows.

SAP has a clear on-demand and cloud strategy:

• John Wookey and Peter Lorenz have outlined a clear on-demand strategy
• SAP Business ByDesign is now achieving wide recognition as a well-designed, flexible, on-demand business application, and its intuitive user interface now enables users to customize their own KPI dashboards and integrate third-party Web services such as GoYellow, Google Maps, or Map24.
• The SAP BusinessObjects on-demand platform has long been the clear leader in business intelligence as a service, letting organizations cleanse, store, analyze and share information effectively without having to install any hardware or software.
• SAP partners provide on-demand extensions to existing in-house functionality.

Collaboration

Web 2.0 tools let people work together to achieve common goals, frequently crossing traditional fault lines such as country, culture, or company boundaries.

SAP believes that collaboration tools should be aligned with business process. Example of technology include:

• The SAP Netweaver Portal provides discussion forums, lets users comment on, rank, and tag content, and integrate SAP content seamlessly into other platforms such as Microsoft Sharepoint.
• Collaboration can be analyzed and optimized, like any other business activity. Jive software, the leading independent vendor of Enterprise 2.0 solutions, provides SAP BusinessObjects’ on-demand analytics as an integrated part of their product offer.
• Data from SAP systems can be used to augment conversations on platforms such as Google Wave.
• The SAP Gravity prototype lets users of Google Wave bring together technical and business experts to collaborate on business process
• The new SAP BusinessObjects 12sprints prototype supports directed, collaborative decision-making.

Social Networking

Web 2.0 tools let people make connections and share status updates.

SAP gives organizations the tools they need to monitor and optimize social networking inside and outside organizations.

• SAP’s text analytics provide organizations with the ability to do “sentiment analysis” across social media, and automatically integrate
• SAP’s CRM solutions provide a seamless customer experience across networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
• The Social Network Analyzer prototype lets organizations bring together and analyze the relationships that are created between employees, and between the company and its customers. It makes it easy to mine the the wealth of data stored in existing corporate systems, such as the organizational hierarchy from a human capital management system, informal organizational information stored in email distribution lists and project systems, the sales relationships from the customer relationship management system, inquiries made through the support platform or web site, etc.
• Twitter is fast becoming a platform for crowd-sourced data gathering. SAP prototypes allow people to avoid traffic in Australia and make presentations an interactive, collaborative experience by showing the “backchannel” twitter feed directly within the presenter’s slides, and allowing voting via twitter.

Mashups

Web 2.0 tools are open and easily integrated with other solutions.

SAP is the clear leader in real-life business process, and realizes that it’s essential to bridge systems and combine information from multiple sources

• SAP is a leading proponent of services-oriented architectures, that allow organizations to easily and seamless provide an end-to-end business process across multiple different application architectures.
• For individuals, the SAP rooftop marketplace prototype lets business people easily integrate information from multiple different sources and applications using open interfaces.

Web 2.0 with SAP

SAP Community Network

The SAP community network site (SCN) is rated as the best in the industry. It gives the SAP ecosystem of customers, partners, solution providers and employees a platform to share questions and expertise. A wide range of different business, solution, and technical areas are covered, and it is . A full set of Web 2.0 tools are provided for members, including discussion forums, blogs (over 5,000 contributors, of whom only 30% work for SAP), e-learning, wikis, and reputation and recognition programs, and there are tight links with other platforms such as LinkedIn and the SAP Social Media page
The site has dedicated spaces for the developer network, the business process expert (BPX) community, a Business Objects community, a university alliance community, a community career center, an interactive documentation space called docupedia, an Innocentive innovation challenge program, EcoHub, a community-driven online marketplace, and a soon-to-be-launched code exchange area.

SCN has over 2 million members, who post around 6,000 messages a day in over 200 different discussion forums, and over 250 blog posts each month. People from 229 countries and territories visited the site over 28 million times in 2009, and viewed over 200 million pages.

The growing involvement in these communities helps SAP get closer to customers, partners and stakeholders for product and service innovation. For example, SAP product marketing managers use the BPX community to share product information and best practices for product use and get product feedback. And SAP customers share their own best practices with their peers and get unbiased advice.

