The following blog is written by Bert Salyga – Senior Education Consultant in the North America SAP Education Delivery Organization. Bert specializes in the areas of Portal, J2EE and ABAP administration as well has Portal, Java and ABAP development. He has more than 15 years of SAP experience and is certified in Portal Administration, Portal Development and ABAP Development. You can contact Bert via email at Bert.Salyga@sap.com. Please limit your questions to those related to training classes.
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Are you utilizing all the content management and collaboration features of your SAP Portal? Some of the features now available in the SAP Portal include:
● Enterprise Workspaces
● Knowledge Management
● Web Page Composer
● Forums
● Wikis
● Portal Site Management and Portal Content Management by OpenText
Workspaces on SAP Enterprise Portal
SAP Portal Enterprise Workspaces are built on top of SAP Enterprise Portal. They leverage all existing portal capabilities.
The main goal of enterprise workspaces is the quick and easy reshuffling of existing corporate assets like reports, transactions, and dashboards from different back-end systems. Although the focus is on structured content, unstructured content can also be integrated to workspaces.
You can use enterprise workspaces within two different scenarios:
- Organize content for your own purposes in a personal workspace.
- Share the content with a team or group of colleagues in a shared workspace.
In addition to the managed content that is provided by the central IT department, enterprise workspaces empower the users. They can select the assets that they need for their daily work, or can share assets with others on a self-service basis. Central IT only provides a set of modules that can be used but the users can decide if they need a module or not.
KM in SAP Enterprise Portal
Enterprise Knowledge Management (KM) provides central, role-based access to the information within your company. It connects your structured business data with your unstructured documents. The IT scenario permits you to exchange documents and information across system boundaries.
Enterprise Knowledge Management contains the tools for integrating different data sources as well as for creating, administering and distributing information. It permits you to consolidate and integrate Intranet platforms, and provides an integrated search technology that takes all the data repositories within your company into consideration.
Knowledge Management is part of SAP Enterprise Portal. The entire range of functions as well as the configuration of Knowledge Management is available in portal iViews. Functions such as discussions, feedback, or sending any item from KM folders by e-mail, are securely integrated in Knowledge Management, and allow work to be carried out on documents at the same time by using roles and department limits.
Functionality available in Knowledge Management:
- Users receive relevant, role-based and personalized information
- KM automatically notifies users about new or modified information
- Users quickly find information with enhanced search functions
- Users react directly to information
- KM displays information from different data sources on a unified user interface
- Users easily exchange information with each other
- KM creates a clear structure using automatic classification
- KM allows users to store and efficiently use unstructured information
Web Page Composer
The Web Page Composer (WPC) is based on Knowledge Management, and uses Content Management to store web content (pages, articles, and other objects).
With WPC, SAP Enterprise Portal supports the construction of company-wide intranets, extranets, and internet services including the integration of web content.
Companies can depend on the reliable and robust platform provided by SAP NetWeaver to power their web sites. Users can create and maintain content as easily without in-depth IT skills or programming knowledge.
Web Page Composer Characteristics
- A standard look and feel is achieved with the close integration in SAP Enterprise Portal
- Full support of merging applications, services, and web content on a single page
- Search for web content is covered by KM and the Search & Classification Engine
- KM functions enhance WPC with approval procedures and versioning
Portal Forums
SAP Enterprise Portal forums are an integration of Jive software forums. Jive is well known for its robust forum software and offers an ideal enhancement to SAP Enterprise Portal, which is used in many companies.
In addition to the standard functions, the “new” forums provide enhanced functions to meet the requirements of most companies.
- The simple, clearly structured, and intuitive user interface enables you to access all tasks with minimum of navigation.
- Moderated forums enable you to establish an approval procedure in which new messages can be checked before publication. In
addition to checking messages manually, the message inceptor (plug-ins written in Java) checks the messages automatically. - Jive software provides a selection of inceptors that check, for example, IP addresses or key words in messages.
Portal Wiki Framework
Wikis provide a framework to easily share and contribute knowledge and information in an intuitive way within the company. They give employees, customers, suppliers and partners a platform for collaborative writing. Wikis save time by enabling knowledge sharing in an easy to manage environment.
The SAP third-party wiki application is a standard component of SAP Enterprise Portal with the new SAP NetWeaver release 7.3 and higher.
Jive Forums and Wikis in SAP Enterprise Portal
- Collaboration tools provided by a third party
- Portal users can create and build communities
- Easily share and contribute knowledge and information
Portal Site Management by OpenText
Enhanced web content management system is available for the SAP Portal and Enterprise Workspaces. The user receives the whole state of the art capabilities like web content management, workflows, language translation, and multichannel publishing. Operational efficiency by empowering non-technical
users to create, edit and manage web content.
Portal Site Management by OpenText Features
- Best-of-breed & Enterprise-ready Web Content Management system based on the market-leading OpenText ‘Web Site Management (RedDot)’
- Tightly integrated with SAP Portal using Out-of-the-box iViews
- Empowering non-technical editors to create, edit, and manage content
- Structured & unstructured data convergence using Application Integrator
- Enhanced content workflows User-defined workflows
- Multi-channel publisher allows publishing web content outside SAP Portal
- Multi-language tools allow semi-automatic translation and localization
- Utilizes Portal infrastructure SSO, LDAP, Personalization, Theming, Quick-Launch, Mashups & Localization
- MS Office / Outlook Connectivity with Enterprise Connect
- Extended ECM upgradability and adaptability
Portal Site Management by OpenText includes a best-of-breed and Enterprise-ready Document Management and Collaboration system and is based on the market-leading OpenText Enterprise Library.
Do you need more information and understanding of these Portal content management and collaboration features? These features are covered in detail in the SAP course EP350 Innovated Content Management and Collaboration for the SAP Portal.
