SAP Press book on Universal Worklist

[darren_hague]

Hi all,

I have just started writing a book for SAP Press on the Universal Worklist, to pass along some of what I have learned when working with the portal these past 5 years or so (anyone else remember EP 4.5?)

I've put up a blog entry at

<a href="http://www.fortybeans.com/">http://www.fortybeans.com/</a> and if you click the <a href="http://fortybeans.wishconsultants.co.uk/item/2007/2/6/universal-worklist-book-for-sap-press">Read more</a> link you can see the proposed chapters and sections I will be writing.

I'd really appreciate any feedback any of you can give me - I want to make this the best possible book of its kind, and the only way to do that is to find out what people want from the book and then to give it to them. Maybe this could be the first book from SAP Press with "Powered by SDN" on the cover?

Let me know what you think,

Darren

[ChrisSolomon]

First off....EP4.5?....yep...when it was a Top Tier product. I was working on Workplace 3.0 (bootcamp) at the time....one week later, SAP and Top Tier announce the joint formation of the company "SAP Enterprise Portals" with their flagship product EP 5.0. Ahhh those were the days. I really want to meet the person who came up with calling it "portal-S" because I spent countless time explaining why the product was "Enterprise Portal" and not "Enterprise Portals". That was only compounded once SAP bought Top Tier outright, brought EP5.0 back into SAP proper and folded the "SAP Enterprise Portals" company. Ugg....anyways...

The book sounds great. I too have fought in the trenches and wrestled with the UWL. It is great when it is used strictly as intended and with the limitations it might have. Past that....let the fun begin!

I read your rough outline. Some chapters/content I would really like to see....

- some basic coverage on Workflow (what it is, how it works, etc).

- some explaination of "webflow", how it got started and where it is today

- how workflow correlates to what the user sees in the UWL

- limitations of the UWL based on support package level ( this is a big one!!! trying to use attachments now...nope...can't until the next SP level unless we backport our own custom webdynpro...that's not fun to find out 2 months in! haha)

- really good examples of customizing items to launch one way in the portal versus another way within the backend inbox (ie. uwl xml config vs. config in the backend) and show ways to launch various SAP apps (dialog in SAP GUI, ITS service, webdynpro, etc). from UWL items.

- same as above but show how to launch NON-SAP apps (we have a situation now where we have a UWL item that launches a Flex application and passes an order number to it)

- similar to the above two, what's possible to pass across from the UWL to whatever through the portal (like UWL to an iView and on to the underlying application)...figuring out how "DynamicParameters" works is new to lots of people who might not have web dev background and/or understand the construction/structure of a URL query string

- some information along the lines of "UWL launched an item/action out to some app, but how does the workflow status get updated to that fact?" ie. what makes the round trip complete?

- a really good BIG, real world example showing multi-system (CRM-to-ECC-to-APO-to-SRM-to- etc) workflow and how the UWL makes it all much easier and fluid (in theory...haha)

That's just a few off the top of my head that seem to always be sooo much fun with the UWL.

Good luck on the book! Looking forward to it already!

[darren_hague]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for that - exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for. A discussion of what workflow/webflow is a good idea, and of course all the gritty detail stuff is exactly where the book is intended to help. In terms of doing a big, multi-system demo - that's more challenging for me. I have my own NW04s ABAP system and NW04 & NW04s Portals set up (thank you, SDN Sneak Previews!) but it's hard for me to get access to a sufficiently large landscape to do the big integration piece. I don't think my company's customers would be too happy with me playing with their systems just to help me write a book... Of course, that doesn't stop me discussing it in theory and pointing out the resources to help make it happen.

Cheers,

Darren

[ChrisSolomon]

Darren....glad to hear I could help (did I? haha) Real quick....as to the "big" example, I wasn't really meaning show a step-by-step "how to" (don't want consultants to have a heart attack. haha)...I was really looking for more of a general, "given this scenario and all the tools/ideas/concepts gained from this book, how would you approach this design?" and then give some high level "talk throughs" of how it all "might" work. I do not ....DO NOT....like just handing an end-to-end solution to people....rather give them the information and lead them down the path to educate themselves and begin to make all the connections from the small pieces to how the big picture all works. Then they can apply it to any scenario from there. Teach a man to fish vs. give a man a fish...ya know. 😃 Again...looking forward to this!