SAP’s Community Workspace platform provides customers and employees with the ability to set up invitation-only collaboration forums to discuss common interests, such as “business process in the Oil and Gas Industry”. Over 60,000 people from over 2,000 different customers participate in over 3,500 different forums, visiting the site more than 260,000 times each month.

SAP Influencer Program

SAP provides what many consider the gold standard program for industry analysts, journalists, and bloggers. The program involves regular meetings and virtual events, and a hosted platform for quick answers to questions. It is famous for providing exceptionally open access to senior executives, company directions, and product plans, and for openly accepting and integrating regular critics of the company.

SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center

SAP is taking an increasingly Web 2.0 approach to innovation. Modeled on the Google Labs, the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center lets customers trial early prototypes and give feedback, long before traditional product development lifecycles. The center receives thousands of pieces of feedback each week that are used to adapt and improve products.

Web 2.0 at SAP

All SAP employees have access to full collection of Web 2.0 tools through the internal corporate portal, including blogging, wikis, discussion forums, collaboration areas, and microblogging.

SAP was one of the earliest members of the 2.0 Adoption Council, a group dedicated to collecting and sharing best practice use of Web 2.0 to improve employee productivity and collaboration. Employees are encouraged to participate in external social media, and have been provided with a clear set of social media guidelines.

SAP and Web 2.0

In the end, it’s all about bringing together the best of SAP and the best of Web 2.0

For more information about any of these topics, please browse the other posts on this blog.

Another round of updates to the PowerPoint Twitter Tools, including:

• Auto-tweeting
• An additional feedback slide
• An option for secure internal use
• A customizable text-zooming tool
• The ability to set up values in advance (for example, to add the tools into a conference template)

To access all these tools, please go to the main download page: http://www.sapweb20.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools/. Here’s some information about each of the new features:

PowerPoint AutoTweet

The PowerPoint AutoTweet functionality, available as a PowerPoint Add-in, lets you automatically update your twitter status during your presentation.

As you go through your slides in presentation mode, any text in your note pages between the tags [twitter] and [/twitter] will automatically be tweeted when you reach the appropriate slide.

The plugin uses Microsoft VBA (visual basic for applications), so is only supported in PowerPoint for Windows (the idea is based on similar functionality already available for Keynote on the Macintosh).

Checking the “Display success status of tweets” option will show a dialog box during the presentation, telling you whether the tweet was successful or not. It will close automatically after a second or so (the actual time may vary depending on the vagaries of Windows processing).

You can use the twitter feed to reinforce the points you are making in your presentation, or ask the audience questions related to your content, and include a feedback slide later in the presentation to review the audience replies.

New Feedback Slide

Here’s another feedback slide tool for high-tweet locations (web 2.0 conferences, etc.), showing twice as many tweets as the original. Like the original, it auto-refreshes every 30 seconds and supports pagination and custom feeds (for example using a service like http://TidyTweet.com for a moderated feed, or any other atom-based feed).

Secure Internal Use

What if you would like to use the PowerPoint Twitter Tools for an internal meeting, but don’t want to blast your critique of executive strategy over the internet?

One option is to use the open-source microblogging platform from Status.Net (motto: “Your life and your business are your own. Take control of your status.”). You can see an example of this product in action at www.identi.ca

To use the product, you’d need to install a server inside your organization, invite your employees to register, and then use a custom feed such as:

http://yourinternalserver:1088/api/statusnet/tags/timeline/thetagyouwanttofollow.atom

The two feedback slides and the ticker bar all support the use of custom feeds. Unfortunately, some of the status.net feeds don’t include the avatars link, so you only get the text updates using this method (e.g. see the screen shot below using the public feed for the “enterprise20” tag from identi.ca: http://identi.ca/api/statusnet/tags/timeline/enterprise20.atom).

Zoom Text Tool

This tool doesn’t connect directly to twitter just yet, but it’s a nice graphic effect that you can customize with your own words. Here’s a glimpse of what it looks like (this text moves towards the viewer, and you can click on values to move them to the center)

Support for Predefined Values and Templates

Do any of these apply to you?

