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What's SAP?

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Re: What's SAP?

#61

Post by 1propionyl »

cm2187 wrote: post #28
meddlepal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there continues to be a huge disconnect between UI designers and their users. I'm a power user so I am not the best person to ask for UX advice, but I talk to people all the time that just wish they still had the classic Windows 9x UI's and things more or less were "boring". Reminds me a little bit of a statement about how Taxi drivers can tell you what works architecturally better than an actual architec…

That’s the problem with software. There are two categories of software: software that their developers use themselves, and software made for other people. Visual Studio is the prime example of a software made by people who use it, it continuously improves (minus a few hiccups), it is made for the most used functionalities to be at your fingertips, it doesn’t hide stuff in layers of submenus, etc. The list is long of…

From my own experience interacting with Microsoft developers, there are more using Macs (with Boot Camp dual boots) then you might expect.

But it's hardly a majority (or even that many at all). If you're developing primarily on the CLR or for one the the many Microsoft sub platforms, the first-party tooling is actually quite good. It's only when you need to do both, or stray from one a bit too much, that things become arduous.

Generally however, the Mac users are almost always essentially Microsoft developers who have to target both Windows and Linux and don't want to deal with managing/maintaining a Linux daily driver. MacOS is "close enough". It's pretty representative of the non-Microsoft developers in similar situations.

And no: the Linux Subsystem isn't enough for them either.

Re: What's SAP?

#62

Post by tibbydudeza »

ABAP developer ... after looking at some of the code it is amazing that it actually works.

I recently did something called a BDC since the API call did not work so you resort to stuffing values into some internal tables and replaying keystrokes to enter the data into the system.

Re: What's SAP?

#63

Post by zxienin »

greatartiste wrote: post #40

Years ago I was involved in a project to scrape certain info out of a SAP system with a web interface. It would have been easier to do it with a API but my conversations with the SAP people at work were going nowhere (is it me or do SAP IT people have no concept of how things are done outside the world of SAP ?). Anyway I started looking through the Javascript the browser automatically downloads and found there was 1…

> is it me or do SAP IT people have no concept of how things are done outside the world of SAP ?

SAP has strong NIH syndrome. They could get away with it due to their dominance. So these guys are in echo chamber of own. It reflects and explains the observation you have here.

> 10s of MBs of un optimised code only a tiny percentage of which was being used

frameworks! they try to scale development with frameworks, and end up in dilbert-esque side effects like these.

Re: What's SAP?

#64

Post by achow »

cm2187 wrote: post #31
randomsearch wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you work in a grey office with grey carpets and grey desks? Aesthetics matter. Make software that is beautiful and a joy to use.

Honestly when I work, I focus on the content. Bloomberg Terminals command based UI is a designer’s nightmare, but you get anywhere you want to go in a few keystrokes, and as far as I can tell, most other users love it too.

Most existing and trained users love it.

I have heard same argument for command line interface in yester years, why switch to Graphical User Interface, when CLI is so much more faster and I love it (and so do my other friends around me).

Attrition (so new employees), interns, fresh campus hires, I guess does not happen in that universe.

Re: What's SAP?

#65

Post by tibbydudeza »

oaiey wrote: post #6
mac_was wrote: post #2

SAP is the ultimate B2B and turning into saas, should be the wet dream of every dev who wants to build his own saas.

Until you know the internals of SAP ;). They have/had an own programming language (ABAP) which is the worst combination of BASIC and SQL you could imagine. Do not know the status in 2020, 2007 it was still a combination of ABAP and Java. Interestingly, the source code of SAP is openly readable (once you have their software installed).

Nope still the same in 2020 ... a knowledge of German is usefull as well for the code to make any sense.

Re: What's SAP?

#66

Post by 1propionyl »

cromulent wrote: post #58
ksahin wrote: post #19

"A basic installation of SAP has 20,000 database tables, 3,000 of which are configuration tables. In those tables, there are ~8,000 configuration decisions you need before even getting started." Wow, really?

He's conflating SAP (a company) with the ERP system, but reality is a little different. There are 133,000 tables in a system I just checked, and 40,000 are flagged as configuration.

What's the breakdown of those configuration tables? I'd imagine (perhaps incorrectly) that most are just integer/enum/bool fields?

If so, how many of those tables just exist to define enumeration cases?

Re: What's SAP?

#67

Post by indemnity »

pferde wrote: post #24

What the HN crowd might find interesting is that SAP does not support any kind of containerization technology to run their products in, despite the fact that certain components, like the dialog instance or saprouter, are prime candidates for just that. Let's give them a few more decades, they'll get it. (From randomly perusing their help portal, it seems that there are one or two modern - and quite exotic - software…

There are pockets in various parts of the company that are on more modern stacks (building on K8s/part of CNCF), but the old stuff is still the bread + butter, and the first thing anyone thinks of when they hear SAP.

Re: What's SAP?

#68

Post by zxienin »

OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #52
greatartiste wrote: post #40

Years ago I was involved in a project to scrape certain info out of a SAP system with a web interface. It would have been easier to do it with a API but my conversations with the SAP people at work were going nowhere (is it me or do SAP IT people have no concept of how things are done outside the world of SAP ?). Anyway I started looking through the Javascript the browser automatically downloads and found there was 1…

We figured out how to get at least some reports to export into Excel. Some others implemented MS Access dbs to postprocess exported SAP data. Browser tricks were also part of the mix. Then the directives came down that working outside of SAP was not acceptable and amounted to criticizing SAP. I think SAP views APIs as a threat. That COBOL-like ABAP language is part of their lock in.

> I think SAP views APIs as a threat. That COBOL-like ABAP language is part of their lock in.

This bit is changing now. They're still not there, but internal engineering teams are slowly getting it. There are high priority API first development projects underway.

Re: What's SAP?

#69

Post by toyg »

halfnormalform wrote: post #50
oaiey wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last paragraph is not good. Is it only me or does it leave a conclusion lurking around without saying it aloud?

It doesn’t match the quality of the rest of the article and would really benefit from some fleshing out.

I bet there were extra paragraphs but an editor went “too many words already for a webpage” or “let’s not criticise them too much”.

Re: What's SAP?

#70

Post by fefe23 »

People complaining about how user-unfriendly SAP is or how companies adapt to SAP instead of the other way around are missing the point of SAP.

The point of SAP is that the module for your type of business is being implemented at the market leader in your area, because they are the only ones who can afford it. SAP will come to the market leader and put their processes into software.

Then everybody else adapts to SAP not because adapting SAP is impossible but because SAP implements the processes that made the market leader successful (at least that's the idea).

So it is very intentional that you adapt to SAP and not the other way around. You do it to emulate the market leader.

And the user friendliness is also on purpose. If you go visit a company using SAP, you will find that you have a certain job in the company and it needs two or three things from SAP. Jobs are very specialized, so SAP is, too. Nobody is supposed to just wing it with SAP. You are supposed to learn how to do your transaction with SAP, and that transaction is then meant to be super efficient.

If you actually go visit a somebody from an enterprise environment interact with SAP, you will be astounded how quickly they can do what they are supposed to do. It's almost as if the software was optimized for frictionless efficiency.

Also note that user friendliness is a subjective and mysterious area. If you go look at an airplane cockpit, where actual research was done into how to optimize user interfaces so that the pilot will not be confused under stress, you will see that there is a separate button for everything. There is no "shift key", no different modes. If you need to use it, there is a button for it. To someone who has not learned how to use that UI, it appears alien and unfriendly. But the the trained pilot it is the pinnacle of perfection.

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