A couple of
months ago we received an invitation from SAP regarding an upcoming Powerweek
for HCP development in combination with Cloud for Customer. To participate in
this powerweek, all we had to do is submit an interesting use case that uses
both technologies / platforms. All submitted use cases would then be reviewed
by the organizing team at SAP for submission.Our use case
Our use
case is to develop a portal application on SAP HCP that shows data from
different systems (e.g. ECC, C4C and maybe other external systems) to customers
registered in C4C. This portal would enable the customers to access a separate
application in the cloud, that will then show the customers information that is
available in the different systems (i.e. orders from ECC and Tickets from C4C
etc.).
Fortunately,
SAP decided that our use case was interesting enough to let us participate in
the powerweek. In total 17 use cases were selected, participants came from
Austria, Belgium, Germany, Finland, Switzerland, United Kingdom and more. Even teams
from Malaysia and the USA traveled to Walldorf for this event.
In the rest
of this blog I will share my experiences of this three day workshop that we
participated in.
Day One – Introduction to HCP
To support
all levels of experience during this three day course, day one was an
introduction to HCP. A global overview was given about what the platform is and
what it has to offer. Great if you never heard of HCP before, but a bit of a
repeat when you are already familiar with HCP.
The second
part of the day was filled with some basic hands-on exercises to let
participants become familiar with development tools like Eclipse and the
WebIDE. Both HTML5 / SAPUI5 (client side coding) and Java (server side coding) were
part of the exercises, but the level of the exercises was pretty basic. Great
for new/novice users, but less interesting if you already built some stuff on
HCP.
The last
part of the first day was a presentation about the roadmap of HCP. Pretty nice
to see what will be made available in the future.
To
summarize, the first day was a bit of a disappointment, but understandable
since not every participant is on the same knowledge level. My colleague and I spend the most time of the first day on working our own
use case instead of following along with the exercises.
Day Two – Detailed technical stuff and use cases
The first
part of day two was a detailed technical presentation about the SAP HANA
Database. Pretty technical stuff, but interesting to learn about how HANA
actually works and why it is so fast and offers great benefits in areas where a
lot of data has to be read, analyzed and processed.
Some of the
tasks that can typically be done by the powerful HANA DB include analytics,
planning, predictive analysis, text analysis and spatial processing. All these
technologies are interesting to learn something about, but were not relevant
for our use case at the moment. Maybe in the future we can leverage the SAP
HANA DB running on HCP store to store/replicate data from C4C and/or ECC for
fast access. This can be an interesting option when the amount of customer data
stored on ECC or C4C grows significantly.
After the
presentation about the SAP HANA DB technology, we did some basic exercises
using the SAP HANA DB. Nice to see the basic functionalities of SAP HANA and
maybe we will use this in the future.
After 1.5
days, the group was separated into two groups. Use cases that were submitted
for the event were not only C4C related, utilities use cases were also part of
this event. To provide both C4C and Utilities teams with as much help as
possible, two groups were formed and got assigned experts to help to specify
the use cases further and discuss about technical solutions etc.
The rest of
day two was filled by a presentation about C4C and a discussion about all the
C4C use cases. The presentation about C4C basically contained information about
what it is, and what integration possibilities you have. Not much news there
unfortunately.
Most discussions were on integration possibilities
between HCP and C4C and security (single sign on). The expert had some useful
answers and promised that most of these topics would be addressed the final day
of the powerweek.
Day Three – HCP & C4C Integration
As day
three is the same day that this blog will be published, I cannot fully report
on everything that we saw and heard about HCP & C4C integration. As
mentioned, halfway through day two the group was separated into two groups: a group
with C4C use cases and a group with use cases for the utilities branch. The
plan is that the C4C and HCP experts show us how to integrate C4C in HCP and vice
versa, explain security, single sign on, user management etc. We expect the most of day
three, lots of useful information and the opportunity to ask any questions we
have regarding our use case and technical implementation plan.
Conclusion
Without
having any information about what we saw and heard on day three, we were a bit disappointed
with the powerweek. We expected to work more on our own use cases than watching
presentations and doing other hands-on exercises that were not that interesting
for people that were already familiar with HCP. Hopefully day three will be
more exciting and informative.