• You’re tired of entering the same keyword values each time you open the presentation?
• You have a technically-challenged manager, and you need to set the values in advance?
• You’re scared that the audience might – gasp — see the mouse on the screen? (this is a surprisingly common fear among conference organizers)
• You’d like to set up a conference template for others to uses

The answer to all these is to use the setup variables, now supported by most of the tools. To set variables in advance, simple right-click the tool in PowerPoint and add them to the end of the movie name. Here’s a quick list of the variables available:

• “keyword=yoursearchterm” (use %20 instead of a space if you need two words)
• “locked=1” hides the bar for the search term, effectively “locking” it to whatever you’ve pre-set
• “votes=10” to set the maximum number of votes
• “customfeed=1” to enable a custom feed
• “customfeedurl=http://yourcustomfeedurl” to set the value of the custom feed
• “days=4” increases the number of days votes are valid for
• “percentageorvalue=1” to show percentage by default (0 to show value)
• “choice1=YourChoiceText” for the hover-over text on the voting charts (choice1 through choice6, as appropriate – and use %20 instead of a space if you need two words)

For example, if you wanted to set up the feedback slide so that it automatically opened with a search for the tag “#sap”, you can simply right-mouse click on the movie, and add “?keyword=#sap” to the end of the “Movie” Parameter (note that in theory you should use URLencoding of values, e.g. %23 instead of #, but it seems to work anyway)

And here’s an example of the text to add in order to get a locked-down, custom moderated feed:
“?locked=1&customfeed=1&customfeedurl=http://timoelliott.tidytweet.com/SAPWeb20.atom”

Here’s the result – note that the search term can no longer be changed:

To see which values are valid for which movies, click on the “embed” button, and view the options for the embedded HTML:

To access all these tools, please go to the main download page: http://www.sapweb20.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools/

New tool: PowerPoint Crowd Meter

When you want to take a break from using Twitter for interaction, try the PowerPoint Crowd Meter – monitors and displays the noise of the crowd in the room, and shows the maximum volume over the last ten seconds – use it for crowd voting!

New Features

“Quiet” Voting. A new option avoids all your followers having to see your votes. Simply use the format “@tweetbyvote 1 myvote”, where myvote is the ID you’re using for the vote. Try using “xcelsiustweet” if you want to do testing.

More Voting Options. There’s now a choice between seeing the voting results as either percentages or vote totals, with the numbers displayed on top of the bars, and you can click through to a Twitter web page to see the actual votes cast.

Automatic Refresh. The feedback slide and the voting slides now refresh automatically every 30 seconds. Beware of keeping them open for too long, or you may run into issues with Twitter Rate Limiting.

Easy Access to Instructions and Embedding. The widgets now all include information and embed icons that give you access to the instructions page on this site, and the HTML needed to embed the widget in web pages:

Predefined Values. For advanced users, the widgets now include support for Flash variables for predefining certain options, such as the search text that appears in the lower left, the number of votes to be counted, etc. Examine the code available through the embed icon, or see the instructions page for more details.

Please keep your feedback and feature requests coming! http://twitter.com/sapweb20 or timo.elliott@sap.com

SAP has been a long-time user of Jive Software’s forum and workspace technology (formerly called ClearSpace, now SBS for “Social Business Software”), and there are close commercial ties between the two companies. Notably, Jive’s platform is used to power the SAP Collaboration Workspace area that is used for both external collaboration with customers as well as internal collaboration – including the main internal “SAP 2.0” forum for discussing SAP’s own adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technology.

But as discussed in a previous post, Social Networking @ SAP, and like most large organizations, a variety of other platforms are also used inside the organization including Atlassian’s Confluence and an internal development, Harmony.

In addition to these existing deployments, late last year, a small workgroup of SAP BusinessObjects employees based in Palo Alto, California, began beta-testing a new, on-demand enterprise collaboration suite called CubeTree.

The initial installation was focused mainly on twitter-like status feeds, functionality that wasn’t easily available from the other platforms. It rapidly went viral within the company, with employees able to invite other employees. I personally started using the site in November last year.

During the initial beta phase, CubeTree was used widely across different SAP departments, and I personally found it very useful to get insights into the activities of other teams working on related projects – especially SAP’s own web 2.0 technology plans.

