A couple weeks back my firm sent me to Walldorf Germany to participate in partner testing of SAP's new business rules engine BRFplus.  I had a great week there overall, made lots of great industry contacts, ate great food and beer, saw castles, and got to watch a public viewing of the Germany / Ghana soccer game.  More importantly I see the importance now of clearly removing business rules from application programming and implementing them in a human accessible form.  Not just from a implementation perspective either, but from an overall TCO perspective to the business.  Here's some bullet points on my lessons learned:

• BRFplus can be used to replace almost all user exit, BAdi and event logic in SAP, since those things are typically used to implement business rules in ABAP.
• BRFplus can be used to replace a lot of custom developed ABAP programs that lean on 'Z' customizing tables.
• BRFplus has the potential to replace a lot of standard SAP customizing in the future
• BRFplus rules use the short text to display rule sentences, instead of using technical names. Ergo, rules are written in English, not in machine language.
• BRFplus has a low learning curve.  Any developer can pick it up and use it within a few days.  Functional people could learn in a few weeks.
• BRFplus is getting functional/technical/business aligned on SAP projects as it is a tool that anybody can at least read and understand.
• I would like to see BRFplus kept in the pockets of all functional and technical people.  How much ABAP could be replaced with business rules?  A lot!
• BRFplus should allow the business to directly maintain some of the simple rules themselves.  Other rules would still need to be maintained by IT.
• The total cost of ownership (TCO) is reduced by using BRFplus since the business is getting ownership back on their rules, as well as the ability to make changes faster since the rules are human readable now.
• SAP projects which come with a BRFplus license should take the opportunity to capitalize by educating the team on what a rule is so that they can identify and implement all business rules in BRFplus.
• SAP customers which have acquired a BRFplus license from another module should consider the extended usage of BRFplus outside of the core module it was included with.  Those ABAP programs which keep changing all the time might be easier to maintain if the rules were built inside a rules engine.
• Likewise to the above point, SAP customers which do not have a BRFplus license but do have multiple use cases for business rules (IE: highly complex and expensive ABAP programs) may want to consider the purchase and roll out of BRFplus.
  

Hopefully some more blogs, or vlogs will come later going through the product itself.  I'm also interested in writing about project methodologies (how to document and implement the rules), and BRFplus project estimation methods.

My company (a large consulting firm) recently did the bi-annual laptop refresh.  While my laptop situation was acceptable before, the cost cutting factor and lack of thought has gotten so bad in the newest refresh that the new line of laptops can not even be classified as usable for the heavy business user nor developer.  My previous laptop was a HP Compaq 6910p.  It sported 1280x800 resolution, 14.1inch screen, 16:9 aspect and weighed in just over 5lbs.  While it wasn't really the fastest computer out there, it was stable enough and could generally do everything I needed it to, which includes:

Just switched to Posterous for my personal blog from Wammy's House.  I didn't have enough personal brand on Wammy's House, and I spent too much time fighting with Wordpress plugins than it was worth.  Posting by email and all the super simple email-based service integration was also simply too tempting to pass up with Posterous.  Enjoying the clean and simple look now, and the keeping the focus on pure blog content instead of service updates and life streams.

See you in the blogsphere!

I notice there has been a lot of iPad complaints out there in the last few days.  (See http://bit.ly/ipadfailtweets, Jeff Nolans blog, and Cory Doctorow’s blog).  Firstly I’ll admit that I’m also guilty of jumping on the iPad hate wagon without so far having given any rational reason to not use the device.  I mean, it really is a sexy device and has potential to change the paradigm of personal computing that we live by right now, just as laptops did 20 years ago or so. So what’s the big beef with the thing then?   

