SAP Netweaver

What an excellent event. I really loved the vibe of enthusiasm and dedication by so many extremely bright people, willing to sacrifice their Friday and Saturday to work on SAP’s latest and greatest and to support charity organizations with a tiny IT budget.

I learned a lot of new things during the 30 hours of wizardry and hacking:

• That “minority report”-like interfaces have reached us way before 2054, the year of the film’s story. And using Kinect they can even be operated without the little light-emitting thimbles Tom Cruise is wearing.
• That project River has a great potential and allows you to very quickly develop enterprise-level applications.
• That you don’t need to have your data ready one hour before the mobile solution utilizing that data needs to be finished, provided that the solution is based on BI On demand.
• That you need to be able to expose your River data to SUP, Flex builder or any other mobile solution platform a good 20 hours in advance.
• Not to believe people that say that an API based on REST is automatically very easy to use and definitely easier or less chatty than SOAP.
• Not to upload SWFs into a River application that you’ve just put a lot of effort in (The same lesson about customizing the Entprise Portal login page came to mind).
• That adding-up the points with only two only hands and too little sleep can be a quite daunting task (I think Chris’ Twitter supported calculations worked out better) putting the IDO team in 2nd place
• That lack of sleep doesn’t necessarily break concentration and good team vibes.
• That Innojams aren’t only great for participants, but events that SAP’s product managers can take a lot home from as well. The number of whys, hows and whatfors were almost overwhelming and I think it will be hard to come across a team as dedicated to get going in unreleased software as the Innojam participants.
• That Innojam judges neither like to see slides nor code. They like to see solutions that work and are plain, simple, yet enterprisy. Error handling is an appreciated bonus.
• That it is way more fun to work on a real business case for a good cause than on a made-up business case.
• That witnessing this tweet, I regret that I didn’t organize a relaxed after-party dinner to chill-down from this energetic 30 hours of hacking, exploring and learning.
• That there are some really good charity initiatives that could use a lot of support from a community like the SCN community. I’m very happy that the community has been able to contribute to these good causes and might even continue to support them in the future.
• That Innojams don’t go unnoticed by the Dutch press: evidence 1 and evidence 2
• That a great Innojam is very dependent on great people. But, if you leave it in the hands of SAP, VNSG and the SCN community, some serious synergy will happen!

Thank you everyone from SAP, VNSG and the SCN community that helped organize the SAP Innojam NL and congrats to the Hoogvliegers team that won the Innojam.

I absolutely had a great deal of fun and am sure that it will take me quite some time to digest all the new learnings and experiences. And although I don’t think I’m done digesting all learnings very soon, I really can’t wait for the next Innojam NL!