Open Source High Definition Video Conference System

Yesterday I got a phone call from one of my fellow student from KTH (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) regarding their project final presentation date. They are working on a project aiming on providing open source high definition video conference system. The presentation and exhibition date of their project are this 16th of October 2009 and next 19th of October 2009, and they sincerely welcome you to their presentation and exhibition.
 
Press Release.

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SAP Systems Integration Master Thesis Final Presentation

I have presented my master thesis last week and started to work for HP as a junior product chef. I have spent more than 4 months to complete my master thesis and the most single difficult part for me was the writing part. I think it is crucial to have good communication with your academic supervisor, since he/she decides how you should write and how much you should write. After this master thesis I began to abhor the communication problems. Giving an example, I wrote 100 pages at the beginning and spent almost 3 weeks to write it, then my supervisor wanted me to cut it down to 30 pages (max.). It was a very big hassle. Moreover, my supervisor did not want me to do those changes with alacrity. Because of that I had to wait two more months before I present my master thesis. Any way it is still good that I have the rights to decry my supervisor and my own work. By the way, my academic supervisor was Gustaf Juell-Skielse from KTH and he is a very experienced Accenture consultant. I have learned a lot from him and he has incisive comments which make me work harder and harder. But my recommendation for those of you, who will write master thesis, is that; talk to your supervisor very very clearly at the beginning. What he/she wants you to do, how much and how does he/she want you to write and so on. Because time management is difficult and you might waste your time if your supervisor changes his/her mind.

However, it was a priceless experience to work in one of the biggest energy companies at Europe and has an experienced academic supervisor back at school. Even if I had some difficult times to finish my thesis, I liked it and enjoyed a lot. In case you need, I am sharing my final master thesis (believe me, this is the real final version:) ) and my final presentation down here:

SAP Systems Integration Master Thesis Real Final Version

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SAP Systems Integration Master Thesis Final Report

I have written my master thesis about SAP systems integration at one of the biggest energy companies in Europe. The company is called Vattenfall and owned by Swedish government. Since the size of the company is large, so that the data size which will be transferred within and outside of the company is also large. Thats why systems integration plays a very crucial role in Vattenfall’s IT concerns. The company is very much SAP centric and the SAP systems are increasing in number and size. This increasing trend intensifies the need for SAP systems integration and an integration platform, which is the most plug and play integration engine for SAP systems, could be of benefit. That’s why I made a qualitative study to evaluate SAP NetWeaver PI to help Vattenfall Nordic to decide whether it can be used as main integration platform at Vattenfall Nordic instead of BizTalk.

SAP PI is coming! I think the product will be used more commonly once SAP solves the core problems. For example SAP PI is a dual stack product and complex to configure, use and manage. The product is very much based on hub and spoke, centralized architecture. But I think it must be (will be) 100% java based, distributed product. Also SAP NetWeaver BPM and PI are emerging more and more. These are all good things for the future of the product. As I mentioned before, PI is coming and will be used commonly in SAP depended companies!

I do not want to write all of my finding again but, you can download my master thesis from here: SAP Systems Integration Master Thesis Final Report. I look forward to hearing from you.

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In Pursuit of Elegance: 12 Indispensable Tips

Matthew E. May is the author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing and the ChangeThis manifesto called Creative Elegance. He spent nearly a decade as a close adviser to Toyota and works with creative teams and senior leaders at a number of top Fortune companies.

1. Question: How do you define elegance?

Answer: Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful. One without the other leaves you short of elegant. And sometimes the “unusual simplicity” isn’t about what’s there, it’s about what isn’t. At first glance, elegant things seem to be missing something.

2. Question: Why is elegance so important?

Answer: Elegance cuts through the noise, captures our attention, and engages us. The point of elegance is to achieve the maximum impact with the minimum input. It’s a thoughtful, artful subtractive process focused on doing more and better with less. That’s especially important during this economic crisis when everyone is trying to move forward while consuming fewer resources.

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SAP NetWeaver PI

NetWeaver is SAP’s latest application platform suite and the foundation for all future SAP applications. As companies add new SAP applications or upgrade to mySAP ERP, the core components of NetWeaver will automatically be there. For example; Enterprise Portal, Process Integration, Master Data Management, Business Process Management, Business Intelligence.

This means SAP PI will be part of SAP investments and it will already be there. Another important fact is that if a company purchases SAP applications such as, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, Product Lifecycle Management SAP PI is the standard integration platform from R/3 and other applications to these new modules. Because all of these solutions are built on top of the NetWeaver platform and PI is the integration part of NetWeaver platform suite. So, all of the mySAP licensees have access to this tool set waiting unused on the shelf, if they decide not to use PI. All in all, for large SAP customers it is not a question of  “if” it is a question of “when and how much” are they going to use SAP PI.

But on the contrary, SAP XI (now called PI) is definitely a “closed” product. It runs on a SAP Web Application Server, which is a combination of a J2EE stack and ABAP stack (ABAP is the proprietary SAP programming language). The core parts of SAP PI run in this ABAP stack, in particular all the queuing and business processes (BPEL). Other parts such as connectivity and adapters runs in theJ2EE stack. Most software assets that are developed in PI are proprietary (maybe except for XSLT transformations). So software components from 3rd parties (such as iWay or Seeburger) need to be customized to run on/in PI. The architecture of SAP PI/XI is definitely closed and proprietary, but so are most integration solutions.

On the other hand SAP does endorse a large number of standards: J2EE, HTTP(S), XML, XML Schema, SOAP, WSDL, WS-Security, . Like all the other integration vendors. PI comes out-of-the-box with adapters for JMS, File/FTP, JDBC, HTTP, SOAP and obviously the SAP specific IDoc and RFC adapters. The (XMB) protocol that PI uses internally to communicate between its different components (standalone adapter engines, proxies, other PI instances) is based on SOAP with Attachments (MIME), with proprietary extensions for security and reliability.

