Report from the trenches - SAP Inside Track OSLO 2019

[rsletta]

We did it!

On Saturday 17.august 2019, we held the first SAP Inside Track in OSLO for ages. And what a success it was! We held it at the home offices of Sopra Steria, on the 25th. floor of the iconic Posthuset. We had around 30-35 people, coming from all over Europe. There was even three junior consultants coming all the way from Italy.

The Sessions

As many might have noticed, we choose the theme "The Future Is Now" for this years event. We wanted to show that there's a lot of exciting things happening in the SAP ecosystem, and that there is no reason to wait to learn it. We had dj.adams.sap, giving the keynote on continuous learning, before malin.liden took us through a great talk on diversity and innovation. Then dj.adams.sap took the stage for another presentation, this time on the Cloud Application Programming Model. Next one out was bfeeb8ed7fa64a7d95efc21f74a8c135 giving us a lecture on his view on the future of ABAP.

After a brief lunch, sebastian.wolf had a session on APACK, before simenlf came on, talking about two things close to his heart; beer and technology. More precise, his IoT enabled home brewery, connected to SAP Cloud Platform. The last session came from stein.tronstad, talking about practical use of SAPs ML/AI offerings.

All the sessions are available on the SAP Inside Track OSLO YouTube channel.

Livestreaming

We decided early on that we wanted to livestream to YouTube. Both for accessibility, letting people participate, even though they are prevented from coming in person. This also had some cool side-effects, namely that we actually had a global audience, with viewers in India (hi nabheetscn), and Australia(howdy jthuijls).



We've had lots of experiences around the streaming, so we plan to have those in a separate blog post at a later time. But we can reveal, that live-streaming is one of the best decisions we made. And as a nörd, there is nothing like putting together a livestreaming rig.

The Team

While SAP Inside Track OSLO has been my "little" project, and I've had kristianlarsen with me as co-organiser the whole time, we couldn't have pulled it of without volunteers helping with the execution. There are many great people working at Sopra Steria, and yvonne.kolltveit, jht, fsolbakk, and Anne Holme all approached me to lend a hand.

The People

While the sessions are interesting and great, the best part about a SAP Inside Track is the people. Fantastic human beings, as diverse as it can get, all sharing a common love for technology and learning. Having the honour of arranging an event like this warms my heart, as I see that people enjoy themselves in each others company.

The Sponsors

This would been very hard to pull of without support from our sponsors, Sopra Steria, EY Skye, SAP, and SAP Press. So a big thank you to all of them.

SAP Press provided us with three digital copies of "ABAP to the Future" by bfeeb8ed7fa64a7d95efc21f74a8c135. These were raffled out, and won by yvonne.kolltveit, Haowen Tan, and Rehan Yousaf.

What's next?

This has been an amazing experience, and there is no question about it; you can all just start to prepare for the news of SAP Inside Track OSLO 2020!

In the meantime, there is work to do. We have to have a debrief and also try to collect feedback from the participant, to identify learning point for the road ahead. We are planning to put together a more technical blog post on the livestream, as that is a nörding goldmine, so look forwards to that one. I also hope that I can patch together a post on lessons learned, to share with the SAP community, as other SIT organisers might find them useful.

And lastly we can reveal that we already have started planning a smaller event around January - February 2020, most likely a Codejam. So on that bombshell, we sign off with sitOSLO 2019 sending all our love to the whole SAP community.

Resources:

SAP Inside Track OSLO on YouTube

SAP Inside Track OSLO 2019 photo gallery

SAP Inside Track OSLO Wiki