Socialize your ERP, and collaborate with him!

Andrea Fontana

Daniele De Laura

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Agenda

• Introduction – persons, company • A new way to look at your ERP • Meet SAP and Connections • SAP vs Digital Experience using DDC • BRS Solution (SAP, DX, CNX) • Examples

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About us – Daniele De Laura

•I started selling software in 1996 •I started selling IBM software in 2001, in Sowre •I started using GPP in 2004 •Sowre TCI champion 2002 & 2004 •Premier Partner since 2008 •Beacon award 2008 for Portal area •Beacon award 2012 for BRS Retail solution

Currently I work as Sales Executive at Sowre SA in Switzerland [ of course, that's not my country :-) ] I’m a graduated management engineer from Karlruhe’s Technical

University

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About us – a weighty colleague in ICS

Andrea Fontana •began working with Lotus Notes in 1992 •began working with WebSphere in 2002 •is an IBM Champion for WebSphere since 2012 •is an IBM Champion for ICS in 2015 •is an IBM DeveloperWorks Contributing Author since 2012 •is an BM developerWorks Accredited Author in 2015 Currently he works as CTO - ICS & WebSphere Architect at Sowre SA

in Switzerland [ but it's also not his country :-) ]

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About us – Sowre’s customers

Socialization is

according to a Dictionary:

a continuing process whereby an individual acquires a personal identity and learns the norms, values, behaviour, and social skills appropriate to its social position.

according to Philosophy:

the process by which human infants begin to acquire the skills necessary to perform as a functioning member of their society; it is the most influential learning process one can experience

What’s Socialization?

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Enterprise Resource Planning is according to a Dictionary: accounting-oriented information systems for identifying and planning the enterprise wide resources needed to collect, make, distribute, and manage accounting for customer orders. ERP systems were originally extensions of MRP II systems according to Wikipedia: Is a business management software, typically a suite of integrated applications, that a company can use to collect, store, manage and interpret data from many business activities, including:

• Product planning, cost • Manufacturing or service delivery • Marketing and sales • Inventory management • Shipping and payment

What’s Enterprise resource planning (ERP) ?

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What’s Company management

Company management involves identifying the mission, objectives, procedures, rules and management of the human capital of an enterprise to contribute to the success of the enterprise.

Management does not need to be seen only from an enterprise point of view, because management is an essential function to improve one's life and relationships.

This implies effective communication.

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The typical use of ERP System in decision process is based on the fact that humans must search each information they need for that specific process.

Humans must run inquiries in the ERP System to collect a large part of the information.

Usually an employee each morning must connect to the ERP, and execute some activities to extract reports and prints, and use them in its decision processes

A typical decision process.

In other words, the standard use of ERP

is in PULL mode, the ERP contains the

information.

But you must pull data from it.

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A typical decision process.

•each actor must search and extract information

•many information will be shown in a report or a document

•only human can extract data and analyze it to make a decision

The most important "actor" is a Document.

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What’s the link ?

Between Enterprise Resource Planing and Company Management, each component involved in running your business, produces finally documents; but this need also to pass through human activities, to achieve the goals.

“Human” is also a main focus in your Business Activities Why don’t try to shift the focus from Documents to Persons ?

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Evolution

Imagine this scenario:

I am a Member of a set of Communities

These Communities work to define a new strategy to sell a new product.

In this Communities we have some Actors like: Project Managers Product Managers Marketing Experts Designers

This actors must work with some data taken from the ERP

Each actor is working together with the other associates to join a goal, and sometime they need to find some data in the company ERP or CRM

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We have a new Actor !

The new concept is: enable the socialization process of your ERP

The leading idea is: SAP can send some information to the communities, to help members to complete decisional process.

So you have a new

colleague: Mr SAP.