From the experiences of other people, SAP PI works OK and is a good integration solution that matches the offerings of other EAI vendors. But it is a rather complex product. Now, PI only makes sense if you have a large SAP installation and a major part of your applications are from SAP. In particular, your SAP team can leverage their knowledge to manage an integration solution that runs on the same base infrastructure. If SAP applications only play a minor role in your organization, you might still deploy PI for opening up your SAP applications and SAP-2-SAP interfacing, but you will most likely combine this with other integration solutions.

So, because of all these problems and complexity, it is not recommended to use PI outside SAP world. But, SAP is investing time and money to make their product more open and simple. So, just wait and see how PI will penetrate into the main market. I have lots of cool ideas and documents about the future of PI, just fallow my blog and my master thesis report.

PS: Thanks to Guy Crets from Belgium

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Weird Ideas That Work

I am reading a book called Weird Ideas That Work by Robert I. Sutton. Professor Sutton from Stanford is a unique voice with an urgent message about how to generate and capitalize on new ides.  Since I count myself as an entrepreneurial person, I loved few ideas and want to share them with you. The book has 3 major parts; Why the weird ideas work, the weird ideas and putting the weird ideas to work. I did not like all of the weird ideas in this book and i am a little skeptical about some of them. But, still want to share few of my notes with you. If you are interested in management and innovation, I strongly recommend you to read this book.

Weird Ideas;

1- Hire slow learners

2- Hire people who make you uncomfortable, even those you dislike

3- Hire people you do not need

4- Encourage people to ignore and defy superiors and peers

5- Find some happy people and get them to fight

6- Reward success and failure, punish inaction

7- Decide to do something that you will probably fail, then convince yourself and everyone else that success is certain

8- Think of some ridiculous or impractical things to do, then plan to do them

9- Avoid, distract and bore customers, critics and anyone who just wants to talk about money

10- Dont try to learn anything from people who seems to have solved the problems you face

11- Forget the past, especially your company’s success

I personally did not like the weird idea 3 and 8. But these are for companies where innovation is a way of life. We can not apply these weird ideas in large and established companies. After all, the book is a breakthrough in management thinking, “weird ideas” can help organizations achieve a balance between sustaining performance and fostering new ideas. As a final message; to succeed, you need to be both conventional and weird.

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High Level Comparison of SAP PI and MS BizTalk

Adoption of SAP PI platform is growing rapidly, primarily for SAP’s application customer base. However, despite SAP’s crucial improvements, PI is still lacking of most-advanced platforms’ abilities. But it will still be used commonly by SAP base customers.

Graph below, shows the roadmap of SAP PI starting from SAP XI versions. From my point of view, there are 3 major versions of product. Phase 1 is SAP XI 2.0 and SAP XI 3.0, phase 2 is SAP PI 7.0 and phase 3 is SAP PI 7.1. SAP invested a lot of engineering hours for PI and tried to provide the most up to date features in it. But, like all the products in integration platforms market, PI has some pros and cons.

Graph 1: SAP PI product versions

In particular, SAP PI is proven as SAP oriented product and is widely used by SAP customers. According to a statistic from SAP, only 5% of the PI or XI users are non-SAP customers. So, it clearly shows that PI is very SAP centric product and fits better to SAP product portfolio.

On the other hand, well known vendors like IBM, Microsoft, Tibco, Sun Microsystems are functionally richer than SAP PI because they focus not only to SAP but also to other application packages. For example they provide much complex event processing, business activity monitoring and other advanced integration features. However, PI is highly optimized for SAP systems and provide much more pre-built integration metadata and it is more similar to SAP systems.

SAP PI license for SAP-to-SAP usage is included in NetWeaver 2004 suite license and MySAP license. For SAP to Non-SAP integration PI base engine is priced based on the overall processed message volume expressed in Gigabytes (GB) per month. For some large SAP customers, special discounts are available and price mentality of SAP is “more you use less you pay” (we can also call it progressive scale).

To match PI with Microsoft BizTalk technology, please refer to the graph 2 below.

Graph 2: SAP PI and BizTalk Functional Coverage

You can download the full version of research paper from here: High Level Comparison of SAP PI and MS BizTalk

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SAP PI Vs. MS BizTalk

Why there is a need for Integration?
Organizations have found lots of compelling reasons to integrate their IT systems. Some have discovered that they must share order and shipment information in real time between an ERP system such as SAP R/3 and existing production applications located in warehouses or manufacturing facilities. Others have come up with equally compelling diverse scenarios. For example in an energy company there exists lots of external parties involving in different part of the business. In such a huge sector companies need to share some information both internally and externally.

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Sun Certified Java Associate

I am a Sun Certified Java associate and would like to share my knowledge and recommendations with you. I think the exam is really evaluating your IT and Java knowledge. The Sun Certified Associate (SCJA) for the Java Platform, Standard Edition, Exam Version 1.0 certification exam provides an ideal entry into an application development or a software project management career using Java technologies.

Since I am a computer engineer and has several years programming experience, becoming a SCJA will be beneficial for me in the future. I think, Sun Microsystems’ certificate exams are really prestigious in the market and help professionals to find better positions.

Lets come to my recommendations:
1- Write codes as much as possible by using NetBeans IDE (personal recommendation).
2- Study through Sun SAI (online learning services)
3- Solve lots of mock up exams and questions (You can find examples from links below)

For more information please check my SCJA Tips page

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Crossing the Chasm

One of my article about a book advice had been published in a magazin in Stocholm. You can find the article from here and have a look at what i wrote about Crossing the Chasm. I think this book is a must book for an entrepreneur.

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