Giving birth to SAP HANA Cloud Portal

Last weekend, after a 12 month pregnancy, a new product was delivered: HANA Cloud Portal (formerly known as SAP HANA Cloud Portal).

Setting the external status flag to available in PPMS

As this is my first blog, let me pause for a second and introduce myself: I’ve been with SAP for the past 8 years – joined a bit after the TopTier acquisition, worked on EP6.0, NetWeaver 04, 04s, business suite integration, A1S at the time what is now called By Design worked on top of NetWeaver, Enterprise Workspaces and web page composer, Business Objects 3.1, 4.0, 4.0 SP3 and 4.1, the people capability inside StreamWork and recently NetWeaver Cloud Portal.

During those years, I’ve seen the portal concept and portals shifted and evolved. From a single point of aggregation to a content management platform to a federation of content platform that inter-operates to SOA and ESOA to a mash-up platform to social-collaboration platform and spanning from classic on-prem middleware installation to virtualized to hosted and self-service, as well as expanding from single channel to multi-channel (and even seen some product calling itself omni-channel).  A bumpy ride, with some concepts holding up and some, well, not so much.

So if you’re looking for my answer to the question – what is HANA Cloud Portal? The answer would be that: the sum of a decade of learning and experimenting on how to bridge between users, applications and data in the best manner. That is the true essence of it and that is the passion that drives it.

Vitaly updating a part of the team about the RTC

After the release and over the past weekend, I came to think a bit about the term delivery. There are a lot of equivalents between delivering a new baby and a new product:

• You want to make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into, but cannot really know until you’ve done it
• Doing it because others have it is not a good enough reason, you need to have your own
• During the pregnancy, you’re careful about what you share with others. You go to some experts in hope for some assertion but are never really calm until you have seen it delivered
• As all parents know, the real work only starts after the delivery
• It takes a village to grow one

I can continue with the analogies, but after all it’s a community for SAP techies and we’re not here just for the mushy part. So moving on to a few points I’d like to mention in advance:

1. We just launched this space, and the content is on the move. you can expect more content to be published here soon.
2. We’re working on creating a free trial (will be offered as part of the NetWeaver Cloud trial). It will take us a few more days, please have patience with us.
3. We’re also updating our public experience site to reflect all the changes that have happened since Sapphire Orlando in May (which is a lot, as we move quite fast if I may).

If you can’t wait to learn more, there are several things you can already do: explore this space in the next days and weeks, get in contact with Ifat Shwarts to join the influence council or our customer engagement tracks and if you happen to be at TechEd Las Vegas – make sure to register session PMC110 and the PMC266 hands-on. Another excellent option is to join our tweetchat on Sept 12th, 5pm CET via the #NWCloudPortal and #NWPortalChat hashtags.

An empty site with no content – our sleek & intuitive authoring experiance

During the course of development of HANA Cloud Portal, we have decided to interact as much as possible with the community about our plans, achievements, execution and yes – also obstacles we faced. Openness is a value we cherish, and now that we are legally able to, it is our intention to share here a true dev team blog – with inside stories, features we expect to deliver, developers sharing their work and more fun stuff.

This blog is a kind of a kickoff, and there is a lot of catching up to do (but no worries, well get to it all eventually). So in the spirit of the exciting blog it forward movement, I’d like to start a cloud portal blog chain and ask the following people to blog, answer the following questions and then #BlogItForward to other cloud portal team members:

1. Vitaly Vainer (@vitalik) – Area product owner for cloud portal
   1. What is cloud portal today?
   2. What are the key features that can be expected in the next months?
2. Eran Nelinger – Scrum Master
   1. Which UI technologies are used by cloud portal for what parts of the product?
   2. What were the reasons to move from Sencha touch?
3. Nir Koren – Dev Ops
   1. How is the patent pending CI process ‘Quality on submit’ working?