One of the key advantages of the CubeTree on-demand architecture is the ability to rapidly add new features as they are demanded by users. There’s a weekly software update, and new features are explained on the company’s blog. To help encourage a variety of opinions and focus feedback, CubeTree uses functionality from User Voice. Participants are given “votes” they can use when making requests and comments to developers.

CubeTree launched their production platform in May of this year, and it now provides the full suite of typical features offered on today’s consumer social networking sites: user profiles, follow/follower news feeds, micro-blogging, along with enterprise collaboration tools including wikis, file sharing, and polls.

Here’s a list of features, and the feature tour video from the CubeTree web site, below.

David Meyer, VP Product Management for Emerging Technologies for SAP BusinessObjects was the main sponsor of the CubeTree project, and participated in the CubeTree launch video below, talking about the promise of the social enterprise and how CubeTree helps him achieve his goals.

Transcript of the video:

Voice-over: SAP BusinessObjects has employees and offices around the world, designing and developing the world’s leading business intelligence solutions. Managing product lifecycles throughout multiple offices and time zones has its challenges, so they turned to CubeTree to facilitate collaboration and to open up channels of communication between stakeholders.

David Meyer: CubeTree helps ideas flow like water and I think that everybody in the enterprise is incredibly thirsty these days, because they’re captured in these silos and stuck in meetings and we need to bring back that human element. And people often don’t equate technology, the social technology, with the human element, and they think it’s de-humanizing. I think that people that are immersed in these systems see it as the exact opposite. They re-humanize within the confines and the constraints of how we’re forced to live our enterprise days.

Voice-over: Casual conversations and impromptu meetings are commonplace. But collaboration within the enterprise can be limited to one office or one team. By using CubeTree, development is more agile and collaboration is made easier.

David: CubeTree meets some of the needs — the very real needs — we have in the enterprise by making us simply move faster. Somebody says something in CubeTree. Somebody else says something from a different walk of life. A few minutes later, and by the end of the day, there’s a brand-new idea. It didn’t exist in the morning. It’s the composite idea, the best, the 1+1+1=8 within these dialogs with people from diverse viewpoints. And those are the things that are very exciting, that I think everybody is starting to feel the acceleration that these tools can provide.

Voice-over: CubeTree has already impacted the way people work at SAP BusinessObjects.

David: The other day I was remarking on a little company that TechCrunch covered. Within three hours, somebody from the ecosystem team saw that I had a point of view on it, looked at it themselves, realized where it fit in into our product strategy, and that same day had signed an NDA with that company, and was talking to them the next day. That’s remarkable!

David also explained his motivations for using CubeTree in the launch press release:

“The market looks to SAP as an innovator and thought leader in driving business transformation through technology. Social networks are transforming how people communicate in their personal lives. We adopted CubeTree’s enterprise social software to bring the same network effect into the enterprise, connecting people and ideas across the company to accelerate our business.”

The internal deployment has not been without its wrinkles, however. Legal and IT security objections to the use of a hosted environment (rather than the in-house deployment of the Jive platform) had to be overcome, and deployment had to be briefly interrupted for non-US employees while European data confidentiality concerns were addressed. In some countries such as Germany, the employee worker council had to be consulted, and has not yet given its go-ahead, barring that country from the deployment. And, of course, the functionality overlaps with existing platforms were examined, and a business case required for the costs and overhead of a new solution.

Unlike the Jive collaboration platform that is available to all SAP staff, CubeTree deployment is currently only available for employees of one of the product divisions of SAP Business Objects, but the deployment may be (re)extended in the future.

Links

• TechCrunch: CubeTree Launches As A Facebook + FriendFeed + Twitter For Enterprise
• Bill Ives: CubeTree Releases Innovative Enterprise Collaboration Platform
• “Buzz” Area of CubeTree web site: http://www.cubetree.com/site/buzz
• Official CubeTree Twitter Channel: http://twitter.com/cubetree
• Ross Fubini, CTO and Co-founder of CubeTree on Twitter: http://twitter.com/fubini

SAP recently announced a new set of Social Media Participation Guidelines and an internal forum to help employees make the most of new social media channels such as Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In the spirit of Web 2.0, and like other organizations such as Intel and IBM, we would like to share our guidelines with the community.

