One of the challenges a Web developer and Portal administrator have in a Portal project is how to enable easy content contribution form content managers. SAP Enterprise Portal offers many ways for content collaboration;file upload, Knowledge management and collaboration etc. Having said that one of the issues I personally found difficult as a developer was how to have our content mangers (a none-technical group of people)change portal content but still stay within the portal style guidelines of color theme, font etc. Please keep in mind that the best method of publishing content is web pages (dynamic (JSP/ASPX) or static (HTML) they are light weight (fast to deliver across the network) and browser friendly(versus a PDF file that requires an Adobe PDF active launch or MSWord for a doc file etc). Another painful fact for me was that the user can change his selected style choosing between 5-6 different styles. In other words every custom web document we create has to change its look dynamically with the user selection.
That is where the online editing comes handy. With Internet Explorer 5.5 Microsoft introduced the ability to edit Web Documents online within the browser it self. Using this feature I created a .NET User Control that edits a web document using the Portal styles. You can select text and set it to H1, H2 etc and the editor will use not the default HTML H1 tag but the EP6 style urtxth1 class which will make the text look like the reset of the portal content. Using this editor the user can create links, buttons (portal style buttons), tables, headers etc. You can also allow for corporate images and links embedding to extended the portal editing with your own company guidelines.
The demo application I provided includes a simple .NET C# application that allows the user to save the change made to a file. Use this application as the basis and extended it using a database as your storage (as I did), adding security, versioning etc.
Please download the sample application (with source code) and follow the instructions in the GettingStarted.html file.
For any question or suggestions contact shaul.firon@sap.com.
*This sample application is provided as is without warranty of any kind.