SAP for Me – Almost one year later

How time flies! It’s almost one year now since I posted my blog “A new beginning: SAP for Me – Your digital companion”. Now, 11 months later, I would like to take the opportunity to review all that has happened in the meantime.

We have started SAP for Me as an open beta

SAPPHIRENOW 2019 was the place where we officially rolled out SAP for Me to the public. We started SAP for Me in an open beta phase, which made SAP for Me available to anybody who was interested, with the minor restriction that the service might not be perfectly stable or that information might not be fully accurate.

Since then, we have met a lot of customers and received a lot of reactions through our feedback channel, which is implemented directly in SAP for Me. A lot of this feedback has already been incorporated. Performance was an issue for many people at the beginning for example, but we can happily say that this is now a thing of the past. We are aware however that new functionality will also increase the data complexity behind the scenes, which again will have an impact on performance. As a result, we see performance improvements as an ongoing task.

Besides the functional testing, we also used the time to prove our concepts, to take first steps without being under pressure, and to make sure we have a good scope to start with after the beta phase is over. Of course, there is much more to do, and we have a whole stack of ideas and requirements in the pipeline. We also want to send out the signal that SAP for Me is good to go right now though and is fully operational.

We are currently planning on ending the open beta phase by the end of April 2020.

You don’t have an SAP Universal ID user yet?

During the open beta phase, we also entered into close collaboration with the SAP Universal ID team. As a first result of this, we announced that SAP for Me was SAP Universal ID (UID) enabled in September 2019.

You might wonder what the benefits of SAP Universal ID are. My first answer is “it’s most likely the SAP version of what Apple has with their Apple-ID”. In the future, you will only require this one ID that is owned by you, stays with you and is the key to access all digital channels like SAP for Me, SAP.com or SAP Community. Other benefits will also unfold over time with SAP Universal ID.

Of course, we have to implement a feature as central and wide-ranged as this in steps, so as to avoid major disruption. To achieve this, the SAP Universal ID team started with the so called “conditional login”, which allows every user to either log in with “old, known” users (e.g. S-User) or the new UID. At present, SAP for Me is therefore UID-enabled using conditional login. Like SAP for Me, the SAP Universal ID team now enables more and more digital SAP channels, like the SAP ONE Support Launchpad, the SAP Support Portal, OpenSAP or the SAP Help Portal.

As mentioned earlier, there will be a lot of further benefits arising from to the SAP Universal ID. The greatest benefit right now is for those of you who have multiple S-Users or P-Users, as UID allows you to link all of them under one UID, thus simplifying the login procedure significantly.

I don’t want to sally forth into a lengthy explanation of SAP Universal ID here though. If you’d like to learn more about SAP Universal ID, I can recommend a webinar session that Kevin DeVilbiss and I recently recorded about UID as part of a larger SAP for Me webinar series.

Finalist of the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award

The greatest confirmation that we are on the right track comes from our direct customer meetings and validation sessions, where our vision, ideas, future steps, and current scope have all been well received.

Another very positive sign for us was when SAP for Me was selected – from 160 SAP projects around the globe – to become one of the eight finalists for the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award.

Being elected by our colleagues worldwide illustrates the strength of support we enjoy in the company. And at this point, it should be made clear that SAP for Me would be nothing without the support of many people in projects which are essential for the content we show through SAP for Me, right now and in the future.

While we didn’t actually win the Hasso Plattner Award in the end, we are still quite honored to have been part of this journey. And of course, we are also proud for the eventual winner. Congratulation to Nicolas Neumann, the winner of the Hasso Plattner Founder’s Award 2019.

What comes next? The rollout rolls on!

So what comes next? We are in the middle of a large wave now. As I mentioned earlier, the end of our Open Beta phase is near. And for us that means speeding up the rollout process.

Remember, you can already access SAP for Me right now at: https://me.sap.com

And also remember that you can create your UID from SAP for Me (user profile section) or here: https://universalid.sap.com/create

Would you like to find out more about SAP for Me? You could still become part of our ongoing webinar series. Here you can listen “live” to our upcoming webinars or watch recordings of our previous webinars.

In the next weeks, we will also launch a blog series that reflects the content of our webinars for those of you who prefer reading blogs to watching videos.

How to keep up to date

For those who want to stay up to date with the latest developments in SAP for Me and SAP Universal ID, I recommend following the people listed below:

SAP for Me

Oguzhan (Ozzy) Genis – Twitter / LinkedIn

Jürgen (JJ) Jakowski – Twitter / LinkedIn

Dietrich Hahn – Twitter / LinkedIn

SAP Universal ID

Kevin DeVilbiss – Twitter / LinkedIn

Thilo Brandt – Twitter / LinkedIn

Cornelia (Conny) Mitschke – Twitter / LinkedIn

Besides people, another way to keep up to date is our page on SAP.com as well as another central source in the SAP Community we are currently building up.

The SAP for Me story just starts here

Let me end this blog with a final statement.

So far, we were focused on getting the first steps right, validating our ideas, and jump-starting the service with an initial scope. The real SAP for Me story is now just beginning, as we set out to rapidly increase awareness of our service and continuously expand its scope over the coming months and years.

All the best and stay healthy,

JJ

Chief Product Owner of SAP for Me

This article is based on a SAP Community blog that I have posted earlier.