SAP Social Media Participation Guidelines 2009

SAP Global Communications, SAP Global Marketing
June 2009

This document reflects the current guidelines as determined by SAP Global Communications, SAP Global Marketing and SAP Legal in collaboration with employees. This document is subject to modifications and amendments from time to time as required.

SOCIAL MEDIA PARTICIPATION GUIDELINES
The following guidelines describe private, individual participation in social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, personal blogs, forums, YouTube, Flickr etc. for SAP employees. If your job requires you to be an SAP evangelist in social media channels and you have questions, or you want to establish social media channels on behalf of SAP or an SAP group, contact the SAP Social Media Group by sending a mail to [redacted]. For any other questions about social media at SAP, please visit the SAP-internal SAP 2.0 Community.

These guidelines are intended to assist you in your use of social media tools as an individual. Please be aware that nothing in the use of these tools changes your responsibilities and obligations as an employee of SAP. SAP and its employees are required to act ethically, and it is every employee’s obligation to review and understand SAP’s Code of Business Conduct, our communications policy, and their confidentiality obligations in other policies, such as the Security Policy.

Social media channels such as (micro) blogging, video and photo sharing, forums, virtual worlds, opinion markets and collaboration environments represent an opportunity to facilitate conversation with all of our constituents regarding the enterprise software industry and our place in it. SAP provides these social media guidelines to help employees participate within social media channels safely, and with minimum personal liability.

The SAP employee community collaborated in writing these guidelines. Specifically, a draft set of guidelines was posted on an internal SAP Wiki and SAP employees from divisions throughout the organization were invited to make comments and suggestions aimed at developing an appropriate set of guidelines.

These guidelines reflect the principles that SAP employees should follow when engaging in online communication. They are intended to provide you with an understanding of both the proper and improper uses of social computing in an effort to make your conversations and interactions as rich as possible. At all times, SAP employees must obey their local laws and adhere to local legal and ethical regulations. Nevertheless, as online communication is global in nature, other laws and regulations may also be applicable to your communication.

Please note that any direct communication to analysts, the financial market and/or members of the media must be conducted only through SAP Global Communications. The following set of guidelines only pertains to your personal statements in any online media. Please be aware that, although SAP is providing you with these guidelines, the overall and final legal responsibility for any statement made by you will reside with you personally. Therefore, you should exercise caution and thoughtfulness to statements you make online.

Setting up personal spaces in social media channels – You are free to set up any blog, space or other area within the given framework of the terms provided by the host of such spaces (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc). Please contact the SAP Social Media Group whenever you intend to use “SAP” as any part of the name or URL to avoid confusion with official SAP communication. Any personal space should have a clear disclaimer that it is not an official space of SAP. The following template may be used for this purpose:

“This [Choose. Blog, Space ...] is the personal [Blog, Space …] of [Name] and only contains my personal views, thoughts and opinions. It is not endorsed by SAP nor does it constitute any official communication of SAP.”

Managers and executives take note: This standard disclaimer does not by itself exempt SAP managers and executives from a special responsibility when blogging or otherwise communicating online. By virtue of their position, managers and executives must consider whether personal thoughts they publish may be misunderstood as expressing SAP positions, and a manager should assume that his or her team will read what is written. A public blog is not the appropriate medium for many types of communications, including, but not limited to: communicating SAP policies to SAP employees; negotiating with third parties; making disparaging remarks about any third party; or other communications, etc.

Write in the first person – When you contribute commentary about SAP or SAP-related matters to an external audience, it is vital that you make it clear that you are speaking only for yourself (i.e. use the first-person singular, such as “I believe…” and not “We at SAP believe…”). There are different ways to do this. A simple and accepted approach is to include a disclaimer at the very beginning of your blog. If the blog is lengthy or long-standing, you should consider repeating the disclaimer inside the message. The disclaimer should state at a minimum that your point of view is personal, and it is not an official SAP point of view. Make it simple. Make it clear.

