Week’s Best Reads

Everyone must have had mobility on the brain this week because there were a handful of outstanding SAP mobility-related blog posts.

SAP Mentor Jamie Oswald draws attention to some of the SAP mobile BI roadmap plans in his post “One App to Enable Them All.”  Oswald points to the need for a mobile BI portal application—an Infoview for a mobile device.

SAP BusinessObjects consultant Dallas Marks predicts that Xcelsius is going the way of Deski because Xcelsius “is too wedded to the Adobe Flash platform to make the leap to mobile devices.” And it may not necessarily be a bad thing.

SAP Mentor Thorsten Franz brings up a number of salient points in his post “Why Mobility Isn’t Getting Off the Ground, Faster.” Not only do cumbersome licensing procedures (printing and mailing agreements to Canada—for real!) and ease-of-use problems stand between customers and mobile apps, but there are issues with developers simply getting the access to the Sybase Unwired Platform that they desperately need.

Speaking of mailing contracts to Canada, “better contract language” is a wish for SAP customers in 2012, according to SearchSAP.com Editor Todd Morrison. Better support also tops the list.

And what would the New Year be without new jabs at SAP from Oracle? This week, Oracle announced its pricing for its Exalytics and signaled that it’d release it very soon. SAP, of course, hasn’t made its HANA pricing public—a norm with all SAP software.

Have you reached the status of “geek” or even tougher, the “ubergeek?” For a step-by-step guide, complete with a Venn diagram, check out Björn-Henrik Zink’s post.

This Week on ASUGNews.com

And then there’s our stuff: Tom spoke with several IT executives to get their advice on how to make an SAP upgrade or go-live as boring as possible (remember: boring is good in this case).

Courtney spoke with Amcor Rigid Plastics about its SAP data archiving project. Senior business analyst and ASUG member Robert V. Bobba graciously lent his tips for a successful data archiving plan. It’s not always an easy one to get business buy-in for, but the effort is worth it, as you’ll see in Bobba’s story.

And lastly, Tom looks at expense-management software and processes and, with the help of an Aberdeen Group report, explains why cloud-based systems are better than on-premise ones for this particular process.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“It’s OK to love technology. And it’s OK to cry when it lets you down and breaks your heart. But always love your users more.”
-SAP BusinessObjects consultant Dallas Marks, blogging on the potential demise of Xcelsius

Tweets of the Week

 @gpmyers: I had no idea my reboot state was repressed. How curious. #BI4

 @vsikka:  Just pre-announced our strongest yr & qtr ever! All due to innovation. HANA did 100M€+ in just Q4! Heartfelt thx to our warriors. We did it!

@levie: The switch to new Gmail is one of those few “Damn, I miss on-premise-software-that-never-updates” moments.

@vendorprisey: imho @sapcio has done more for SAP’s brand than a 100000 airport posters. #sap #marketing

 @SAP_Jarret: I bet @LarsLuv is chomping at the bit to formally get started as a big & extremely important year ahead for #SAP & #Successfactors

 @alanlepo: I have a dream that one day I will stay in a hotel with multiple electrical plugs all in convenient locations.

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