SAP NetWeaver Portal

10 things that caught my attention in portal 7.31

Rajendrakumar Gaikwad — Fri, 17 May 2013 05:04:27 GMT

Just wanted to share my experience as end user for SAP Netweaver Portal 7.31.

So after waiting for long time i got to get the hands on Portal 7.31. Was expecting a lot,had written a blog @ my expectations from 7.3 few months back.

As a end user i noticed the following .

1. First Menu is now non-rooted. we can change the First Menu also by drag and drop.

2. Search button is working by default.so i just type the service name, it displayes the matching services, select and go..thats good.

3. In Place filters for UWL, Really Nice enahancement.

4. Enhanced Webdynpro java applications. I noticed a tiny calculator in Tax Declartion and Claims app.

5.Works on Chrome Browser, although Adobe forms do not work in Chrome.

6.Nice Out of the Box (OOB) Login Page for Mobile Devices.

7.Portal on Device : Fantastic Framework. although Webdynpro Java apps do not work on Portal on Device.Unless UWL works it is no good for approvers OOB.

8.Now we can include a New Session Button in the MastHead. Thats a cool Feature

9.Portal Theme Studio.. This is really Nice.

10.Enhanced Wiki,Forums and WPC features. although WPC is still primitive.

As i write this, 7.4 is made GA. so let me see when can i get my hands on that ...

Regards

Rajendra

SAPPHIRENOW2013 – Day #2: the mobile portal day

Aviad Rivlin — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:00:29 GMT

Hello,

As the SAPPHIRE event gets more and more momentum, the free time to write my daily blog is minimizing. So, this blog is going to be very short, but better a short one than nothing…

Day #2 (Wednesday) was definitely the day where the mobile portal got more and more momentum with the peak at the afternoon theater presentation of PepsiCo presenting their SAP NetWeaver Portal solution and showcasing a Proof of Concept of the mobile portal based on their existing SAP NetWeaver Portal implementation featuring the latest mobile Universal Worklist offering.

Together with the new mobile portal and “Fiori” solutions, customers can now mobilize their landscape easier than before leveraging Web technologies.

All about the mobile portal…

Cheers,

Aviad

Next SAP Portal Tweetchat "SAP Portal Upgrades" on May 27

Vera Gutbrod — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:34:29 GMT

On Monday May 27nd from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m CET, you are invited to join the next Portal tweetchat on “SAP Portal Upgrades.”

This tweetchat is an activity meant to give a general overview of the different options and aspects to upgrades of SAP Portal.

SAP NetWeaver 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 and analyze this knowledge, 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.

SAP NetWeaver Portal is the Web UI for the newest generation of SAP enterprise applications, providing intuitive, Web-based access to HR, financial, customer relationship management, product lifecycle management, and other critical applications. As a unified interface to these applications, the portal helps each user quickly access the right resources and be as productive as possible.

Highlights of SAP Portal Upgrades are

- Upgrade to 7.3 release is beneficial with many enhancements introduced
- Upgrade of existing system vs. new installation
- Upgrade toolUpgrade of custom developments
- Business package version compatibility

For more information see this blog by Thomas Hensel.

Our panel of core experts include:

- Aviad Rivlin (@AviadRivlin)
- Thomas Hensel (@ThHensel)
- Alexandra Shapilov (@AlexShapilov)

The tweetchat will be moderated by Karen Golub using our Portal Twitter account @Portal_SAP. You can connect with the tweetchat moderator before the chat. Send for example some questions or your expectations already before the chat. You can start with this already now! Send the questions and statements directly to our SAP Portal Twitter channel @Portal_SAP.

What is a TweetChat and How to Participate
What’s a tweetchat? It is similar to a webinar in which the speakers, rather than talking, type out their thoughts in 140 characters or less. And during a tweetchat, rather than using a dial-in number, you follow along with your preferred Twitter app like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite or TweetChat.com. The key benefits of TweetChat.com is that it automatically adds the hashtag to the end of your tweets after you successfully sign in using your Twitter account.

