Socialize your SAP ERP and Collaborate with him!

UKLUG 2012 – Cardiff, Wales

Andrea FontanaSocialize your ERP, and Collaborate with him

September 2012


About me

•I began working with Lotus Notes in 1992•I began working with WebSphere in 2002•I’m an IBM Champion for WebSphere since 2012•I’m an IBM Champion for ICS in 2015•I’m an IBM DeveloperWorks Contributing Author since 2012•I’m an BM developerWorks Accredited Author in 2015

Currently I work as CTO - ICS & WebSphere Architect at Sowre SA in Switzerland ( but it's not my country :-)


What’s Socialization?Socialization is

according to a Dictionary:a continuing process whereby an individual acquires a personal identity and learns the norms, values, behaviour, and social skills appropriate to his or her social position.

according to Philosophy:

the process by which human infants begin to acquire the skills necessary to perform as a functioning member of their society; it is the most influential learning process one can experience


What’s Enterprise resource planning (ERP) ?

ERP is

according to a Dictionary:accounting-oriented information systems for identifying and planning the enterprise wide resources needed to collect, make, distribute, and manage accounting for customer orders. ERP systems were originally extensions of MRP II systems

according to Wikipedia:

is business management software, typically a suite of integrated applications, that a company can use to collect, store, manage and interpret data from many business activities, including:

• Product planning, cost• Manufacturing or service delivery• Marketing and sales• Inventory management• Shipping and payment


Company managementCompany management involves identifying the mission, objectives, procedures, rules and management of the human capital of an enterprise to contribute to the success of the enterprise.

An enterprise environment (as opposed to a physical or mechanical mechanism), implies human motivation and implies some sort of successful progress. Management does not need to be seen only from an enterprise point of view, because management is an essential function to improve one's life and relationships.

This implies effective communication.


Typical decision process.Typical use of ERP System in decision process is based on the fact that humans must search each information they need for that process.Humans must run inquiries in the ERP System to collect each information.Usually an employee each morning must connect to the ERP, and execute some activities to extract reports and prints, and use them in his decision processes.In other words, the standard use of ERP is in PULL mode, the ERP contains the information, but you must pull data from it.


Typical decision process.•each actor must search and extract information•many information will be show in a report or a document •only human can extract data and analyse it to make a decisionThe most important "actor" is a Document.


What’s the link ?Between Enterprise Resource Planing and Company Management, each component involved in running your business, produces finally documents; but this need also to pass through human activities, to achieve the goals.

“Human” is also a main focus in your Business ActivitiesWhy don’t try to shift the focus from Documents to Persons ?


Next StepImagine this scenario:I am a Member of a set of CommunitiesThese Communities work to define a new strategy to sell a new product. In this Communities we have some Actors like:

Project ManagerProduct ManagerMarketing ExpertDesigner

This actors must work with some data taken from the ERP


And now we have a new ActorThe new concept is to permit a Socialization process of your ERP

The leading idea is: SAP can send some information to the communities, to help members to complete decisional process.So you have a new colleague: Mr SAP.


The new Scenario is ready

Human are the main focus in a new decisional processwhere my ERP collaborates with them in Decisional Communities.We have completed in this way our transformation to

Social Enterprise Collaboration


Behind the scenes, First Step

Some SAP function have a special workflow step to publish some alert in the Connections Activity Stream or Blog post using a specific SAP-Bapi:basic idea is: SAP-Bapi, when a specific situation happens, create a json/xml data and POST it on Connections, like an alert to user


Behind the scenes, next step

One module creates an Interface gateway with SAP Bapi (cnx Bapi) and uses Cnx API to publish information to Connections.This Module receives a request from SAP and via Cnx API publishes on Activity Stream or Blog Post that information; it can also receive requests from Connections and invoke SAP Bapi.


Semantic Role

“Duke Ellington posted a new video to a channel” actor: Entity performing the activity (for instance, “Duke”)

verb: Action of the activity (for instance, “post”-ing)object: The primarity object of the action (for instance, “video”)

target: Target of the action (for instance, “a channel”)

Activities/events can be represented in 2 formats:

─ JSON document─ ATOM document

JSON is the primary format supported by Connections.

Atom is only supported on retrieval – not to post events


Sample to post an ActivityStream


Semantic details


…and the result is…


Use of Template keywordsIBM Connections allows two kinds of Template in the title of a connections.

Object substitutions - where an appropriate representation of a known object within the event is substituted into the title.Title template substitutions - these use the above object substitutions, providing a full title that is appropriately resourced.

Object Substitution. Number of substitution values are supported within a submitted event.title:

${Actor} - this is converted into appropriately marked up HTML which displays the Actors name and links to a Business Card corresponding to the Actor ${Object} - if this is a person we display as with the Actor above, otherwise the displayName with a link to the url ${Target} - if this is a person we display as with the Actor above, otherwise the displayName with a link to the url


The new Json will be


@mention


Where can I send my Json?Now we have a Json ready to publish on our Connections but how can we do it?

<ctxRoot>/opensocial/basic/rest/activitystreams/@me/@all/@all

<ctxRoot>

is the context root of the OpenSocial end- point deployment on your VM

Authentication scheme Specify the auth. Scheme intendend to be used:

“basic”: basic authentication

“form”: form based authentication

“oauth”

User id The stream returns all events that are related to the given user.

@me is an alias representing the currently authenticated user.

CommunityUUID representing specific Community

Group Id Events for the group related to the user id.

@all (wild card) in most cases.

@friends – events from user network

@following – events from people followed

@self – own events

App id Events for a given applications.

@all corresponds to top level view

Application name: “activities”, “blogs”, ...


Taste it

Scenario 1 : Mr Sap sends to me an ActivityStreamScenario 2 : Mr Sap publishes a report on a CommunityScenario 3 : Mr Sap sends to me an ActivityStream directly from an incoming order


Demo

Socialize your SAP ERP and Collaborate with him!

Technology

Transcript of Socialize your SAP ERP and Collaborate with him!