Sap News & Articles

If you haven’t got your Christmas shopping done yet, there’s a pile of new document management software that’s worth a look. SAP and OpenText have upgraded NetWeaver, Microsoft and Nokia have new apps for Symbian, Version One goes to R2.2, KnowledgeTree releases ExplorerCP and SmartVault has a new service update.

Box.net is gearing up to take on bigger players in the enterprise software market. Having recently raised US$ 48 million earlier this year, the cloud storage platform startup has recently updated this Series D financing round with US$ 81 million from Salesforce.com and SAP, with Bessemer Venture Partners and NEA contributing to the round.

Oracle’s OpenWorld has finally kicked off with the customary keynote from CEO Larry Ellison. Leaving aside the fact that many are saying this was his worst keynote ever, for those in enterprise computing the launch of the Exalytics analytics appliance is the one most will be watching.

If the hype is to be believed, platform-as-a-service is going to be massive in the not-too-distant future and SAP is partnering with MongoDB to drive its offering in the market.

Dreamforce starts today… and it feels like Groundhog Day. Not the groundhog that tells the weather, but groundhog in the way things keep repeating themselves. The repetition this time is in the shape of Microsoft’s offer of rebates of US$ 150-per-seat for customers who subscribe to Dynamics CRM online.

In recent months, the Facebook team has been on a quest to pack more information into the homepage. The latest composition removes the Most Recent tab from the news feed and replaces it with a real-time activity feed inside the Chat sidebar, slamming users with more information whether they like it or not. 

This week, after announcing its release in March, SAP has put BusinessObjects 10 GRC on general release, Google gets some more security certification, BMC offers cloud Lifecycle Management to mitigate the risks associated with cloud computing outages, and Hostway offers email encryption.

You get the impression sometimes that OpenText (news, site) and SAP (news, site) make so many agreements at both a business and technology level that they should just merge and get it over with. The latest agreement is one that will enable the SAP Travel Management application to work with a receipts management solution that OpenText has released.

SAP (news, site) announced that it is partnering with Google (news, site) to allow customers to create geographic visualizations of business information stored in SAP’s analytics software using Google Map, Earth and Street View.

It’s taken a couple of weeks to get it, but Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the GRC space is finally out. Leaving aside the list of vendors that made it into the "'Leaders' quadrant," Gartner says that over the course of this year, the market shifted from a tactical focus on regulatory compliance to a wider focus on enterprise risk management.

In today’s increasingly connected, competitive and rapidly changing business environments, the individuals working within an enterprise need to be able to quickly access all relevant expertise and information, wherever it may reside, and trust it enough to act upon it. None of that can be done if organizations don’t become more open and transparent.

Want to convince your company to start an online community?

If SAP (news, site) has given the impression in recent years that it is slow in getting to market or responding to change, the announcements that it will be moving some of its products to the Amazon EC2 cloud and that it is facilitating deeper integration between SAP and Microsoft cloud computing technologies should go some way to improving that image.

Microsoft has finally set a (approximate) date for the release of its Service Pack 1 for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, which, according to the Office Sustained Engineering and Release blog, will support Chrome once it is released.

I understand where this question comes from -- if you're a "collaborator" you must somehow be opposed to process. Not true. A process (in the more ideal than evil world) is an embodiment of learning. It's a way to automatically follow some best practices so that you don't have to expend effort or brain cells figuring out how to do it. It scales very well defined tasks, and ensures compliance with various rules, regulations and policies. Processes have their limitations -- they aren't good at learning, experimenting or adapting. Which is of course what collaboration is extremely good at.

So in this "more ideal than evil" world we try to arrange for ourselves, we want to be collaborators -- supported by processes.