To participate in our tweetchat, simply log in to the Twitter client of your choice and submit all your questions and statements with the hashtag #SAPPortalchat included. In case you are not using this hashtag, we cannot see what you are tweeting. We’ll be monitoring the timeline live and responding through the accounts of our experts.

See you on Twitter on May 27th!

This chat promises to promote a lively conversation about an interesting topic. Please join us on May 27th from 16:00-17:00 P.M. CET using the #SAPPortalchat hashtag. We are really looking forward to talking to you directly. So start thinking about your questions now. We hope to see you on May 27th live on Twitter!

SAPPHIRENOW2013 – Day #1: a cloudy portal day

Aviad Rivlin — Wed, 15 May 2013 10:22:27 GMT

Hello,

First day of SAPPHIRE is now over. So many people (I heard the number 20k visitors – WOW!), so many topics, every SAPPHIRE\TehcEd I am amazed again.

So… for the portal team this was a very busy cloudy day. We first presented the SAP Cloud for Service solution which is built on top of SAP HANA Cloud Portal.

The team has presented the rich and easy customization capabilities with cloud portal. Customers can change not only the themeing, but also the structure of the site and the aggregation of content from both SAP and non-SAP sources. Needless to say that mobile consumption is built in.

In addition, we have presented other cool sites built on top of cloud portal for different scenarios as Public Sector, Higher Education and others.

If you have any question about the cloud portal, feel free to contact: Amir Blich, Yariv Zur or Ifat Shwartz.

Let’s see this second testimonial about the SAP HANA Cloud Portal by our great partner Intenzz:

So… this was my short SAPPHIRE2013 day 1 summary. If you are onsite, don’t miss us at the Database and Technology booth (DT625) and Mobility booth (MO414).

Aviad and Asi Messica

SAPPHIRENOW2013 - Let the show begin...

Aviad Rivlin — Tue, 14 May 2013 02:39:27 GMT

Hello,

This year, I will do my best to write down a short blog summarizing my personal ASUG \ SAPPHIRENOW conference highlights. As you can imagine, it will all be about the SAP Portal portfolio offering…

So… today we unofficially kicked off the conference with a pre-conference seminar about Renovating and Refreshing the SAP UI’s with the latest User Productivity Tools, with ~20 customers in the room. We were discussing the different challenges and solution SAP has to offer in the area of UI: SAP Portal (of course ), NetWeaver BusinessClient, SAP Screen Personas, Adobe Forms, FPM, SAPUI5, SAP App Designer*, SAP NetWeaver Gateway, and others…

Header 1	Header 3

Thanks Yariv Zur for making this happen.

During the coming few days, I encourage you to follow the twitter accounts of Aviad Rivlin, Amir Blich, Yariv Zur, Guy Bavly, Ohad Levy, Orna Kleinmann, Nimrod Barak, Yair Vidal, Asi Messica, Ram Alon and Ben Aflalo – we are all onsite at the SAPPHIRENOW conference looking to meet you onsite and collaborate virtually.

Let the show begin... turn on your speakers, lay back and let's open the SAPPHIRE conference for the portal gurus with the first in a row of new SAP Portal videos:

Comment below with questions\ thoughts\ideas, and I’ll do the best to answer as soon as I can. And… looking forward to meet you.

Aviad

Extending SAP NetWeaver Portal with Enterprise Workspaces 1.1 Service Pack 4

Aviad Rivlin — Fri, 03 May 2013 12:42:50 GMT

Hello,

Today I would like to share with you the availability of SAP NetWeaver Portal, enterprise workspaces 1.1, Service Pack 4.

With this latest release of Enterprise Workspaces, we extend (even more) the mobile capabilities of the SAP NetWeaver Portal and Enterprise Workspaces.

