Content Segmentation Analysis and Role Design Have you ever been burdened by the huge amount of roles your portal implementation has? Are KM ACLs becoming a huge headache for you? Well, I have gone through the same and I know how troublesome it can be. In this Blog, I am going to try to describe some of the different user content segmentation solutions possible. This Blog includes some relevant sections of official SAP Documentation and excellent info docs available on SDN for reference. It will be in two parts, User group “Company employee” Organizational unit “Administration” Function “Employee” Core process “Consulting” Blended Roles Blended roles offer an organization the ability to add multiple functionality ( crossing over processes) to users. This gives the flexibility to achieve a much more personalized portal, a portal which can meet the needs of even the smallest segmentation need.For example, we could take a solution where roles could be combined to create an assignment like a support employee in India specializing in X Product. So here we have the following combination: User Type = Employee, Org Unit = Shared Information Services , Function = Support , Core = X , Location = India. This would seem natural but here is how the number of roles will look like if we extend this blended roles to different combinations and add a section for location: UserType = 8 , OU=9, Function=9, Core Process=30, Location = 20 The different permutations and combinations for the above example would lead to about 388,800 Roles!!!. Not a nice situation if you are the content/user admin. Flexible Role: Content Filtering With SAP NW Portal, there are additional APIs available which allow the possibility for Role Content Filtering. This mechanism acts upon the attributes attached to the PCD objects and the corresponding User Profile Attributes. An example would be a Location Role for Support Admin. With PCD object filtering, we could have just one role for support employees with iviews/worksets for all locations attached to the role. At Runtime, it would be determined on which iviews should be displayed to the end user according to the tagging of the PCD objects and the mapping with the User Profile Attribute. Thus, it is possible to further reduce the number of Roles significantly! Explaining it further we have: Filters can be defined to filter role content according to user Attribute in terms of pages and worksets. Retrieving user specific content more dynamically must be enabled on the iview Level as it is part of the iview application logic. For tagging content we need to use the PCD inspector tool to tag the content with appropriate tags. After tagging, we would also need to ensure, the user profiles has an attribute which matches to this tag. The PCD GL dynamic filtering capability provides a solution. This is based on JNDI Search Filter and is implemented as a Portal Application with an Object Factory and Portal Service. During the deployment, it is to be registered with the portal registry. Scenario Let’s take a scenario for further explanation.Consider the following Users: User A – Located in India and working in the Mumbai office. A is a support consultant working with the EP User B – Located in Japan and working in the Tokyo office. B is also a support consultant but working with BI. User M – Located in India and working in Delhi office. M is region manager. Now consider the following roles: 1) Home Page Role The Home Page Role will have same content for all users, but for the Region Manager it has more confidential news iviews. 2) Support Tools and Links Role The Support Tools and Links role will contain different tools for EP Support Administrators and BI Support Administrators, as well as a local tips and tricks news iview. Practical Implementation of the PCD content filtering: As mentioned above, we need to tag the content and the users with attributes. In this scenario let us take the following attribute for the sake of the scenario: Location, Function, Product. So for the above mentioned users , we have the following properties: User A : - Location = Mumbai Function = Support Product = EP User B : - Location = Tokyo Function = Support Product = BI User M : - Location = Delhi Function = Regional Manager Product = N.A The content in the Role can be tagged as below: 
So, by attaching the user attributes in Table 1 to the respective users and by tagging the content in the PCD, we can attach the same roles to different people. All of them will see different content. Hence, in this scenario we have restricted the number of roles to only two for different user attributes. The Step wise workflow has been listed below:Custom Development is required for the filter factories Maintenance will be required The view of a role for a content admin might not represent exactly the way the user will see the navigational menus. This can be overcome by efficient and extensive documentation and a strict process. Need the skill set for the PCD Inspector Tool Advantages: The filter factories, since they are custom, meet all the requirements The number of roles can be drastically reduced. This Weblog explains the scenarios in details about how to achieve the solution, There are already very good documents in SDN to achieve this in your implementation. These are listed as below: More info about the PCD inspector tool: http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw2004s/helpdata/en/47/a4a442dc030e31e10000000a1550b0/frameset.htm More info about PCD filtering:https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/17968de1-0a01-0010-1f9f-c090fbc7... Code Sample:https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/3367e690-0201-0010-d285-c69bd884... Imp. Web Log: PCD filter and navigation cache. Be Careful When Combining Navigation Cache, PCD Filter Hope this one will be helpful to you. My next web log will be about achieving Content Segmentation for KM content.
- “Segmentation through Role Concept Design”
- "KM Content Segmentation: Using User Profile attributes and Meta Data attributes attached to KM docs.”
So, by attaching the user attributes in Table 1 to the respective users and by tagging the content in the PCD, we can attach the same roles to different people. All of them will see different content. Hence, in this scenario we have restricted the number of roles to only two for different user attributes. The Step wise workflow has been listed below:- Create PCD Objects and the Filter Factory components
- Create Roles and assign content to them
- Assign the content with the appropriate PCD attribute ( eg. As per the above table)
- Ensure the corresponding user attributes have been populated
11 Comments