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The new Scenario is ready

Human are the main focus in a new decisional process where my ERP collaborates with them in Decisional Communities. We have completed in this way our transformation to :

Social Enterprise

Collaboration

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Behind the scenes, First Step (to CNX)

Some SAP function have a special workflow step to publish some alert in the Connections Activity Stream or Blog post using a specific SAP-Bapi: The basic idea is: the SAP-BAPI, when a specific situation happens, create a json/xml data set and POST it on Connections, like an alert to a user

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Behind the scenes, Next Step (from / to CNX)

One module creates an Interface gateway with SAP Bapi (cnx Bapi) and uses Cnx API to publish information to Connections. This Module receives a request from SAP and via Cnx API publishes on Activity Stream or Blog Post that information; it can also receive requests from Connections and invoke SAP Bapi.

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Semantic Role

Used in the Connections Activity Stream API

“Duke Ellington posted a new song to iTune”

actor: Entity performing the activity (for instance, “Duke”)

verb: Action of the activity (for instance, “post”-ing) object: The primarity object of the action (for instance, “song”)

target: Target of the action (for instance, “iTune”)

Activities/events can be represented in 2 formats:

─ JSON document ─ ATOM document

JSON is the primary format supported by Connections.

Atom is only supported on retrieval – not to post events

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Use of Template keywords

IBM Connections allows two kinds of Template in the event title:

Object substitutions - where an appropriate representation of a known object within the event is substituted into the title. Title template substitutions - these use the above object substitutions, providing a full title that is appropriately resourced.

Object Substitution. Substitution values are supported within a submitted event.title:

${Actor} - this is converted into appropriately marked up HTML which displays the Actors name and links to a Business Card corresponding to the Actor ${Object} - if this is a person we display as with the Actor above, otherwise the displayName with a link to the url ${Target} - if this is a person we display as with the Actor above, otherwise the displayName with a link to the url

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Sample to post an ActivityStream

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Semantic details

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Semantic details

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Semantic details

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Semantic details

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Semantic details

Filed Type: Activity Object Describes the primary object of the activity, for instance, in the activity: “Duke Ellington posted a new song to iTune”, the object activity is “Song”. An Activity SHOULD contain an object property whose value is a single Object

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Semantic details

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…and the result is…

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…and the result is…

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The new Json will be

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@mention

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Where can I send my Json?

Now we have a Json ready to publish on our Connections but how can we do it?

<ctxRoot>/opensocial/basic/rest/activitystreams/@me/@all/@all

<ctxRoot> is the context root of the Connections FQDN

Authentication scheme Specify the auth. Scheme intendend to be used: “basic”: basic authentication “form”: form based authentication “oauth”

User id The stream returns all events that are related to the given user. @me is an alias representing the currently authenticated user. CommunityUUID representing specific Community

Group Id Events for the group related to the user id. @all (wild card) in most cases. @friends – events from user network @following – events from people followed @self – own events

App id Events for a given applications. @all corresponds to top level view Application name: “activities”, “blogs”, …

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Integrating with IBM Digital Data Connector (DDC) for DX

You can use the IBM® Digital Data Connector (DDC) for WebSphere® Portal framework to integrate data from external data sources on your portal pages by using IBM Web Content Manager presentation components. External data means that the data does not need to be stored directly in IBM Web Content Manager or must use live data.

With Digital Data Connector, your website designers can use Web Content Manager presentation components to generate the web page markup for your external data. They can use all the Web Content Manager data management facilities for managing your external data visualizations

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The Digital Data Connector is a secret weapon from IBM! It gives you the possibility to use WCM and WCM design components to render any external data, with little-to-no java coding or deployment. A DDC profile is used to define the transformation from your specific XML into a generic list data structure and enumerate the data attributes available in your list items.

Integrating with IBM Digital Data Connector (DDC) for DX

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One module creates an Interface gateway with SAP Bapi (xdx Bapi) and can answer via WebServices with a json/xml data, This data can be rendering via WCM presentation template in our Portal Experience. It can also receive requests from Portal and invoke SAP Bapi, to perform an Action, as confirm an Order or similar.