This new service pack provides enhanced and extended mobile and social capabilities for the SAP NetWeaver Portal, in four major areas:

Mobile Homepage – 16 new mobile homepage templates and multiple new mobile ready modules.
Mobile user interface for the SAP NetWeaver Portal Universal Worklist - an HTML5 based user interface for the existing Universal Worklist running on smartphones and tablets, while reusing the existing configuration of the Universal Worklist (SSO, UWL configuration, etc.)
Enterprise Feeds – new portal container aggregating different content sources into one harmonized feed. The enterprise feed aggregates one or more channels, consuming data from an external RSS feed, news items stored in the SAP Knowledge Management repository and\or Universal Worklist items. Customers and partners can extend the list of channels via public API’s and consume items from additional repositories. Enterprise feeds can be consumed on multiple devices - desktop and mobile devices.
People Explorer is connecting people based on both enterprise data and personal information, it supports in creating professional networks, finding experts and discovering colleagues with shared interests. With Enterprise Workspaces Service Pack 4, multiple relationship types are supported (for example: "following", "member-of", etc.), end user can edit and update their own profile, and several additional enhancements.

Check out this short video presenting the mobile consumption of the SAP NetWeaver Portal on tablet devices:

To summarize:

Enterprise Workspaces 1.1 Service Pack 4 provides enhanced capabilities for quick and easy creation of mobile workspaces and mobile homepage.
It provides a mobile view for the SAP NetWeaver Portal Universal Worklist.
It provides 16 new mobile homepage templates and additional mobile ready modules for feed consumption, mobile application launching and mobile Universal Worklist.

For further information, please review the detailed presentation and the release notes on help.sap.com.

Finally, don't miss the live demos and face-to-face discussions at sapphirenow2013. If you are attending the sapphire_now_2103 / asug_365 conference in Orlando, you are welcome to e-mail me and meet in person.

Aviad

With the new gamification tools on SCN, don't forget to "like" this blog in case your find it useful...

Passing SAP certification C_EP120_701

Tobias Hofmann — Thu, 02 May 2013 20:41:54 GMT

SCN gave a SAP certification voucher to the topic leaders 2010 - 2011. While the voucher came with an expiration date, with the help from SAP Education I was able to extend its validity to 2013. That was way beyond what I have imagined, so here is again a thank you to SAP Education in being gracious regarding the expiration date.

Having a valid voucher is one part when taking an exam, the other part is being prepared to pass the exam. The exam I took is C_EP120_701, which translates into SAP Portal developer. Instead of now writing generic tips I`ll focus here on the specific exam I took.

I know how to develop applications for the portal, and after screening the exam topics, it was clear that I know around 60% to 70% of the topics covered. As my knowledge is real life knowledge, it was clear to me that some SAP specific definitions I`ll have to learn or refresh. For instance, when developing a PAR I use NWDS and the wizards that come with it. That does not mean that I know the exact class needed for a JSPDynPage project.

How did I pass?

1. Choose exam and level

I chose an exam I in a field I know something about: SAP Portal. There are two possible levels available by SAP Education for an exam: associate and professional. For SAP Portal developers, there is only the associate certification for Portal 7.01 available. Associate means that you have a fundamental understanding of the SAP solution: know the basics, the definitions and how to use the software as SAP wants you to.

Short: SAP does not expect you to write a working portal application in the exam.

2. Training material

After reading the topics covered by the exam it was clear that some things I never or rarely had done before: like writing a portal service or accessing WDJ context via generic context API instead of using typed access. Hands on experience does not mean that you necessarily know everything. Instead of focusing only on the 40% missing, I thought: why not start from scratch and learn the full 100%?

You can attend an official SAP training, perhaps you can get the course material when working for a partner or you use SAP Help. As I am almost all the time working for large SAP partners / SI, attending official training is unlikely. That leaves me with the course material in PDF form and SAP Help for learning how SAP defines portal development. I do have a very outdated PDF for EP150, but nothing for JA310. Which leaves me to use SAP Help for learning the WDJ definitions.

