SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG annual conference 2011 here is now my summary of the SAP Portal related sessions and informations from SAPPHIRENOW and ASUG annual conference 2011 at Orlando. During this event I didn’t write a blog for every day as I communicated the news I heard directly via Twitter – I hope some benefited from my tweets.
At SAPPHIRE NOW and the ASUG annual conference attendees had the unique opportunity to assist sessions covering the current portal (7.0) from SAP customers and see the new features of the new portal 7.3 by SAP. As always, the ASUG sessions showed how the portal is used currently by customers, why and how they chose it and most importantly: how typical problems are solved. Following is a (not complete) list of sessions I attended and their key takeaways. The quality of the images is not the best, but when you do have an ASUG account you can download the presentations there.
An example where an SAP Portal customer decided to implement usability recommendations and had to customize the SAP Portal to do so. They had some very good ideas when it came to publishing transaction links or how to present data: a list that displays the links and loads the description and details via AJAX on the right side. The portal favorites also gained a nice redesign: grouped into categories or being role-specific. The CMS is done by a 3rd party software. Always interesting to see for what the portal gets used and the size of the portal team and the upgrade plans, specially the effort of an upgrade when using several BP and customizations.
Integrating BOBJ into the SAP Portal isn’t really hard and it looks like SAP is pushing the SAP Portal more to be the frontend for BOBJ. The basic integration can be done by URL iView or KM iView, in the later case you have to prepare the SAP Portal for BOBJ. Of course you have to evaluate if you use the portal or InfoView. Despite how to integrate BO into SAP Portal the session included a comparison between InfoView, KM and iView, as well as BI Portal vs. SharePoint vs. SAP Portal.
Aviad gave a good overview of what the 7.3 portal will offer. Besides what already got presented in great detail by SAP throughout this and last year about 7.3 here on SCN, the session also focused on a mobile framework. That’s right, SAP presented a cutting edge mobile framework that will ease our troubles when it comes to use the SAP Portal as a launch pad for mobile applications. The new signature design (aka AFP) was presented and on what layer you’ll do the customization (by using the L-Shape APIs). Enterprise Workspaces and how to use and integrate it got also presented and the main benefit: user enablement. The session closed with the much awaited product WPC 2.0.
The session showed how to use the SAP Portal for corporate communications where the business is managing the communication and not the developer: now the editors have the freedom to publish content to their department’s page. The CMS system (3rd party) guides the editor with a wizard through the process (tags, meta data, formulars). The SAP Portal ensures that the company has a communication channel, while the CMS delivers coherent content.
Integrating SAP Portal with SharePoint will be easier with 7.3, and integrating SAP with Microsoft is done via Duet. For the ones thinking that Gateway is totally new: this is done by the Duet Service Consumption Layer (SCL), that is using NetWeaver Gateway. The Microsoft side is using Business Connectivity Services (BCS). The SAP Portal integration can be done on several levels, ranging from development, embedding to RSS.
The portals of the year award was an ASUG contest that ran last year. The competitors presented their portal implementation during ASUG webcasts and later the members voted. The winner of the competition was: City of Burnaby. You can find more about the contest winner and the contest at ASUG.
Some of the new features are:
When you use WPC, it will get upgraded. Depending on the customizations done in WPC (pages, layouts, applications) this demands some work. Business Packages from 7.0 won’t work with 7.3 (someone from SAP can please share some more information about this? Many customers do use the portal because of the BP offered by SAP and need compatible BP for 7.3 with their current system, ECC 5/6).
ASUG offers the great possibility of influence councils where you can talk directly with PM from SAP. SAP presented Portal 7.3 and was open for feedback. The Portal will expand its 3rd party list, specifically when it comes to ECM/DMS, CMIS isn’t considered urgent. While talking with participants I noticed that companies have problems finding skilled SAP Portal consultants. People that understand how to code, implement and maintain the portal and business packages. Let’s hope that with Portal 7.3 more professionals will focus on the portal, if not, companies may stop using the portal because they cannot find skilled people to run it.
The SAP Portal is used to deliver a single look and feel for > 10.000 users. The portal parts used are TREX and collaboration. Their portal has some impressive usage statistics: ~930.000 objects in TREX, ~380.000 views/month and ~67.000 logins/month. To deliver the portal content they use the KM for the html pages and the PCD for the navigation. As the content providers are not web designers, they have one portal content editor form, but many forms for showing the content.
They make extensive use of a 3rd party statistic tool to know how the portal is used:
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