Mass change your SAP passwords
The short version: Here is a script to automate changing your SAP password across many systems. The long version follows…
Who’s your special Basis person?
With Mother’s day over, it’s time to reflect again on the other special persons in ones life. Today I had an amusing discussion with two colleagues about who’s Basis guy is the best. It turned out very much like a discussion between some five-year olds about who’s dad is the strongest.
If the shoe doesn’t fit…
The decade of the 90s was the heyday of ERP systems. Of course, the history goes back much further. Look at SAP, for example, who started in the early 70s by producing “one size fits all” solutions. This was of course a radical departure from the norm up to then, in that most companies wrote their own systems from scratch. SAP recognized a need in the market for such solutions, as the same solutions were being written over and over again. While I imagine that this worked quite well for accounting software like SAP’s first product, R/1, covering other aspects of business is and has been a different story.
My first SDN blog entry
The caption of this article should have read “My first PHP website” or “My first Ruby application”. But it doesn’t. It is my first SDN blog entry, which I humbly invite you to read, if only to remark about the fact that it seems so dry, so crusty, so devoid of all verve.
I must say that it was rather exciting to see my own blog entry on the SDN website, “in print” as it were, there for the whole world to see. The feeling was rather giddy, something like the vertigo when zooming in from a dizzying height to merely a few-hundred metres above a landmark in Google Earth. You should try it some time.
Why I like ABAP
This month marks two anniversaries for me. One is the engagement to my wife 6 years ago. The other is that I have been working for 10 years. I started out in ABAP and I’ve been doing ABAP ever since (with long excursions into Java along the way). I have come to greatly respect ABAP, with which I have chiefly been earning my bread and butter.
There are some things about ABAP that don’t seem so great at first. It’s a proprietary language tied into a particular system, and it can’t be applied outside of that context. ABAP smacks of older mainframe languages, from which I’m sure it’s inherited some traits. The syntax and keywords seem odd and nonsensical, even clunky and quirky at times.