While I believe that SAP Help is more than enough to learn the definitions, the content is not really meant for self-learning. The official PDFs come with a clear table of content, lessons and useful tips when explaining a section. SAP Help gives you the raw information: it is your task to extract what is part of the exam and what`s not. Using only SAP Helps means that you`ll spend more time for a topic. Moreover, you`ll have to create your own code examples. Depending on how you are used to learn, SAP Help is more complete, but the risk is high that you`ll end up learning actually too much: content that is not part of the exam.*

3. Learn

Yes, learn. Learn, learn, learn and learn. Then repeat. Learning is the only way to pass the exam. Again: learn, learn, and learn.

Maybe it is not so easy. You have two options: learn to pass the exam or learn and create a library of examples and personal notes that will really help you later when coding applications? It depends on you if you want to study the material to pass or study to actually learn how to code applications for SAP Portal.

The first case means that you go through the learning material and remember the definitions and usage patterns. The latter case means that you apply it to actual code and go through all the examples provided by SAP. I chose the latter option (of course). The difference is that I gained a repository of a dozen and more SAP Portal applications, including notes and can run and test them on my personal portal installation. My personal tip to anyone that wants to screen a SAP certified developer: check if they have a repository of code examples.

4. Learn more

Best way to learn is trying it out. In case you do not have a SAP Portal at hand at work or from your employer, download the SAP Portal trial here from SCN. The exam covers topics related to SAP Portal development, so don`t expect that your daily work assignments also cover 100% the exam. I developed over the years several portal applications, but portal services or going into the details of portal application personalization? Knowing the basics and casual SAP Help consultation for solving daily problems does not mean that you know everything about writing a service (interface, lifecycle, properties, etc). And as you can not (you can`t, right?) deploy a custom test service to the portal landscape of your client / employer, you need a personal SAP Portal to play around with.

What`s to remember here: what you do as a portal developer in your day job most likely is NOT enough to pass the exam. Hardly you`ll develop WDJ, portal services & components, JCA, user administration, web services, VC, and so on at the same time. Even when you have developed in all of these technologies, changes are good that some time passed when you last used one. So even when you do portal development for a living, you won`t be an expert in each area covered by the exam.

5. Prepare

Prepare for the topics covered in the exam. That`s harder than it sounds, as the exam is for portal 7.01. When you work with 7.1, 7.2 or 7.3 you can apply the content, but sometimes you`ll see that the certification is for an old release: VC changed, the positioning of WDJ changed slightly and you do not use PARs anymore in 7.3. Even knowing that some answers are “wrong” for 7.3, they are still correct for 7.01. The problem here is that SAP Education does not offer an exam for 7.3. Looking back, maybe only two or three questions were outdated. The rest is still 100% valid. Talk about backward compatible ;-)

6. Take your time

If you use the PDFs, be prepared to go through more than 1500 pages. At least. Ok, some are TOC, empty pages, indices, but still, more than 1000 pages are waiting for you. Don`t expect to start on Monday and pass the exam next Friday. Especially when you do the learning beside your job. Real learning takes time. I did a fast run through of the content to get a quick overview and then took a deep dive on each topic that took between 1 to 2 weeks. As I have a job that can consume quite some time, I did not learn constantly. Sometimes there was a gap of several weeks (also explaining what took me so long to use the voucher).

7. Take the test

The test is 80 questions and SAP gives you 180 minutes. Questions are multiple choice and I did not have to code. Topics covered match exactly what SAP Education publishes at their site. No surprises. I did not have one question that made me flip a coin. The English used is not overly complex, it`s clearly written with non-native speakers in mind and the names used match what is used at SAP Help and the PDFs. A little bit more than 2 minutes per questions may sound like a short time, but it took me around an hour to complete the whole test, and that includes the introduction to the software as well as answering the questions and going through them again.

