User empowerment is about users gaining control over what they're doing. It also concerns group participation, where everyone benefits from the collective wisdom of the group. For business software, user empowerment means opening up user interfaces and services so that users can personally access the data and services they need. Individuals can create their own data and services as well as customize the formatting and analyze the results as they wish. This new flexibility also enables users to achieve better results based on the experience and advice of others. In short, the Web is no longer "read only" for users; it is a read/write platform for next generation applications, where users do much more than passively enter inputs. Business software companies such as SAP must provide customers with all the capabilities the customers expect from their systems – from security and scalability to availability and consistency.

SAP Research has been exploring user empowerment for a significant period of time. The organization has studied ways to help users leverage SAP systems to a full extent. This was achieved by providing more intuitive ways of accessing SAP systems, as well as having embedded access within typical end-user environments, such as a browser or a mind-mapping tool. SAP Research is undertaking a range of activities on user empowerment with projects exploring mash-ups, semantic analysis, social Webs, collective intelligence, and dynamic programming languages.

Lightweight Composition is one of the pillars of the SAP Research project portfolio in this space. The Rooftop prototype allows end users to develop user-centric mashups with a one-click operation. It was developed by SAP Research in Brisbane and is currently being turned into a product by SAP. Additionally, the team has developed a range of widgets that are now productively being used at SAP, such as the SAPcon widget that informs IT managers worldwide about the overall status of the IT landscape. There is also a growing demand for mobile enterprise applications, as well as an increasing need for companies to reach out directly to end users via their mobile devices. This is why SAP Research is researching lightweight mobility, making it possible to multiply mobile scenarios that adapt well to mass-market devices.