Introducing the new capabilities of the Portal's System Landscape
SAP’s recommendations on landscape management which is cross technology (Java, ABAP and others), are to use the Solution Manager’s landscape management or the system landscape directory of SAP NetWeaver (SLD). NW SLD is a framework used for landscape management and for SAP components catalogue information. This blog doesn't dive deeply into the SLD but rather deals with the NW Portal. You can read more about the SLD in the System Landscape Directory (SLD).
The new features in the Portal's system landscape aims at improving and easing the task of systems management in the Portal and reducing the TCO by shortening the setup time of a Portal system. It is now possible to discover the landscapes and systems maintained in the SLD automatically and to apply the configured properties to the systems in the Portal. By this, the responsibility for the content correctness is taken off the Portal, leaving it to one central repository meant for this cause – the SLD.
As a thumb rule, the SLD is the one source of truth regarding systems’ data, and all the possible information should be retrieved from it. The Portal should rely on the data in the SLD and provide a reflection of the systems maintained in it, in addition to locally maintained systems (traditional Portal systems).
The Portal system administrators are now required of significantly less effort in setting up the Portal system landscape with respect to connecting it to the various systems that should interact with the Portal. Some processes involved in the setup of a Portal system landscape which used to be a bit cumbrous are now automated and made much simpler.
Installation Steps
The new System Landscape is delivered out of the box with the NetWeaver Portal 7.3 so no special steps are required in order to have this feature up and running.
A prerequisite step is to have the NW Portal configured with an active SLD. This step is done during the NW Portal installation process.
Role Location
The application can be accessed via the regular System Landscape Overview, resides under the System Administration role.
Check out my next posts to get a glimpse of these new capabilities:
