Month: November 2014

It’s been an incredible year for me, and I hope you can say the same.  I have a lot to be thankful for, and it’s too numerous to go into.  I hope you are enjoying your friends, your family, your liberty and your life today.

Thanks for reading,

After several hours of fighting through table of contents and internal links, I finally ended up with an e-book that I’m really excited about.  After all of my hard work, I officially have a publish E-book:
SAP Service Management: Your Successful Implementation Guide
Currently, I’m waiting for it to show up on Apple and some of the other major outlets.  In the meantime, it is currently on Smashwords, and will make it to the major outlets soon.  It’s available in all the major formats that work on iBooks, kindle, nook, etc.

Now, the next mission will be finish all of the formatting and then I’ll publish my second effort which will be the advanced configuration for Service Management.  I’m not gonna lie, I’m feeling pretty damn good right now (even if my eyes are incredibly buggy).

I’d love to hear your thoughts, and if you’re so inclined, buy a copy 🙂

Thanks for reading,

Well, I’m getting closer to having my e-book published (well my first one).  I was able to slice and dice my existing one and convert it to probably 3 books at the end of the day.  So I found my publisher of choice.  it’s a place called Smashwords, and overall I like what they offer.  Well, I uploaded my book, and everything seemed great.  Until I got the results.

Happily, there was only thing stopping me from being accepted by the big players, like Apple and Amazon.  Of all things, it was the table of contents.  What I just learned is that you can’t use the nice easy method of the MS Word table contents.  You know, the piece that I meticulously built and refined using the different headers… blah blah blah.  It turns out, you need to use bookmarks for everything.

So that means, I had to manually type out my Table of Contents.  Then go find all of the links that Word built for me, and create new ones in the form of bookmarks.  None of this was hard, but it certainly was time consuming.

Then I found that all of the internal links, needed to use a special naming convention (ref_) for the bookmarks.  I only discovered this after uploading my changes, only to find that most of my links didn’t work :(.  So, now I’ve fixed that, and I’m just waiting for the conversion to complete.  If all goes well, my next post will be to tell you to look for my new E-book 🙂

Thanks for reading,

Well, I thought I was ready to start distributing my e-book…  I went to a website that seemed pretty decent called Smashwords.  They take care of the heavy lifting for you (for a fee of course), but since this book isn’t about the money, I don’t really care if I lose a few bucks a book.  What I do care about is getting it into as many places as possible, so I can help build my credibility even further.  I thought this was going to be the easy part.  Well, I started going through the guide and find that they won’t accept files bigger than 10MB.  Oooops.  My book is 16MB.  The whole concept behind my book was lots of pictures, then the text to describe what needs to happen.  Well, that sure backfired on me.

I’ve since attempted to go direct to a few places.  I have to wait for my account to be approved at both Amazon and Apple… so I don’t know if my book is too big for them yet or not.  I do know that Nook won’t take my book because it’s too big.

So now, this brings up an interesting dilemma.  Do I need to break my book up into multiple pieces?  Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal.  Find a good middle spot, and break it up.  Unfortunately, the whole idea behind this is the quick implementation guide with lots of hyperlinks to the locations you need to update.  The logical breaking points make this impossible to do, because if you’re going to configure service management, you need a little bit of every thing.  The other option is to pull out all the other sections that aren’t part of the quick start guide, put those into their own book.  This is more likely the approach I will have to take, but like everything, it will take time.

So…  it looks like tonight will be an editing night 🙂  I’d love to hear any feedback you might have on this topic.

As I was blowing out my sprinkler system today, in preparation for winter, it got me to thinking about preparing for spring.  While there is a still long time before I can start planting seeds in preparation for my garden, it’s still all about planning what is coming.  I have these cool plans for building a food forest in my backyard, and that will require clearing trees, order new plants and trees, and a lot of digging.  But before I can really do any of that, I need to map out my plan of exactly what I want to do.  Why am I talking about gardening in late fall?  Because a garden is no different than business.

Everything in a business is about planting seeds, preparing the ground, and being ready to reap the harvest in the coming months.  If your business plans things properly, you have a chance of a harvest.  If you half-ass it, well, you’ll end up with a half-ass harvest, or maybe nothing at all.  As I look at the evolution of my own business over the past 6 years, I can see where I obviously didn’t plan.  I went full speed ahead before I knew what I was doing.  Do I regret any of it?  hell no…  do I wish I had been a little smarter.. ABSOLUTELY!!!  The whole idea is to learn from my mistakes.

This past year has been an incredible amount of learning for me.  It has also been a year of planting seeds.  I’ve focused a lot of time and attention on building connections.  Between the SAP MFG conference, my Linked-In initiatives, and my soon to be published E-book, are all about planting seeds.  The biggest problem with planting seeds, is that you never quite know if they will grow into what you expect.  So, this coming year will be all about continuing to plant more and more seeds…  you may have noticed that more of my blog posts are promoting some of my own stuff.  Now that I’ve built my audience, it’s time to start showing them all the work I’ve been doing over the past 6 years 🙂

Now, the future is always in motion.  So who knows where my attention will go in the next 12 months.  But I have every confidence that a good chunk of my effort will be supporting my new customers.  Care to join them???

In my recent attempt to cut expenses, it’s forced me to take a look at a lot of the things I took for granted.  My relationship with SAP is one of the biggest expenditures I have each year.  For the record, I’ve been an SAP Partner and a member of their ICC program, which entitles me to one certification per year.  And for the price tag of 10,000 Euro’s a certification, I finally realized this required a bit more examination.

So, the process of certifying an ABAP Add-on, which is what SAP calls anything designed in ERP that isn’t an interface or smart phone application, is a lot like ISO9001.  If you’ve ever worked in a manufacturing company, you’ve probably heard of this.  The whole process seemed rather interesting to me.  The short story is that it certifies that you wrote down your process, and then follow what you wrote down.  This seemed like a strange thing to be proud of to me.  And I’m sure there had to more to it than that…  but SAP certification is a lot like that.  You give SAP your code, you tell them how to run it, what to test, what to press, and if it all works, they certify you.  They don’t really perform an in-depth code check, beyond what that AAK does for you (this is the software SAP uses to make their own Add-ons and support packs), they trust what you do.  After that, they give you some official looking paperwork and post you on their Add-on website, which I believe you need to be an SAP customer to even see, and until I certified my first application, never knew existed.

So…  that got me to thinking…  what is a certification really doing for my small business?  right now, certainly not 10,000 Euro’s worth.  Will I consider doing it in the future?  absolutely…  if a customer asks for it.  Otherwise, it hasn’t been something I’ve benefited from.  If there is anyone out there that has had any experience with certification, I’d love to hear from you.  Maybe I’m just not utilizing some resources that I was unaware of.

Thanks for reading,