SAP NetWeaver Portal Innovations: User Experience, Mobility, Social and Content

Hello friends,

There are about 80 millions Millenials living in the USA today and thousands of them are joining the workforce every day. They grew up with Mobile devices in their hands, Social Networks at their fingertips and want their Content available everywhere they go, with an appealing User Experience. Bill McDermott (CEO of SAP) said recently that “…right now more people own mobile phones than toothbrushes“. Mobile devices are so common they made the mobile interface the de-facto interface.

Here’s a short video in which I discuss the latest developments in the Portal area:

We in SAP NetWeaver Portal team are not blind to these trends. We realize that our users (there are over 30 million of them today), require access to the portal from multiple devices – smartphones, tablets, laptops, and even, take a deep breath, desktop computers. They want to socially collaborate with their colleagues, they want their applications to look as beautiful as their consumer-grade apps, and they want new and advanced ways to deal with the ever-growing amount of content they create and consume.

The new look & feel of SAP NetWeaver Portal can be seen in the new Ozone demo                    

Now here’s a problem you might have encountered: our smartphones and tablets are swamped with dozens of applications. My iPhone right now contains so many applications that it has become pretty hard for me to find anything when I actually need it. The Mobile Portal Launcher we developed as part of EP 7.3 is a web framework that mimics the look & feel of a smartphones and tablets, only this time, web, native, and third-party applications are put side-by-side. Your Travel Expense, Document Management, and Twitter apps are now all accessible from in one place. This is a new concept which boosts user productivity.

SAP Mobile Portal Launcher

Mobile Portal also allows you to create homepages from pre-defined templates, to be later consumed by various devices. This is a true multi-channel approach.

SAP Mobile Portal Homepage

SAP Fiori is drawing a lot of attention, in and out of SAP. With its state-of-the-art design, it significantly simplifies the way we consume our business applications.  In the pursuit of making life easier for the portal users, we seamlessly integrated Mobile Portal and Fiori. For example, a user can now open a Fiori application directly from the Launcher. We also integrated SAP Jam into the Mobile Portal to allow you to follow your colleagues’ activities, from various devices.

SAP Fiori App opened using Mobile Portal from an iPad

Organizations are looking for new ways to share content among employees via multiple consumption channels, especially via mobile devices. SAP Portal Content Management by OpenText (PCM) provides the perfect answer, now also with mobile support.  The same documents can be consumed by multiple devices, wherever you are, without worrying about where you saved them.

SAP Portal Content Management by OpenText (PCM) – now also on mobile 

Finally, with the next Portal release (EP 7.4), we will introduce Portal on HANA, SAP’s in-memory database. It means far better performance, and more importantly, it will utterly change the paradigm of content aggregation, bringing everything into context, in real-time.

So here’s something to look forward to!

Yours,

Ohad