8. Pass and wait to receive the certificate

Pass the exam, wait for SAP to send you the certificate by mail, take it gently out of the envelope and put it into a fancy frame. Hang it on the wall with the support of a nail or put it in your cubicle.

Now what?

SAP is not offering a certification for Portal 7.3, and I can only guess why. 7.3 is getting more and more traction In the market (it’s around for some time now). At least I'd like to see a roadmap / statement on the SAP education site talking about the status of 7.3 certification.

Does a SAP Portal certification make sense? SAP Portal development means Java development, so the underlying technology is Java and Java web technologies. Oracle offers certifications in that area too, and honestly, when you are looking for a portlet developer certification, it makes more sense to go for that certification, as you`ll learn about the Java standard and not about how to develop for a specific product. Of course you won't learn about VC, WDJ and EPCF, but your skills should be more universally applicable (think also HANA Cloud Portal); in case you want to change your specialization.

While to focus is on Java, a small section should also cover Web Dynpro ABAP development and how to customize standard portal applications like masthead or the logon screen.

Why a portal certification at all and not SAP Mobile Platform? I’m still waiting to see how SMP evolves and how SAP Education will offer trainings and certification to new SMP versions, especially considering Syclo integration.

*For those wondering: I achieved > 95% for the SAP Portal and EP120 part, and my weak part was WDJ. As I do not really like WDJ I also had motivational problems when it came to learn about controllers, hooks, etc.

Error in applying SPS 13 to Netweaver 7.02

Vinod Kadam — Wed, 01 May 2013 16:34:05 GMT

Hi All,

I am applying Support Stack 13 to Netweaver 7.02.

I selects packages then stops cluster and while starting it gives message Cluster not started waiting 5 seconds....

asn so on.

I never starts cluster.I tried different SAP notes,parameters but nothing worked.

From the logs what I have seen is

Deployment will be performed in engine mode UPGRADE as deployment threshold set in JSPM config file is reached.

Restarting cluster SEP in SAFE mode

I removed instance from SAFE mode tried to restart but again it came to same point.

Then I checked jspm_config.txt in /usr/sap/SEP/JC60/j2ee/JSPM/param.

here parameter /jspm/deploymentEngineMode was set to SAFE_UPGRADE, I commented it and set it to NORMAL.

And afterwards stacks went ahead.

Just wanted to share this information as I could not get this when I was looking for it on SDN.

Thanks.

Best Regards,
Vinod

SAP Portal Newsletter Blog: April 2013

Vera Gutbrod — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:32:19 GMT

Welcome to the April Edition of the SAP Portal Newsletter blog. This time we have the following top stories for you:

Upcoming Events: SAPPHIRENOW and ASUG 2013
SAP HANA Cloud Portal News
SAP Portal, On Premise: New Features in SPS9: WPC and Portal Content
SAP Portal, Mobile Edition
Portal Implementation Competition: Call for Proposals
SAP Portal on Facebook
Blogs from the Portal Community

Upcoming Events: SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG 2013

In the upcoming ASUG event in Orlando (May 14 - 15) there will be various sessions on the SAP Portal portfolio. These are the main areas we will cover in our sessions:

1. General information on SAP Portal like roadmap, future directions, strategy, influence council, demos, release 7.3 etc.

2. Portal Mobile Experiences

3. SAP HANA Cloud Portal (formerly known as SAP NetWeaver Cloud Portal)

4. HANA and HANA UI Services

5. Content Management

All in all we offer over 20 sessions which you can find in the session catalogue by selecting the presentation category "Portals" under the ASUG Annual Conference.

At SAPPHIRENOW you can meet our experts in the following campuses:

Database and Technology
Cloud
Mobile
Industries

Note: In case you would like to arrange a meeting with one of our experts at SAPPHIRENOW and/or ASUG conference, please contact us via sapportal@sap.com.

