The NetWeaver Business Client (NWBC) - A Portal Consultants Guide

[Former Member]

Introduction & Background

I've been wanting to write this post for a while but at lunch today in Sydney with my friend and ex-colleague marco.furlanetto I got the impetus I needed to get started - thanks Marco! Some of you who know me will probably know that I've been an SAP Portal person almost since the beginning of the portal, I worked with the portal predecessors namely the TopTier Portal and the mySAP Workplace and went through EP 5.0, 6.0, 7, etc... etc... it's been a journey.

While the technology changes the problems it is trying to solve haven't changed that much, so when recently I started using the NWBC more seriously (I had played around with it for a while) I kept seeing similarities with the way the portal works and drawing parallels between the two. I have also been asked lots of questions from people who aren't sure when to use the Portal and when to use NWBC and which one could do what.

This post isn't about which one is better (I firmly believe they both have their strengths - and can be used together to provide the best possible user experience), this post is about highlighting some of the features and functionality of the NWBC and linking them back to how similar results would be achieved in the NetWeaver Portal. I suppose you could call it a "Portal person's guide to NWBC".

Format and Content

I'd like to structure this as a series of posts, each one focussing on a different aspect or feature where I have been able to draw a comparison between the two. I'll keep this post as the intro to the series and update it whenever I write another "chapter". To start with I'd like to write a little bit about Portal roles vs. NWBC roles so:

Table of Contents
Part 1 - Portal roles vs NWBC roles
Part 2 - Accessing multiple systems in NWBC
Part 3 - NWBC Authentication & Single-Sign-On (SSO)
Part 4 - NWBC Troubleshooting and Debugging Tips
Part 5 - NWBC Branding and Theming
Part 6 - Object Based Navigation (OBN) in the NWBC

I'm not writing this as a definitive guide to NWBC or Portal, but more as a way to introduce people to NWBC who may already be familiar with the Portal concepts and to share my experience as a long time portal guy using NWBC.

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Thanks,
Simon