What’s New in SAP Enterprise Portal SP11?

Earlier this month, SAP Enterprise Portal 6.0 SP11 was released, which means it’s now time to check out the new version and see what major changes were included.

This weblog lists and briefly describes the changes in SP11. Upcoming weblogs will describe in greater detail some of the major changes for content administrations, system administrators and portal developers. I have included links to these weblogs.

The following are the new and enhanced features in SP11:

• Content Administration:

• Significant changes were made in the way administrators copy, move and delete objects in the Portal Catalog. I have written a separate New in Portal SP11: Content Administration on these changes.

• System Administration:

• Two main changes were made to help system administrators:
  • Portal Permissions: You can now view the entire ACL structure of the portal, and transport permissions from one portal to another.
  • System Landscape Overview: You can now view in one window all the systems and system aliases that exist in the portal.

  I have written a separate New in Portal SP11: System Administration on these changes.

• Unification, OBN, and DQE:

• You can create your own business objects that are not part of an existing system. In the editor for creating business objects, you can now simply type in the name of a new business object, instead of just selecting an object of one of the defined systems in the portal.

  

  The following is a more detailed look at the GUI:

  

  For more information on object-based navigation, see the portal Administration Guide or Developer Guide.

• Support for Mozilla Firefox Browser: The portal now supports, in the end user environment, the use of the browser Firefox 1.x (based on Mozilla 1.7).

  For more details on the portal’s browser support, including on Linux, see the Product Availability Matrix for SAP NetWeaver 04. (The PAM is available to credentialed users of SAP Service Market only.)

• Portal Developer Guide: The Portal Developer Guide in the SAP NetWeaver ’04 documentation now includes the following sections:

  • Dynamic System Resolution: Developers can now write a service that resolves at runtime a system alias to a system in the PCD. I have written a separate weblog on this feature.

  • Transformation Service: The portal provides a transformation service that developers can use to transform XML data using existing transformers/style sheets.

  • HTMLB: The Portal Developer Guide now contains a reference on HTML-Business (HTMLB) for Java. This section explains how to use HTMLB controls in JSP pages and how to call and process these JSP pages in a DynPage.

  • Web Dynpro: This section explains how Web Dynpro applications can call portal services and how Web Dynpro applications are integrated into the portal.

• Portal Development Kit for Microsoft .NET: Portal Development Kit for Microsoft .NET (also known simply as PDK for .NET) is a set of tools to enable Microsoft Visual Studio .NET developers to build portal components.

  that have existing investments in Microsoft .NET technology The purpose of the kit is to allow organizations existing investments in Microsoft .NET technology to leverage their developers’ skills in order to take advantage of the SAP NetWeaver platform. .NET portal components draw on the strengths of the .NET Framework and ASP.NET, as well as SAP Enterprise Portal services. PDK for .NET supports both .NET languages: C# and VB.NET.

  You can find more information about PDK for .NET from the following places:

  • Installation Guide – PDK for .NET: The guide is available in the Dev Env section of the SAP NetWeaver ’04 Installation Information page.

    You can also get to the Installation Information page by using the instguidesNW04 quick link in SAP Service Marketplace.

  • On-line Help in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003: The help is available once PDK for .NET is installed.
  • SDN: Check out the .NET Interoperability page, Yossi Pik’s The specified item was not found., presentation and white paper, as well as the Interoperability .NET.
  • SAP Notes: You can also check out the latest information about PDK for .NET by looking at SAP Note 800842, which is the Central Note for PDK 1.0 Patch 2 for MS .NET.

• Visual Composer Documentation: Documentation for SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer 6.0 is now included in SAP Library for NetWeaver ’04.

  The user guide (SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer: User Guide) is located under the Application Platform (SAP Web Application Server) component area.

  The installation guide is available in the SAP VC section of the SAP NetWeaver ’04 Installation Information page.

  You can also get to the Installation Information page by using the instguidesNW04 quick link in SAP Service Marketplace.

• Support for My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition (Discontinued): As of December 31, 2004, the integration of My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition (MYEE) into SAP Enterprise Portal was discontinued. As a result, all Yahoo!-related content objects shipped with the portal (such as systems and iView templates) and documentation are no longer available.

• Support Platform: The Support Platform provides a Web AS environment in which you can run plug-ins that assist system administrators in performing any of the following tasks:

  • Check system readiness for installation
  • Run tests on one or more server nodes
  • Fine-tune your system
  • Troubleshoot your system

  The Support Platform is delivered with a number of plug-ins, including checks performing pre-installation, post-installation, fine-tuning, and troubleshooting operations. In addition, anyone can quickly and easily write a plug-in to perform one or more of the checks on any NetWeaver component that runs on the Web AS in which you run the Support Platform.

  For more information, see SAP Note 812688.

For more information on all the changes in SP11, see Release Notes for Portal in the SAP NetWeaver ’04 (SPS 11) documentation on the Help Portal.

For the entire SAP NetWeaver ’04 (SPS 11) documentation, see the Help Portal.

The articles in this series so far:

• What’s New in SAP Enterprise Portal SP11?
• New in Portal SP11: System Administration
• New in Portal SP11: Content Administration
• New in Portal SP11: Dynamic System Resolution