Development Trends

SAP Flash Island is a new/upcoming feature in SAP Netweaver and the discussions about what kind of features we could/would expect in these Islands have already started. SAP and Adobe have already given some examples – and for people working within the SAP area, the upcoming Flash Islands could open up for quite new features and possibilities.

The other day – I ran into an interesiting project at Adobe Labs. A project called Adobe Cocomo which is in it’s final testphase. It’s a set of  hosted services which will make it easy to add social capabilities to your Adobe Flex application (Flash Island). You will need to download a SWC to use in the SAP Flash Island project – with this Cocomo interface it will be quite easy to use  some of the following features in your SAP Flash Island:

1. VoIP Audio
2. Webcam Video
3. Chat
4. Multi-User Whiteboards
5. Real-Time File Sharing
6. User Management
7. Roles and Permissions
8. Robust Data Messaging

You might think – “… why implement features we already have in Skype or Messenger in a WebDynpro application”? Well – with a SAP Flash Island you will have a welldefined integration path to the backend system, masterdata, transactional data and authorizations – and could consider to use this as input (and output) to the Flash application.  So suddenly you could display a snapshot of the latest sales figures at the multi user white board and discuss the sales progress in a Webcam, VoIP or chat session – just as an example of the possibilities.

Six Thinking Hats

You might take it a step further – and look at some of the methods behind the “Six Thinking Hats” (also known as “The de Bono Hats system”) and use them as an inspiration to enhance the SAP/Cocomo features and end up with a SAP Flash Island application which will do much more than Skype or Messenger – and it will be integrated with SAP Netweaver.

Read more:

Adobe Labs Cocomo website

Six Thinking Hats/The de Bono Hats system

An Adobe Flex template project for SAP Flash Islands

SAP ABAP developers: How to get started with Adobe FLEX – part II