It’s a new dawn, it’s a new year, it’s a new release for HANA Cloud Portal – and I’m feeling good!

I was watching this morning the amazing sprint review where the team presented all the new Cloud Portal capabilities and this song got stuck in my head: Nina Simon – Feeling Good.

I must say that for some of the features this is just a kick start, however I could really see how the feature requirements and customer feedback collected during 2013 was expressed in this new release. Here is a taste of the upcoming key capabilities you will find later this week in your free trial account – try it out!

The new default theme:

A fresh new default theme was introduced in Cloud Portal, allowing styling of the new elements (header, footer, menu widget) in the page. The site can be easily re-branded and customized to include the company look & feel with a different background image, colors, fonts style etc. by adopting parameters using LESS technology.

If you wish to keep the old Cloud Portal default theme with the clouds, please follow the guidelines in this blog.

All the new capabilities below are presented using the new default theme.

Page templates:

New out-of-the-box page templates are now available for site authors.Every page in a site can be assigned to a template, which determines the layout and the page elements such as header, footer and side panels. For a smooth migration, all Cloud Portal sites have been assigned to a page template (in many cases a migration template has been used to support the standard header and navigation bar).

Next step, we plan to enable authors the option to customize the templates and basically create their own custom templates that fit their site layouts.

                                                            Page Template – Landing Page

                                                            Page Template – Short Header

Multi-level page hierarchy:

Authors can now create sites with up to three levels of page hierarchies. They can create, reorder and nest pages using drag & drop in the Page Management panel. In addition to the new page templates, we created a new Site Navigation widget that facilitates site navigation across all levels of the site. The new widget will be the new menu bar replacing the current page navigation bar.

Role-based authorization:

It is now possible to assign global roles within Cloud Portal (e.g. group of Administrators) to groups defined in the local IdP (Identity Provider). A new tab was added to the Admin Space to support role and groups assignments. We realized that customers would like to manage users in a central place which is usually the local user store in the organization (e.g. Active Directory). The user information such as group/ role defined in the local user repository will be transferred via the SAML assertion to be mapped in Cloud Portal.

For the next phase we plan to extend the authorization mechanism to apply on end users who access the site. Groups of users will be able to access certain page(s) of the site based on the authorization assignment done by the author.

Document Repository:

Cloud Portal now contains a central repository for all types of files, allowing users to store, share, download and reuse in their sites. The files are organized in an hierarchical structure of files and folders. The Document, Image and HTML Viewer widgets were linked to this repository allowing file selection directly from the repository.

The Document Management capability is based on the HANA Cloud platform Document Service. This service is exposed using a standard protocol Content Management Interoperability Service (CMIS) and as such it can also share documents with any other Content Management Systems that supports the CMIS protocol (e.g. Sharepoint, Alfresco and OpenText).

                                                                 The new Document Repository

                                                  Image can be uploaded or selected from the Repository

HANA Marketplace Integration for SuccessFactors Extensions:

The existing Marketplace folder that was added to the Admin Space is now extended to expose SuccessFactors extensions from the HANA Marketplace. SuccessFactors customers will be able to browse and get detailed information on the available extensions, and eventually launch the HANA Marketplace to adapt an extension.

                                                  Sport Reward Extension in Cloud Portal Market Place

                                        Sport Rewards Extension in the HANA Marketplace

Social Network Widget:

A new social widget was added to the existing out-of-the-box widgets. The new widget is already placed in the footer as part of the new templates.

Authors can configure the social network widget to add social icons along with their related URL of the social network, configure the view (vertical vs. horizontal) and set the icon size.

As promised at the beginning of this blog, everything will be available this week in Cloud Portal to all users. You are welcome to experience the new capabilities and provide your feedback back to our team. You can also send a request for demo or detailed discussions on certain topics.

All the best,

Ifat Shwartz – Product Manager for SAP HANA Cloud Portal