What's in store for the Enterprise Portal?

[Former Member]

My starting point for this post is the UP100 presentation "SAP Netweaver Portal: Roadmap for the Next 12 Months" given at TechEd 08. With TechEd 09 fast approaching I wanted to get a feeling for what has been acheived so far and maybe speculate a little about what the future has in store for the SAP Netweaver Portal.

The Portal Footprint

Between July 2007 and July 2008 SAP claims a 62% increase in productive portal installations. I am very interested to see what this number might look like this time around. My guess is that it we will see similar or slightly less growth mainly due to the continuing move to present SAP content via the Portal - but I wonder if the GFC has impacted projects enough to take this number down a bit?

Reducing TCO

One major focus for the portal over the last 12 months was the reduction of Total Cost of Ownership. We have seen Accelerated Application Delivery (AccAD) for improving Portal performance in low bandwidth and/or high latency scenario. The portal has become more modularized which is a way toward enabling the UI strategy and opening up the floor a bit for the NWBC. There also seems to have been a fair amount of work done in the Federated Portal Network space.

Some areas that I don't think I have seen much progress yet in are around Supportability (RCA and Log Cleanup) and I am really interested to find out more about the role of Enterprise Content Management systems and how they will integrate with the Portal via the the ECM Service Layer.

Simplifying content development

Next Generation WPC? I have to say I am left wondering a little bit about what is happening in this space - I test drove the "Collaboration Portal" as part of the product ramp up but that was probably about 12 months ago and since then I haven't seen it really make a grand entrance onto the scene... humm? Anyone know anything more about that?

Oh yes and Wikis... I wonder what is happening on that front?

Enable collaborative enterprise mash-ups & Enterprise 2.0

This is really >12 months out to be fair, so no real progress has been seen as far as I can tell in this area (although I am sure lots is going on behind the scenes) - perhaps with the exception of the Duet and Alloy integration in the Personal Productivity space. I felt that the statement made around only planning "minor enhancements" to collaboration rooms was fairly significant last year and am looking forward to find out a bit more in the next couple of months.

I hope this refreshed your memory a little bit about where the portal was headed 12 months ago and has whetted your appetite for the UP100 presentation at TechEd 09! 🙂