This blog post is just a bunch of things I would like to see SAP doing in 2018. I invite you to do the same in your expertise area.
2018 has just started! Why not revealing my wishes for SAP in 2018? I do have many of them (124 to be precise). Wishes are separated in broad expertise areas.
I wish...
ABAP
1 - ABAP in SAP Cloud Platform becomes available and easily accessible for those who would like to give it a try.
2 - CDS to have a better documentation, specially when it comes to define what is the result for each annotation
3 - External Views to have better support for database types like VARCHAR, BIGINT, DATE, etc and to have that back-ported in all NetWeaver versions which are currently under maintenance
4 - BOPF to be back-ported in all NetWeaver versions which are currently under maintenance
5 - BOPF gets a better documentation with simple and complex examples
6 - ABAP Push Channels to be back-ported as well
7 - CL_SALV_TABLE becomes obsolete for real OR gets updated to include
overly-requested features like edit mode
8 - SE80 / Eclipse to have a better code completion.
9 - The default eclipse ABAP perspective to be more useful
10 - Eclipse get rid of the "System Packages" option which just lists the first 1000 standard packages (almost all starting with /)
11 - SE16N and SE16H transactions to be moved to a "core" package so they're available in other systems as well
12 - It becomes worthwhile creating unit tests in ABAP (it lacks support for mocking) - I doubt 1% of customers do it regularly in custom developments
13 - It becomes clear the future role and direction of ABAP persistent classes and if there is no future to be announced
14 - Web IDE to become a possible IDE to be used
15 - ABAPGit releases many new features (why not be included as part of the switch framework?)
SAP Gateway
16 - SEGW transaction gets a "refresh" button to update all ABAP artefacts changed while it's open
17 - SEGW transaction enable service generation for oData V4 services.
18 - SEGW transaction enable service generation based on normal global classes
19 - SEGW transaction to show warnings in yellow and errors in red. There are a few situations today that error are displayed in yellow.
20 - SEGW transaction to enable renaming a project
21 - SEGW transaction to enable changing a project type
SAP NetWeaver
22 - SAP Netweaver trial to be delivered BEFORE each new Netweaver version be released to customers
23 - SAP Netweaver trial not to request licenses renewal
24 - SAP Netweaver trial to have an effortless installation both on premise and on cloud
25 - SAP Web IDE to be provided as part of SAP NetWeaver
Fiori
26 - SAP delivers more apps for customers without HANA (will SAP keep negligent about this for 7 more years?)
27 -Fiori Apps Reference library stop calling ABAP programs "Fiori apps" - Read more about the
Fiori Lie Detector
28 - Less effort in useless stuff like the recent
Analysis tool announced in SCN and more effort in the items
29 - Fiori Launchpad Designer (On premise) to have a decent Icon selector which enables filtering and seeing icon's name
30 - Fiori Launchpad Designer ASKS for a workbench/customizing request each time a new Catalog/Group/Tile/Target Mapping is created instead of remembering your last selection
31 - Fiori Launchpad Designer (On premise) to look like the one available as part of Fiori Portal service in CP
32 - All cache bugs to be fixed and all /UI2*CACHE* programs to RIP
33 - Fiori Theme Designer to be way faster (on premise and cloud)
34 - Fiori Theme Designer to be delivered as an NPM module
35 - Fiori Launchpad to be open sourced
36 - Public sites to be available in Fiori Portal service in CP
SAPUI5 / OpenUI5
37 - Less delta between SAPUI5 and OpenUI5 - in other words, open source APF, Fiori Elements, SAP Viz, etc
38 - Any developer to be able to generate the complete UI5 documentation including Developer Guide and API reference. It does not work as described
here and
here
39 - Documentation to be available in
devdocs
40 - More detailed documentation about how to contribute to the library (the purpose of each tool and important file)
41 - Some controls to be back ported when feasible
42 - Documentation to allow "comments" so people can post more examples themselves in any page
43 - Better documentation on Overview Pages, giving detailed examples about each card type and other important topics like variant management and filtering
44 - There are webinars presented by the UI5 team on a regular basis
BUILD
45 - BUILD becomes open source again (
GitHub repository was completely forgotten)
46 - There is a commercial plan for individuals/startups with a feasible price
47 - SAP BUILD service to be part of any SAP Cloud Platform license and in any region
48 - Removes the "limitation" of 5 active projects (when in the end it does not limit anything as it's possible to "archive" projects and "unarchive" them later
49 - SAP BUILD has an option to export the project using a specific SAPUI5 version
50 - Prototypes and studies to be accessed anonymously if desired
51 - Questions which answers are set to "by performing an action" to be automatically "done" as soon as the user does the action (example, clicking a button or navigating to a specific page)
52 - A theme cloud be imported into the prototype (this feature does exists but it's a mystery how it works fine - always seems to be incompatible with the theme uploaded)
53 - A real web service can be consumed inside a prototype
54 - I could select templates which are available in a specific release. For example: it does not make sense to prototype an Overview Page if I am in Fiori 1.0. BUILD is assuming that its user have deep UI5 and Fiori knowledge.
