SAP NW Portal Star: Vote for btexx/sotric

Dear SAP Portal friends,

with great pleasure have I read in Aviad’s blog about the upcoming SAP Portal Challenge at SAP Teched 2012. I am looking forward to see all the great portal implementations here on SDN or on stage at SAP Teched.

We at btexx have a heart for SAP Portals and are happy to show/share our best practice portal implementation with you. We hope you love it 🙂  

About btexx

btexx knows the possibilities the world of Enterprise 2.0 has to offer and helps customers develop innovative solutions that withstand the test of time. From the strategy planning and design to implementation – btexx offers all of the solutions for portals with SAP and Microsoft from a single source.

The “Software” business unit offers solutions that complete our range of services with add-ons for the SAP NW Enterprise Portal in the area of Web Content Management, collaboration, search functionality, document management and mobile.

About sotric – our best practice portal template

Personalized start page of the sotric intranet

The sotric portal template concept bundles the complete btexx portal experience of 250 portal projects compressed into an immediately usable template for Internet-, Intranet- and/or Extranet-portal solutions.

btexx has put together all advancements, like the development of a Best Practice Information architecture, a state of the art design, a performant framework and many content modules for an immediate use.

sotric is a fictional energy service provider with the business units wind, water & solar. In the screenshots and videos you can see the Social and Mobile Intranet of sotric, which was build on top of SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.30 and the btexx Portal Suite 2012.

Key business scenario and involved portal capabilities

The sotric Intranet supports all portal flavors!

• Information Portal:
  • Easy Content Creation and Maintenance, e.g. Corporate News & Department Information etc.

• Intuitive Content Consumption
• Role and attribute based provisioning and personalization of content
• Comfortable search functionality to find the information you are looking for

The video shows the search functionality of the sotric Portal. Via comfortable filtering mechanism the search results can be narrowed down. This works on desktops, as well as on smartphones.

• Application & Process Integration
  • Seamlessly integrated SAP and Non-SAP processes and applications
  • Self-Services, like Employee and Manager Self Services (ESS/MSS)
  • Sales Support Applications
  • MS SharePoint Integration, e.g. calendar/events integration

• Collaboration Portal
  • Social Portal functions, like comments and rating

• Easy document management and sharing 

• Contribution / Knowledge Exchange via sotricpedia (wiki based on SAP NW Wiki capabilities)
• Social Business Card: It’s all about the people and their know how and connections

sotric on Device

The sotric intranet users can use their device of choice to consume the portal services, e.g.

• Browser/Desktop Access (Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.)
• Tablet Access (iPad, etc.)         
• SmartPhone Access (iPhone, Android, etc.)

sotric Corporate News Consumption: Desktop vs. Mobile

The video shows how the corporate sotric Portal news can be either consumed via classic desktop browser or via the btexx Mobile Portal.

Lesson learned from the project 

• Plan enough time for a detailed requirements analysis
• Involve all relevant parties (project sponsors, marketing, design, IT, development and MOST important the actual target groups of the portal) and develop a joint project understanding and scope
• Before starting with the technical implementation we would recommend to test and verify the usability of the core portal scenarios via a interactive click dummy. From our point this helps tremendously to find design and usability issues/improvements at an early stage. This can help to save a lot of  implementation budget
• Make a build or buy analysis, maybe a SAP Portal partner has the perfect-fitting portal already in stock for you 😉

Summary (Why you should vote for btexx as SAP NW Portal Star)

• Great usability and design
• Best practice portal implementation
• Based 100% on SAP NW Portal standards
• Low implementation effort
• Support of a wide range of different devices

Innovative feature request for an upcoming release of the portal

• Frontend UI Builder for a fast and intuitive creation of SAP UI5 based applications
• The story of the Visual Composer is still good, but with the current capabilities and UI restrictions the market adaption is not so good

We would love to show you our portal live on stage at SAP Teched in Madrid. So please like and promote this blog 🙂 Looking forward to see you all.

Best regards from the whole btexx team!