Identify yourself – The value of social computing is diminished when people hide behind a pseudonym or an anonymous post. Trust is hard enough to establish and maintain over the Internet, and if you do not identify yourself, then do not be surprised if your well-considered contributions are brushed aside. Therefore, please identify yourself to provide additional authenticity to your online contributions.

Be Honest – Tell the truth and if you find you have made a mistake, issue a clarification or a withdrawal or whatever may suit the circumstance and make it abundantly clear that you have done so. Social computing is a tolerant neighborhood – mistakes and errors will not make you a social outcast if you take responsibility. Rather than editing your content once it has been published, find ways to make your corrections transparent.

Be Respectful – simply carry the professionalism norms and standards of any SAP office onto the social computing platforms.

Separate Opinions from Facts – and make sure your audience can see the difference.

Add Value – be informative and interesting. Contribute your thoughts, experiences, observations, and opinions regarding issues you know and care about, but make sure to check your facts and figures – if you don’t, someone else probably will.

Be Engaged and Be Informed – Read the contributions of others. Know what the current conversations are and what people are saying in order to see if, and how, you may be able to contribute a new perspective. Participation is the fuel of social computing. And remember…

Aim for Quality, not Quantity – Offer your contribution with context whenever you can. Provide links to other blogs, media articles or whatever sources you think are necessary. Make your content rich and interesting for others to read. Consider attaching documents when necessary (but not SAP internal documents, confidential or not, of course!). And in every case, keep the language simple and flowing. If you start a blog, encourage feedback and conversation – make sure your readers can add feedback to your blog and respond in a timely manner. A two-way communication exchange allows for a more meaningful conversation.

Don’t Pick Fights – When you see misrepresentations or patently false statements about SAP by bloggers, the media, analysts or anyone else for that matter, you may certainly address these misrepresentations, even by joining someone else’s conversation. But stick to the facts and make sure the facts you rely on are publicly available.

Protect Your Privacy – Never disclose personal information.

Remember that you are still an SAP employee – do not make false, misleading or detrimental statements about SAP or SAP products. Consider that, although you are writing a personal blog, your statements will be considered an indication of the internal proceedings in SAP and how the company and our products are seen internally.

How to Handle Media Inquiries – Your contributions to social computing and the online conversations around SAP products, solutions, and practices will help advance dialogue, maybe solve some problems, create awareness and possibly attract attention of all kinds, including the media. If a member of the media contacts you, simply notify the Media Relations team in Global Communications via press@sap.com. They will determine the best way to handle the inquiry.

Legal Considerations – Yes, you have legal responsibilities and they need to be considered. You must respect copyrights and other intellectual property, fair use and financial disclosure laws, and SAP deals in general. Remember the following – do NOT talk about: perceived product defects or deficits; revenue projections; future product launch details; acquisition targets yet to be defined, or disclose corporate topics, product roadmaps, customer wins, our relationship to customers or partners or any other material SAP internal information. Do not post materials from SAP partners or customers in your communication (whether marked as confidential or not) or otherwise make information public that you have received through interaction with customers or partners. Use your common sense, and when in doubt contact the SAP Social Media Group.

Social Computing and Your Primary Role – Active contribution to social computing in its many forms can be time-consuming, so it is important that this does not interfere with your role at SAP. If you find that your social computing activity interferes with your role at SAP, please speak with your manager to determine if your personal contributions can become official SAP communications in alignment with SAP Global Communications as part of your job. If your manager and SAP Global Communication determines that it is not possible to incorporate your social computing activity into your role at SAP, you should reduce your involvement in social computing and consider posting a statement that explains why you are reducing your online activity.

SAP is a Gold Sponsor of this year’s Enterprise 2.0 event in Boston. Unfortunately, I’m not able to attend this year – here’s what I’ll be missing (least until the online versions are available):

Connect. Collaborate. Transform Your Business. Forward looking businesses are using web 2.0 and social tools to achieve new levels of productivity and efficiency in a tough economy. Attend the leading event for business and IT professionals challenging the status quo and leading the charge to Enterprise 2.0.