You can find more information in this blog which summarizes all Portal sessions. Read also this blog by Portal Product Manager Aviad Rivlin who wants to invite you to join him at this ASUG sessions and learn more about the latest innovations of the SAP NetWeaver Portal – Core, Mobile, In-Memory.

Cloud Portal

Cloud Portal Webinars: Still 2 Webinars To Run

You still have the chance to register for the 2 last webinars in the series of SAP HANA Cloud Portal webinar series,

Manage Content with SAP NetWeaver Cloud Portal (May 23): Need to transfer knowledge from product teams to sales, marketing, partners, suppliers and others? Find out how you can easily share and manage documents, training materials and other assets with the content management capabilities of SAP NetWeaver Cloud Portal.
Bring HR Information to Your Employees with SAP NetWeaver Cloud Portal (June 20): Need an easy and user-friendly way to bring HR information to your employees? See how you can set up an HR platform with SAP NetWeaver Cloud Portal. Learn how you can bring benefit information from the SAP on-premise systems and make it available to employees through visually appealing sites, secure and optimized for mobile.

You can register here.

Cloud Portal Partner Test: Places available

On June 11 we are hosting a 3-day free testing event in Walldorf, and we would like to invite SAP Partners to get their hands on SAP HANA Cloud Portal (formerly known as SAP NetWeaver Cloud Portal) latest innovations and experience the value it offers to organizations to meet the next level of portal demands. During this event, you would have the chance to experience the Cloud Portal offering and sharpen your skills. If you are an SAP partner, or know a partner that would like to take advantage of this unique opportunity, register here http://www.sappartneredge.com/BIT.

We have still some open places for the test event and you can still register.

Poll for Cloud Solutions:

Vote in this poll and let us know about your plans on Cloud solutions.

SAP Portal, On Premise: New Features in SPS9: WPC and Portal Content

Saar Dagan shares with you in his blog something new that started in SAP NetWeaver 7.3 SP09, 7.31 SP07 – a new WPC connection was created. Unlike the previous connection, the new connection supports not only areas but also pages. It means that you can directly connect a WPC page to a role. These new possibilities will really help users integrate WPC pages in more scenarios.

Moreover, with this new connection you can set both WPC pages and areas as portal entry points, enabling users to see WPC pages and areas in the first level of the navigation structure. For more information, read this blog by Gitit Sagiv.

Until now, end users could add iViews or pages to a personalized page from the Portal Content Directory. The end user had to know where the required objects were located in the PCD hierarchy to be able to add them to the personalized page. In addition, administrators had to maintain permissions for content they made available to end users add. Now a new ability has been added to portal page personalization. You can now see a new content area named "Role-Based Content":

This new feature was developed as part of the Customer Connection program. For more information, read this blog by Gitit Sagiv.

SAP Portal, Mobile Edition

IT organizations trying to enter the mobile world would do well to look to the portal technologies they already have in place for a good place to start their mobile initiative. For SAP NetWeaver Portal customers, taking advantage of the mobile edition of the solution means getting a solid start in mobilizing the IT landscape. On top of that, these customers can enjoy a low TCO since they’re leveraging an existing investment and require no new training. For customers who have yet to invest in SAP NetWeaver Portal, it isn’t too late to take advantage of the robust and scalable platform with its multi-channel entry point.

You want to read more on the mobile edition of SAP NetWeaver Portal ? Then read this article by SAP Portal Product Manager Aviad Rivlin in SAPINsider.

And have a look at this image you get an impression of the mobile experience with SAP Portal:

Portal Implementations: Call for Proposal

Are you interested in award-winning portal user interface designs & guidelines? Would you like to share the lessons learned from your portal implementation project? Do you like to showcase your portal at SAP TechEd? Thomas Hensel, Portal Product Manager wants to support an initiative to search the best SAP Portal implementation for the Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) “Intranet Design Annual 2014: Year's 10 Best Intranets”.