Here’s the coles notes version of why people are hating this thing right now:

1) Apples making it hard to open up the hardware itself to do things such as change the battery etc.
2) Apples Chinese-democracy in it’s app store is giving the wrong message on how software should be distributed.
3) Apple now markets their products to casual users, and is forgetting about the hackers.
4) Content providers are charging too much money for tablet specific content (IE: Times charging $5 for an issue of their magazine in iPad format).
5) Apple uses DRM with their music downloads, which annoys the piss out of us.

So, while I originally agreed and retweeted a lot of these comments and feelings, I never did stop and give an actual solution to the problems presented here.  When I thought about it though, the solution is almost available already, and honestly solves almost every single problem / complaint presented here.  Mashable posted a great link here outlining alternative tablets that are in the works.  Note, most of these tablets are powered by the Android operating system.

So, without further adieu, here’s my agreeing with the iPad hate rant, and then presenting the realistic devices and software options that will blow it out of the water and resolve all the issues people have with it right now.  IE: For all the things iPad doesn’t, Android does.

1) Apples making it hard to open up the hardware itself to do things such as change the battery etc.

Most laptop-and-smaller devices are not really made to be taken apart.  But that doesn’t stop the real hackers from taking them apart anyway.  I’m sure that in the next few days somebody will post a walk through on Hacker News explaining how to change the battery.

While we wait for the 100-step-probably-gonna-brick-your-device walk through, a real solution for this could be to wait for an Android tablet to come to market later this year, which is ’screws not glue’ as mentioned in Cory’s blog.  As we all know, one of the selling points for the Droid was that you can feel free to expand your memory and change the battery as you please.  I’m sure the same will go for the Android tablets coming too.

2) Apples Chinese-democracy in it’s app store and products is giving the wrong message on how software should be distributed.

Steve Jobs originally built the Mac to help people, proving that computers are not just business machines, but machines that can help us all in our daily lives.  Now, while that’s a nice warm fuzzy feeling, things have changed.  Apple now takes a much more protective approach with it’s products.  The draconian rejections of software from Apples app store goes completely against old Steve’s helping people ideology.  Now he’s out to protect shareholder value only and isn’t interested in providing software that helps makes peoples lives better.

Us hackers miss the ‘old Steve’, but never fear, Android is here!  Android offers an app marketplace as a simple and centralized repository of applications that make it easy for anybody to get new software for their mobiles.  So, what if you want something that isn’t available on the marketplace?  No problem, Android also lets you install non-marketplace applications too.  Hence, the marketplace acts as a real solution to distributing software easily, while still giving full rights and freedoms for people to install whatever other programs they want.

3) Apple now markets their products to casual users, and is forgetting about the hackers.

This one is a little less functional and more whiny and nostalgic.  Yes we all miss the ‘old days’ where owning a computer was much geekier than it is nowadays.  But let’s face it, the people buying iPads are not the same people that bought the Apple II back in the late 70’s, and Apple isn’t the same do-gooder company it used to be.  If you’re a casual user who doesn’t even understand, nor want to understand the philosophical dilemmas around hardware and software democracy then by all means, buy an iPad.  If you are a hacker, and/or a user who wants to support open and transparent technology then buy an Android device.  The software is completely open source, and the hardware is generally more accessible than Apples.

4) Content providers are charging too much money for tablet specific content (IE: Times charging $5 for an issue of their magazine in iPad format).

This complaint is kind of dumb.  People simply won’t purchase content at this price seeing that it’s about 5x the price of print content or Amazon Kindle content, and eventually the providers will lower prices.  There will be the really hardcore Apple fan-boys or braggers who will pay the premium price right now for this content, but that’s a small percentage of what the content providers need to break even.  In a few months the prices will have to drop in order to compete with other devices.

5) Apple uses DRM with their music downloads, which annoys the piss out of us.

Ok this one is really simple.  Buy an Android device and use Amazon MP3.  No DRM attached, problem solved.

So there you have it.  Android solves every single problem presented by the iPad.  I hope you find it helpful and that is provides you with some decent alternatives to the iPad.  Any takers on the Adam yet?