Archive for the ‘Strategy’ tag
RIA, SAP BSP or WebDynpro… and some CRM
A couple of weeks ago I went to the SAP CRM course CR580 – SAP CRM User Interface in London – a course about the new UI in SAP CRM 2007 – and it was quite an interesting course.
One feature you will notice rigth away – is the improvements to the user interface. I guess you could say that SAP CRM has been ‘AJAX’ified’ 
and suddenly you start dreaming about more RIA in SAP. And all the screen flikering is gone – and the UI works quite well. It’s actually quite impressing…
But during the course something happend which confused me a bit – because I thought SAP had a quite clear Web UI Strategy in generel. In connection with the introduction of the course, the instructor told us about SAP’s considerations regarding the underlying development framework to use when building SAP CRM 2007. The CRM team were looking at a Web UI technology which was: stable, with a good performance, and a framework which offered a flexible and extendable user interface… so thinking about the SAP Web UI strategy – you might think you have already guessed the answer… it could only be SAP WebDynpro… No?
SAP CRM 2007 is built in SAP BSP !! – and let me just underline I have no specific preferences to either BSP and WebDynpro (I love both of them) and I have done a lot of development with both frameworks, but I cannot understand why SAP decides to use BSP when the chosen Web UI strategy is WebDynpro? When I read about WebDynpro, SAP uses a lot of time to explain why we should use Webdynpro – and so far I haven’t seen them claim that WebDynpro should be less stable than BSP, perform worse compared to BSP and that WebDynpro should be less flexiable and harder to extend compared to BSP. So why SAP – why was BSP a better choice for SAP CRM 2007?
And how well will this match some of the other initiatives targeted towards WebDynpro? E.g – we are all looking forward to start using SAP Flash Islands. In order to do this – the underlying framework should be WebDynpro. And I guess SAP CRM could be quite an interesting platform for SAP Flash Island? I know it’s possible to embed Adobe Flash in BSP directly, but you will be missing the smart integration from the ‘real’ Flash Islands.
Seen from a development point of view – there is a new tool available together with SAP CRM 2007: “The BSP Component Workbench”. With this new tool you can extend your CRM solution without making modification to SAP standard, and this tool is so cool that I am already missing it in SAP ERP.