Purpose
"Portal" or "Portal Platform" or "SAP Enterprise Portal"
The portal offers a
single point of access to SAP and non-SAP information sources, enterprise
applications, information repositories, databases and services in and outside
your organization—all integrated into a single user experience. It
provides you the tools to manage this knowledge, to analyze and interrelate
it, and to share and collaborate on the basis of it.
With its role-based
content, and personalization features, the portal enables users—from
employees and customers to partners and suppliers—to focus exclusively
on data relevant to daily decision-making processes.
Integration
The portal is the
front-end component for SAP NetWeaver—the comprehensive integration and
application platform that facilitates the alignment of people, information,
and business processes across organizational and technical
boundaries.
Tightly integrated
into the portal are also the knowledge management and collaboration
capabilities of SAP NetWeaver, which allow users to share information and to
work together using that information.
·
Knowledge Management offers capabilities that everyone can use to
distribute, access, and manage unstructured information within an organization
through a heterogeneous repository landscape. Capabilities include
collaborative document authoring and publishing, version management, search
and navigation through taxonomies, automated classification and subscription,
and more. See
Knowledge
Management.
Knowledge
Management.
·
Collaboration brings users, information, and applications together
to ensure successful cooperation. All collaboration tools and channels are
easily accessible directly from the portal. These tools include collaboration
rooms, instant messaging, chat, e-mail, and calendar integration. See
Collaboration.
Collaboration.
·
Guided Procedures offers a set of functions that enables a business
expert to create reusable components and model people-centric business
workflows with them. At runtime, business users can initiate a process from a
process template, and follow its execution until completion. The integration
of interactive forms into the Guided Procedures framework enables the
implementation of online and offline form-based processes. See Guided
Procedures.
Features
The following table
highlights the key features of the portal. Follow the links for detailed
information.
Key
Capability
|
Description
|
Technology and
architecture
|
The portal is built
for the enterprise, providing a secure and scalable environment.
·
Platform-independence: The portal runs on a wide range of operating
systems, including Windows and UNIX.
·
Multi-language interface: The portal supports many languages to make a
global deployment more efficient and usable.
·
High performance and
availability:
Clustering and caching mechanisms provide high performance and high
availability.
·
Security: The portal allows businesses to expose their
resources to partners, suppliers, and customers, while maintaining rigorous
confidentiality for restricted business information. The security features of
the portal include authentication, single sign-on, authorization, integrated
user management, and secure communications.
·
Unification: Unification in the portal enables an enterprise to
integrate the resources of its information systems and provide unified access
to its structured data. It provides correlation-based technology that allows
users to take information from one application and to use it to retrieve
information from another application, and trigger an automated
response.
·
Navigation: The portal offers a flexible and open navigation
layout design that supports virtually every usage scenario.
·
Global portal scenarios: The portal supports global portal scenarios
through the use of open standards, wide platform support, multi-language
support, global deployment and scalability, and delegated
administration.
|
End-user
environment
|
The portal runtime
environment offers users a single point of access, in a fully customizable
portal desktop, to internal and external information, applications, and
services that are relevant to their role in the organization.
·
User navigation: The portal offers a comprehensive role-based
navigation environment for users to retrieve the business-specific
information. Portal pages and iViews also display assorted links to associated
information, enabling further investigation. Navigation in the portal is
facilitated through top-level and detailed navigation, page navigation,
dynamic navigation, object based navigation, Drag&Relate, and navigation
by URL.
·
Personalization: Portal users can work in a customized environment;
by personalizing the look and feel of their portal desktop, language settings,
personal information, single sign-on logon credentials, and content displayed
per portal page.
·
Accessibility support: The portal ships with high contrast themes,
manages font handling for portal content, enables keyboard access to
interactive elements in the user interface, and works with third-party screen
readers. SAP is committed to making its products accessible to all
users.
|
Advanced
administration support
|
The portal provides
a complete set of tools to maintain, manage and monitor the portal within one
coherent environment. These administrative tools are designed as modular
portal pages or iViews, enabling you to delegate administration tasks
according to your business scenario.
·
Content administration: The Portal Content Studio provides a central
administrative environment in the portal for code-free development and
management of portal content.
·
Role definition: The structure and delivery of content to portal
users is determined by role definitions based on the user’s task within
the organization. Through roles, a company can structure its business
processes and deliver business content according to the needs of certain user
groups of the portal.
·
Delegated administration: Comprehensive delegated administration helps
manage large-scale implementations by targeting tools and content specifically
related to the functions and tasks of users in the organization.
·
Customization: The portal design can be modified to fit a specific
corporate image. It provides design templates for users to choose from. Portal
administrators determine the level of personalization available to portal end
users, including portal themes, languages, passwords, and page and iView
properties.
·
User administration: The portal utilizes a user management service that
connects to and manages user and group data stored in the user persistence
store. A Web-based interface in the portal enables administrators to
administer user data centrally and access multiple user data sources in
parallel, such as corporate directories, databases, or SAP systems.
|
Enterprise-centric
content
|
Portal content
delivers information from heterogeneous sources to portal users in a single
desktop. Portal content enables access to links and documents, transactions
and data in underlying business applications, internal and external services,
and to reports and analytics.
·
Development: Developers can stay with their preferred programming
model and within their preferred development environment to create content for
the portal. The Portal Development Kit (PDK) provides the tools for
programmers to develop their own content from scratch.
·
Business Packages: Predefined role-based portal content, in the form
of Business Packages, is ready for immediate use in the portal. Business
packages are available from the Portal Content Portfolio on SAP Developer
Network at www.sdn.sap.com/sdn/contentportfolio.sdn.
·
Role-based portal content: Helps various user groups to be more
productive more quickly.
|
"Portal" and "Portal Platform" are used
interchangeably to refer to the Web front end of SAP NetWeaver.
"SAP Enterprise Portal" refers to the SAP
NetWeaver cross-component solution consisting of Portal, KnowledgeManagement, and Collaboration.
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