Building Portal Sites on SAP Cloud Platform Cloud Foundry – Creating your first portal site

Most of you would be across how the Portal service can be leveraged to create Fiori Launchpad and Freestyle sites in the SAP Cloud Platform Neo environment. The Portal service has evolved over the last few years and we have seen many organizations adopt it for various use cases ranging from Corporate HR Portals to Supplier portals. One of the recent advancements was around the support for a multi-cloud deployment. SAP Cloud Platform already offers many services in the Cloud Foundry environment and the Portal service is one among those. This is a major steps towards the Multi-Cloud approach to support deploying portal sites in some of those leading IaaS providers close to you. The Portal service on Cloud Foundry will also be the foundation for the Central Entry point as described in “SAP Fiori Deployment Options and System Landscape Recommendations“. Its important to note that the Portal service in Cloud Foundry is not yet in parity with the same service in Neo environment. Looking at the roadmap for this service, you can be assured that lot of work is going into both Neo and Cloud Foundry environments to add more capabilities to the Portal service.

There are plenty of SAP Community blogs and openSAP courses which you can refer to familiarize yourself with the service in the Neo environment. This blog series is dedicated to the Portal service in the Cloud Foundry environment. I will keep adding contents to it as when new capabilities are added and when I do get some spare time to blog 🙂

Vera Gutbrod had earlier posted a blog on how to get started with subscribing to this service in Cloud Foundry trial environment. Here is an excellent video which walk through the steps on how to setup your Cloud Foundry subaccount to launch the Portal service.

Creating a Portal Site

The process for creating a Portal site is not very different when compared to Neo. We still have the same portal objects like Catalogs, Groups, apps and roles. There has been come consolidation of tools. You may recall in the Neo environment – We have the Fiori Configuration Cockpit and Site designer (for creating Freestyle and hybrid sites). This has been consolidated to one single tool called the “Site Manager”.

Launching the portal service from the subscriptions will take you to the Site Manager where you can create new sites.

Once your create a site by providing a name, it opens up the Site Editor where you can configure your site and add pages/apps. By default, you have a Launchpad based page.

Click on the “+” icon to create a new free style page. Select the desired page template.

Once the new page is added, you can set it as Home page and also define the layout settings

This is exactly the same way you would design your freestyle pages in the Neo environment. All those widgets are available and you can add them to your page.

I have used few widgets to design my Home page shown below

The next step is to create your menu for a top-level navigation. Use the Menu Editor to design your navigation menu. Each item can refer to existing pages/app/URL links.

If you want to add apps to your portal site, you will have to use the Content Manager. By default, the only object which is available is the “Everyone” role. Use the “New” button to create new portal objects.

Lets start with creation of an App. You can configure an app for the following types:

• Fiori Apps deployed in Cloud Foundry (Needs to be MTA apps with Fiori Launchpad modules)
• WebDynpro ABAP
• SAPGUI for HTML
• URL Apps

I will show in a separate blog on how to create Fiori apps in Cloud Foundry and also configure WebDynpro apps and add them the Portal site. For now, I will stick with an easy example – URL apps. In the properties section, I have just add the title/description and the URL.

In the Navigation section, you can add the semantic object/action along with parameters to pass to the application.

Finally, in the Visualization section, define the tile UI settings.

The next step is to create a Group and Catalog and have the app assigned to them.

Ensure that you search for the app in the “Assignments” section and add them to the group and catalog which you create.

The last step in the Content Manager is to assign the app to the required roles. For simplicity, assign the apps to the default “Everyone” role. In the next blog post, I will cover how to create user-defined roles and assign them to users.

The below objects should now be available in the Content Manager. We now have a URL app which is assigned to Group/Catalog/Role.

To view this app within the Fiori Launchpad, I need to assign it to a menu entry. In the below example, I have assigned the Launchpad page to the “More Info” menu entry.

These are the basic steps required to create a simple portal site with freestyle as well as Fiori Launchpad pages. Once you have configured your site, hit the publish icon on the top right hand corner

This will open the portal site in a new window. Here is an example of my portal site which opens up with the freestyle page with all the defined widgets.

I can also view the Fiori Launchpad and apps within it by navigating the the “More Info” menu item.

As you can see the Admin interface has been simplified a lot and for those who have worked on the Portal service in the Neo environment, you would not see much of a difference as the concepts and approach remain the same.

Move on to the next blog to know more about Role concepts.