September 8, 2009
James Governor of RedMonk yesterday kicked off an interesting discussion about the state of Enterprise User Interfaces, more specifically Enterprise Portals and points out …
“… That’s right- less painful for users. Products like IBM WebSphere Portal and SAP Netweaver Portal were supposed to bring much improved user interaction models to enterprise IT, but unfortunately traditional systems-focused IT departments, rather than user interaction specialists and their web brethren, did the work …”
James eludes to the crux of the problem in the above quote and Thomas Otter highlights it further in a comment saying …
I sense that most of the problems/challenges with enterprise UI are not just a tool challenge. It is a design thinking problem. Until design thinking permeates enterprise application development, UI will be a sore point.
Thomas is right, it is a design thinking problem, more precisely, the problem is that there are no design thinkers in most teams that build or customize enterprise software…. read more
June 10, 2009
As some of you on twitter may have seen me mention today morning, I’m now an SAP Mentor.
The Mentors’ website defines …
The SAP Mentor Initiative identifies and provides special status to exceptional and high-value members of our SAP Developer Network (SDN) and Business Process Expert (BPX) communities.
SAP Mentors are role models who differentiate themselves through the high quality and frequency of their community contributions, their perspectives, attitudes, and interaction styles. They are subject-matter experts who are passionate about SAP and share their opinions and insights with the community.
It’s truely an honor to be named along with such an extraordinary group of people, some of the brightest brains in the SAP world …. like Marilyn Pratt, Dennis Hewlett, Anne Petteroe, Dick Hirsch, Darren Hague, Michael Bechauf, Craig Cmehil, Ed Herrmann, Thomas Jung, Dan McWeeney, Blag, Abesh (the list goes on …) a mere conversation with some of these people has the potential of blowing your brains out … I deeply respect all of them, so I’m humbled, I’ve been given such a great opportunity to learn.
I also see this as an excellent opportunity to evangelize and promote RIAs in the enterprise, I strongly believe that enterprise applications can gain a lot by adopting RIA ideologies, so I look forward to mangling together my experiences in the Adobe and SAP worlds.
read more
January 27, 2009
When I first heard of SAP Flash Islands I thought it was a game changing move in the SAP world and went so far as to describe it as Enterprise UI 2.0 … I’ve played a little with Flash Islands since then and I just blogged on SAP Developer Network about an experiment I did with SAP Web Dynpro Flash Islands and Ribbit to allow making phone calls from an SAP application.
The blog post shares code on how to do this and also tries to explain SAP Flash Islands from a Flex developer’s perspective …. read more
October 24, 2008
After a lot of convincing, Abesh got me to start writing at SAP Network Blogs … as part of my introductory post I ended up describing what I thought the term RIA meant and I later realized I had never documented my interpretation of Rich Internet Applications so here’s what I said in the SDN post ..
What are Rich Internet Applications? .. while there are many definitions on the web, I like to decide if something is an RIA or not based on the following criteria …
- It has to be an Application … something that deals with dynamic data, takes an input and processes it to produce valuable output.
- Its primary function should be to deal with data that lives on the Internet (or intranets).
- It should offer a user experience that is Richer than what we’ve been used to in the past in a particular environment.
If a piece of software satisfies the above criteria, in my opinion, its an RIA. If you think about these points for a little bit, you’ll quickly realize that, even though a fairly new buzzword, is not a new concept …. Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Messenger, Gmail etc are all RIAs that came out several years ago. After some more thought, you’ll realize that in today’s context majority of applications that we build have something to do with data that lives elsewhere on the network, therefore the dominant factor that defines an RIA is the richness of the experience users have while using it. So if we oversimplify, RIAs are applications built with special attention to user interface and user experience.
Many modern interface development technologies have been labeled as Rich Internet Application Technologies .. these include AJAX, various Javascript libraries and frameworks, modern browsers, Gears, Flex, Flash Player, AIR, Silverlight, JavaFX etc .. while these technologies facilitate building an RIA it does not automatically imply that everything built with them is an RIA … in fact, it is very easy to build a Not So Rich Internet Application with these so called RIA technologies. At the same time, it is important to note that the use of these technologies is not a prerequisite to building an RIA either.
This is how I understand Rich Internet Applications .. what is your interpretation of the term RIA?
August 5, 2008
Thomas Jung over at SAP Developer Network has posted the details of a workshop he will be leading along with Rich Heilman, Dan McWeeney and Ed Herrmann at the SDN Community Day in Las Vagas.
The workshop is aimed at educating developers about the new UI features in the new version of Web Dynpro (SAP’s UI development technology) available in Netweaver 7.0 Enhancement Pack 1, Thomas also posted the below video that shows a preview of these new features that they will be discussing in the workshop.
All the new enhancements are exiting, but what really got me charged up was the feature called Flash Islands (mentioned around the 6th minute of the video), In summary, Web Dynpro now allows you to embed Flash/Flex components within Web Dynpro Interfaces and there is seamless integration, Web dynpro elements can communicate with Flash and Flash elements can communicate back with Web dynpro … this has 2 very exciting implications …
- Web Dynpro is a closed framework and till now could not have customized controls, now it can have any kind of UI components you can think of with Flex
- More importantly, this can totally change the face of enterprise interfaces, imagine highly interactive engaging UIs, innovative data visualizations, video etc. etc.
So dare I call this Enterprise UI 2.0 .. yeah I know 2.0 is such a cliche these days 
.. but this stuff is exciting.