Integrating with IBM Digital Data Connector (DDC) for DX

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The major benefits of this approach include the following: • Your Web Content Manager designers can fully control the visual appearance of the

integrated data. • They can visualize the external data in the same way in which they visualize data that is

stored in Web Content Manager. • As a result, they can visualize the external data in a way that is consistent with the

corporate design of your overall website by reusing existing Web Content Manager components.

• To quickly adjust existing visualizations of your data or create new visualizations for new kinds of external data, you no longer need the help of software developers or the IT department. Your website designers can start working on the presentation templates directly from your portal pages that show the data. They use the inline editing capabilities of Web Content Manager.

• Your website designers make updates to the Web Content Manager design components in project scope. This way, they can keep updates in draft stage until all updates to the project are completed, approved, and finally published.

Integrating with IBM Digital Data Connector (DDC) for DX

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Use Digital Data Connector in the following ways: • You can code a Java plug-in, a so-called DDC plug-in, that hooks into

the DDC. The plug-in loads the external data and transforms it into a generic DDC data structure, so-called bean lists. You can then have the bean lists rendered on your portal pages by using standard Web Content Manager rendering methods.

• You can use the generic XML DDC plug-in that is built into Digital Data Connector. You can use this plug-in to integrate remote XML data without writing or deploying extra Java code.

• You can also use a combination of the two approaches.

Integrating with IBM Digital Data Connector (DDC) for DX

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Use Digital Data Connector can be integrate remote data in two format:

• .

• DDC plug-in that is ready to use for integrating external JSON data of your choice. You can use this plug-in to render external JSON data on your portal pages without having to write custom Java code.

DDC plug-in that is ready to use for integrating external XML data of your choice. You can use this plug-in to render external XML data on your portal pages without having to write custom Java code.

CF06(required)

Integrating with IBM Digital Data Connector (DDC) for DX

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Integrating wit IBM Script Portlet (SP) for DX

The IBM Script Portlet enables a script developer to create portlets for IBM® WebSphere® Portal with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The Script Portlet is designed for front-end developers to make porting applications to WebSphere Portal easy. You can import an application that you developed already. The components are saved in Web Content Manager. You can also edit the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in the Script Portlet.

The Script Portlet makes it easy to develop portlets with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, without Java or the JSR 286 portlet specification.

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The following key WebSphere Portal and IBM Web Content Manager features are available with the Script Portlet: • Content targeting based on devices or locations • Access to user login information • Adaptive design that uses conditional rendering • Access to shared render parameters, portlet preferences, and live text

The Script Portlet has the following advantages: • Users have more autonomy and less dependence on central IT for portlet

development, which decreases the time to market. • Users need less skill to be productive WebSphere Portal developers. • Users control access and workflow processes in enterprise settings. • Users can create reusable assets and contents. • Users can render existing portlets, such as those developed with IBM Web Experience

Factory or IBM Rational Application Developer

Integrating wit IBM Script Portlet (SP) for DX

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Integrating wit IBM Script Portlet (SP) for DX

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Biometric Recognition Solution (DDC & SAP & BRS)

BRS is the solution dedicated to Retail and traffic analysis Significance and quality of the information BRS is designed to provide high quality measures and data: Precision counts of the inflowing visitors and their demographic profile; • Gender • Age • Ethnic group Store personnel is not counted. Attention time is calculated exactly, with no distortions or errors Multiple passages of a customer are detected and managed No pictures and no personal data are stored; traced and closed processes avoid any possibility of misuse 40

Biometric Recognition Solution (DDC & SAP & BRS)

All experience data will be combined with Business transaction. Usually we combine data collected using BRS with the cash transaction data (receipts), as registered e.g. in SAP. We can identify which type of user have purchased and how much spent divided by

• Gender • Age • Etnia

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Example: Mr Sap sends to me an ActivityStream

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Example: Mr Sap sends to me an ActivityStream

Mr Sap with BRS show me my Store KPI’s

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Mr Sap with BRS show me my Store KPI’s

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Andrea Fontana

CTO – ICS & WebSphere Architect afontana@sowre.com

Michele Buccarello

------ mbuccarello@sowre.com