Over forty sessions across six conference tracks cover the latest trends in Enterprise 2.0 technology innovation and organization-wide change:

• Enterprise 2.0 in Action
• Social Tools for the Enterprise
• Foundations for Enterprise 2.0
• New Ways to Work: Organization 2.0
• Community Engagement Through Social Media
• Executive

There will be a host of Enterprise 2.0 experts from SAP attending the conference, including Beth Beld, Vice President Emerging Technology Strategy. They will be networking with customers, analysts, and partners, and the SAP booth in the Expo Pavillion will be open Tuesday and Wednesday, 11:30 am – 6 pm. Don’t forget to visit to get the latest on SAP’s cloud computing directions, on-demand strategy, and the latest Web 2.0 prototypes from the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center.

Mani Gill, Vice President, OnDemand, SAP will be presenting in the panel on Privacy, Data Ownership and Identity in an Increasingly Social World, 3:30 pm–4:30 pm on Wednesday, June 24:

"It’s IM all over again!" as public services such as Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace increasingly cross from consumer into enterprise. As these tools become legitimate business services for marketing and collaboration, IT must determine how to move from blocking to supporting their use in a manner that’s consistent with requirements for data loss prevention, security, compliance, and management. During this session we’ll explore the challenges in bridging private and public worlds, as well as mitigation strategies to enable use of public services while minimizing potential threats.

Google has posted videos of all the sessions at the recent Google I/O 2009 developer’s conference.

SAP attended as part of the session on “OpenSocial in the Enterprise”). Overall, the session was a little disorganized and meandering, but it did end up giving an overview of what companies like IBM, Oracle, SalesForce.com, and Atlassian are doing to leverage social networking technologies such as OpenSocial within organizations:

• Mark Weitzel gave a demo of the IBM Mashup Center proof of concept, allowing you to create mashup pages, using messaging between different sources (based on OpenAjax, but can integrate with OpenSocial) (link directly to this demo)
• Rich Manalang from Oracle gave a demonstration of Oracle’s internal collaboration system, called “Oracle Connect”. (link directly to this demo)
• Dave Carroll of Salesforce.com showed how they have been working with customers to add collaboration to the CRM experience (link directly to this demo)
• Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian showed how OpenSocial could be used to link enterprise applications, and between applications and gmail. For more, see http://atlassian.com/opensocial (link directly to this demo)

The highlight of the session (OK, so I’m biased) was a demonstration by John Mayerhofer, VP, Standards Strategy Group of SAP, showing the Social Network Analyzer technology (see below, or link directly to this demo)

Unfortunately, not much time was left for Q&A session. The most interesting question was about “What are the barriers to social systems in the enterprise?” and the answers included a mix of technical and social concerns:

• Security and identity were mentioned as special problems.
• There was some frustration than social networking APIs don’t take into account enterprise needs.
• Exposure to the consumer social networks actually leaves a negative impression, people fear that it’s just about socializing, rather than collaborating.
• Everybody agreed that it was early days
• The session ended with a hopelessly vague question/comment about needing to “liberate users” rather “concentrating on the enterprise”.

We’re strong believers in collaboration, and your participation will make this event exceptional. Please share your passion, your latest project/discovery or pet peeve in or around the SAP (Eco)System.

Here’s a short list of some of the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 sessions planned:

• Adobe Flash and SAP- changing the user experience – Andre Salazar. ABSTRACT
• Envision the Future of the Business User Workplace — Matthias Zeller. ABSTRACT
• Cloud Computing at SAP — Frank Stienhans. ABSTRACT
• Spark – Enabling Grassroots Innovation inside of SAP– Rebecca Sowards-Emmerd, Will Gardella. ABSTRACT
• Assemble your Tribe. Enterprise Community Building in the 21st Century. Mark Patrick Finnern. ABSTRACT

And I’d particularly like to point out the BusinessObjects Community Session by Laurent Bride of the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center, who will be showing off the latest Web 2.0 prototypes:

Please come and join to learn about the latest trends in Business Intelligence and see live demos of the newest BusinessObjects Innovation Center prototypes including "Social Network Analyzer", "Business Objects Explorer on the iPhone" and more!

In addition, I’m told that many of the sessions will be recorded and made available via SAP Connect, so you’ll be able to “participate even if you can’t make it to the event.