SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.3 – Unified Access to Applications and Processes

Dear portal experts,

As you probably already now, the next major release of the Portal (also known as SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.3) was successfully released for SAP NetWeaver 7.3 in Ramp Up after a very successful beta program.

In this blog, I would like to share with you some of the new functionalities that are part of the new portal release, but fist let’s align on the release numbers. The current and most adopted SAP portal version is the SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.0 with enhancements package 1 and enhancements package 2. When talking about NetWeaver 7.3 release, please note that this is neither a support package nor an enhancement package; it is the next major release of the SAP NetWeaver Portal with plenty of new capabilities and functionalities.

Those of you, who have attended the Unified Access to Applications and Processes session at SAP TECHED 2010, should already be familiar with these topics. But for those of you who did not have the chance to join us at TECHED, let’s start…

The next major release of the portal provides enhanced functionalities in various areas: access to SAP and non-SAP application, simplification of content creation, Web Page Composer enhancements, Knowledge Management enhancements, Wiki’s and more. In this blog, I will concentrate on the key enhancements in the area of content creation and access to SAP and non-SAP applications.

• Simplified implementation process for SAP Business Packages – a simplified process for News for Portal Content implementation with guided wizards for system aliases assignment and role customization. Refer to the diagram bellow explaining the new and simplified process:

• Simplified content creation via automatic iView (application) upload from the back-end system to the portal.

• Top-down approach for role creation – the ability to start building the navigation hierarchy from the role itself and createadd folders, pages and iViews from within the role (this will simplify the work, especially for those of you who are new to the Portal).

• Enhanced transport capabilities archived via integrating with the Change and Transport System (CTS+) and the new concept of synchronized folder. A synchronized folder is a folder within the transport package that contains references to the PCD objects you would like to transport. Once the transport package is actually exported, only then, the PCD objects are grabbed into to the transport package (for those of you who are looking for the traditional behavior of the transport package, no worries, it is supported as well, side by side with the new functionality).

• Enriched Portal role types – with the new portal version we have 4 different role types: free-style roles (the roles as you know from the current portal version), workcenter roles (roles that implement the workcenter role user experience guidelines), roles from packages (role from SAP Business Package) and role from PFCG (uploaded roles from the PFCG ABAP repository). We will deep dive into the details of each role in one of the coming blogs.

• Interoperability with 3^rd party Portals – many customers are running a dual vendor portals approach (i.e.: more than one portal vendor in the organization), and the typical question is: how can I expose to the end user one, harmonized portal, although from an IT perspective I have more than one portal vendor? The solution covers: branding alignment, single sign-on and session management.

• AJAX framework – many documents and sessions were already gives about the new AJAX framework and from now on it is available for you to use! This is actually the new default framework page when installing the portal. You can find plenty of information about the AJAX framework already today and plenty more to come…

• QuickLaunch – a new navigation concept for navigating within your portal though a search capability. For example, you are looking to create a new purchase order, but do not know where to find this iView. You simply typesearch for the word “purchase” and all the iViewspages
  oles with the sub-string “purchase” are available for you.

That’s it for this time. You can expect more details in the coming weeks. If you are interested in specific topics in the area of the SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.3, please list them bellow and I will do the best to cover them in the coming blogs.

Happy New Year!

Aviad Rivlin