55 - A project can have multiple prototypes to do A/B testing for example
SAP Web IDE
56 - There were an option to "beautify" an xml file like this
<Button
text="Press me"
icon="sap-icon://add"
press="onAdd">
</Button>
57 - There are more templates
58 - The git client and log are not so limited and have less bugs
59 - It is possible to use a yeoman generator to create a new project
60 - It is possible to simply rename a root folder
61 - Annotation editor could work with no connection with the back end service
62 - Outline worked fine
63 - manifest.json editor could rename UI5 routes properly
64 - manifest.json editor includes fields for important metadata information like root view, router class and ovp cards
65 - Regular Web IDE is merged with Full Stack Web IDE
SAP HANA
66 - Fiori Launchpad Designer to be available in HANA 2.0 (and in HXE as well) instead of making each developer figure out how a JSON file can make magic happens
67 - Fiori Theme Designer to be delivered as a MTA app in HANA 2.0
68 - XS CLI to be open source
69 - There is a connector for
Google Data Studio is implemented
70 - Tutorials on how to integrate payment gateway in HANA to enable/disable users
71 -Announce features and tools which are far from ready as "beta" - Fiori is a good example of that
72 - SAP HANA could trend like redis in sites like
StackShare
SAP Cloud Platform
73 - It is possible to create HANA 2.0 instances in its trial version
74 - Trial region to have less timeout errors - specially in Services tab
75 - Gamification service to be part of any license
76 - HCPms to be cheaper or have different licensing models
OpenSAP
77 - More courses for specific SAP Cloud Platform services (workflow, tax service, etc)
78 - Arduino/Raspberry course
79 - SAPUI5 advanced course
80 ABAP CDS course
81 - BOPF course
82 - BRF+ course
83 - SAP Open Source Projects course
84 - SFSF **practical** course
85 Hybris **practical** course
86 - Ariba **practical** course
87 - Concour **practical** course
88 - Leonardo **practical** course
89 - Increate the rate of people who finish a course - I am sure many people give up as soon as they lose a week test
SAP Support
90 - All SAP support team to focus in solving Customer/Partner issue and not in SLAs
91 - support.sap.com portal to have less outages (planned and unplanned)
92 - support.sap.com to be faster and include different filtering options
93 - Publish SAP Notes publicly (without requesting for an S-user)
94 - Publish Downloads publicly (without requesting for an S-user) - Why on Earth do I need an S-User to download SAP GUI? What someone could do with it alone?
95 - There is a program which suggests SAP notes to be installed based on your version (and obviously that install them automatically)
96 - There is no more manual notes, just use something smarter
SAP Education
97 - Official courses have a affordable price (10+ minimum wages for a basis ABAP course is not considerable affordable anywhere in the world)
98 - Anyone anywhere could try to take a certification exam without having to:
- do an official course beforehand
- waiting SAP certification day
99 - SAP rename the certification day in Brazil to "in-the-law day" (without doing this any day represents a tile-in sale, which is considered illegal in Brazil). In other words, someone must buy a course in order to be eligible to take a certification exam - which is another sale). Certification day is done two or three days each year in less than 6 capitals.
100 - I can take ANY certification exam in my country
101 - Learning hub can offer cheaper prices for those who are not interested in **all** content provided by it (aka everybody)
102 - SAP Education team don't be pissed of with SAP Mentors who are teachers in training companies which are not SAP Education partners
SAP Mentor Program
103 - Plan more activities for kids, schools and universities
104 - Engage smaller initiatives in pairs or small groups
105 - Record SAP Mentor monthly meetings
106 - People who really deserves to be mentors to become mentors
SAP Startup Focus Program
107 - Announce which startups "succeeded" or are "going well" since the start of the program
Events
108 - Developer track is back in SAP Forum
109 - There is a SAP TechEd in Palo Alto and Sao Leopoldo
110 - SAP Inside Tracks to have awesome talks
111 - Local meetups to be organised more than ever!
SAP Community
112 - SAP threads/questions were 100% moved to StackExchange and retired from SAP Community
113 - SAP to be more creative when it comes to convicing people to return to the community
114 - Linked profiles recent feature take a step further and enable **merging** profiles
115 - Gamification to be back, for real
116 - The community could moderate content
117 - Downvotes were allowed in blog posts
118 - Tags were not handled as categories nor were organised based on language
119 - Search could work just once
120 - There is a SAP Community mobile app
SSO
121 - We are in 2018, is it too early to implement this properly
Innovations
=======================
THIS ONE IS MY MAIN WISH
122 - Last but not least, I wish SAP team could create an internal/external Kaggle Team which objective was to join competitions using only SAP products in order to win.
Is HANA, CP, BW, Vora, PAL, SAP PA, Lumira, etc enough to win Kaggle competitions? If they are, why not showing this to the world? (if succeeded) This could generate great use cases for huge potential customers.
=======================
What are your wishes?
123 - I really wish at least one SAP employee responsible for each topic above could read this post and comment on each relevant item.
124 - I wish to know your wishes!
So, I invite you to write your own blog post (or add a comment below) with your wishes for 2018.
Happy new year. Definitely, we all have lots of stuff to work on.