It is time for the Portal news for the month of March 2012. In this edition I have prepared some important information you should know about the SAP NetWeaver Portal area on new SCN. And I want to point you to some interesting new blogs, a new presentation from ISUG and up-to-date information on SAP Portal Content and Site Management by OpenText.
What You Should Know About New SCN
The Portal Space
Topic spaces are comparable to the “homepages” on the old SCN landscape. In old SCN we had the Portal homepage which was the single point of entry for all information around SAP NetWeaver Portal. In new SCN you have “topic spaces”. We have a topic space ”Portal” with the following URL: http://scn.sap.com/community/portal. The space "Portal" is again the single point of entry for all the information around the product “SAP NetWeaver Portal”. On the overview tab of the space “Portal” you find a “Follow” button. Just click on it and you will get informed on what is going on by notification email.
You'll go to a topic space because the focus topic interests you. Most likely, you'll develop a set of favorite spaces that you'll regularly visit or follow. Once you’ve entered the space “Portal”, you can navigate to the “Content” tab where you find all blogs, documents, and discussions that belong to that space. From here you can start a discussion, write a blog or a document. Please do so – be active in the Portal community!
Portal in SCN Navigation
At the moment you navigate to the Portal space in the following way: Solutions -> Technology -> Application Foundation/Integration -> SAP NetWeaver -> Team Productivity -> SAP Netweaver Portal. It is planned to change this navigation so that the navigation path will become shorter. You will be informed about this planned change in one of the next news blogs.
Your Personal Space
Your personal space is about you. It's like an area where you manage your profile and manage how you interact with the community. Here you can get an overview of your activities and of the content that you've created. You can manage your connections with other members and get an overview of the places and content you are following. After we launch the new SCN, you will need to go into your personal space to update your profile, upload a recent photo of yourself, and set up your environment on the new platform. After you log in to the New SCN, you can access your personal space simply by clicking your name at the top of the masthead.
Your Migrated Blogs
If you are a blogger, you'll find that all of your previous blogs have been migrated into the content area of your personal space. But they are no longer assigned to the area "Portal" because this assignment could not be migrated to new SCN. Therefore you will need to go to the content area of your personal space and assign each of your blogs to the space "Portal". Here is a nice blog from Pat Flanders including a screencam explaining how to move blogs to a topic space: http://scn.sap.com/community/getting-started/blog/2012/02/27/the-new-scn-move-your-blogs-to-make-the....
Portal Forums and Subspaces
The forums were migrated from the old SCN to the new SCN landscape. In the new world, each forum belongs to a space/subspace and each space/subspace contains exactly one forum. Forums are now called “discussions.” As a logged-on member of SCN, you can participate in and contribute to any discussion, and you accrue points in the spaces in which you are active.
The Portal forums you know from old SCN were technically migrated into subspaces. So they are no independent objects as in old SCN, they exist only in the context of a “subspace” within the space "Portal".
How can you find the Portal forums on new SCN? Once you’ve entered the space “Portal”, you navigate to the “Subspace” tab. Once you entered a subspace (for example Portal Implementation), navigate to the Content tab and then go to "Discussions". Here you find the migrated forum content from old SCN and here you can start a new discussion. And there is also the possibility to discuss directly on the "Portal" space level.
Note that we will change the subspace structure in the next future. Turning forums from old SCN to subspaces in new SCN does not reflect anymore our Portal product structure and main product areas. And this is what subspaces are for: they give you a great opportunity to represent the main areas of a product. Subspaces are bigger entities for product areas whereas the old forums - which were turned into subspaces - are mostly smaller entities which must be renamed and assigned to the bigger product areas.
As a consequence the existing subspaces must be renamed and we also need to create new subspaces which represent new product areas like SAP Portal Content Management by OpenText, On-Demand Portal etc. The existing discussions will not be lost and existing links will still work.
There is still a lot of work lying ahead. I hope that you will like the new Portal area on SCN, when all restructuring work will be finished!
Interesting New Blogs
Huseyin Bilgen: Why did FIT choose NetWeaver Portal for the Ticket Sales Portal of IDOBUS? In this blog Huseyin describes a success story created by FIT Consulting by using SAP NetWeaver Portal technology.
Simon Kemp: Why I think Portal on Device (PoD) has potential. In this blog Simon describes why Portal on Device is a great idea.
Michael Nicholls: Finding recent portal blog posts in the new SCN. Nice tip from Michael!
Presentations from “ISUG”
This presentation includes some of the highlights and planned innovation of SAP NetWeaver Portal, as discussed in ISUG (Israeli User Group) 2012: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-25254.
New Information on SAP Portal Content and Site Management by OpenText
On this new SCN document you find overview information on SAP Portal Content and Site Management by OpenText: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-25682.