Whenever Thomas attended an SAP event or SAP user group conference the agenda highlights that excited him most were the customer showcases. These presentations surface the true innovation power of our portal customers who apply latest design thinking and usability concepts to greatly serve their clients around the world.

WHAT’S IN FOR YOU?
As a team of SAP Portal experts your company can demonstrate thought leadership and award-winning design in the portal and user experience domain.

The portal product team is highly interested in learning more about your project. We are planning to create delightful customer testimonial videos and promote the winners at SAP TechEd conferences to the portal community.

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO?
You can submit your proposal for NN/g “Intranet Design Annual 2014: Year's 10 Best Intranets” during May-June 2013 via http://www.nngroup.com/intranet-call-for-entries. The web site provides detailed instructions on the submission process. Winners will be announced by NN/g in January 2014.

More information in this blog by Thomas Hensel.

SAP Portal on Social Media

We would like to inform you that we created a new SAP Portal Fan Page on Facebook. Fan Pages are public: this means is that in order to see our SAP Portal Fan Page, you don’t have to login to Facebook or be our "friend" to have access to it — there’s no barrier there for you to see the page and its content.

In case you would like to visit this page, follow this link www.facebook.com/SAPPortal. And if you like our page - you can show that by pressing the Like button. We are looking forward meeting you on Facebook.

On the fan page you will be informed about product news, events, releases, technical information, techncial product details. You can see images on Cloud Portal, Portal on premise and Mobile Portal, videos or you take part in a poll etc.

You can also interact with us:

share your ideas with us
give us your feedback
tell us what you always wanted to tell us
like our links and news and also comment on it
give feedback on our new products and ideas for future development

Blogs in the Portal Community
Integration of BOBJ with SAP Portal by Vinod Patil: Vinod describes how to integrate Portal 7.3 SP 7 with BOBJ Version: 4.0 SP 4 Patch 3 using below steps.

Portal framework page unavailable by Tobias Hofmann: In case you are a Portal administrator and get the message that the framework page is not available, you should read Tobias tips in this blog.

Bowser Document Mode – How to set the IE Compatibility View from server side by Dani Cohen. When using the SAP Portal with Internet Explorer browsers, in some cases the content is displayed poorly and functionality is impaired. This might be because the content in the Portal was designed for an earlier version of IE. For these cases Microsoft developed the compatibility view. In his blog Dani describes how to set the compatibility view, standard mode and quirks mode from server side.

New Administration Feature - Locked Position of Content in a Page

Alexandra Shapilov — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 08:42:41 GMT

Until now, content administrators could not control the final position of content in a portal page. If the page could be personalized, users could change the position of content in the page - move it up and down and between containers.

A new ability has been added to the Page editor - a new column called Locked Position.

Marking a content item as locked will prevent users from changing its position in the page during page personalization. This way the content administrator can control the final position of content in a page.

To enable this ability perform the following:
1. Go to NetWeaver Administration (http://<host>:<port>/nwa)
2. Navigate to "Application Modules": Configuration -> Infrastructure -> Application Modules
3. Under "Module List" select the webdynpro/resources/sap.com/tc~pp~adm~wu~page_editor module
4. Under "Web Module Details" select "Web Dynpro Properties" tab

5. Select Components/com.sap.portal.pageeditor.data.DataProvider/DataProvider
6. Under "WD Property Sheet Details", set the value of "LockedPositionFeatureEnabled" property to "true"
7. Select Components/com.sap.portal.pageeditor.layouts.PELayoutContainer/PELayoutContainer
8. Under "WD Property Sheet Details", set the value of "LockedPositionFeatureEnabled" property to "true"
9. Save your changes

When end users personalize a page that contains locked content, they will not be able to uncheck the "Locked Position" checkbox. This way the position set by the administration remains as is.

Note the following:

1. The position of an object can only be locked if it is located in the top position of a container or if an object above it in the same container is marked as locked.

2. Setting an object as locked automatically sets the "Visible" and "Fixed" attributes to “true”. End users cannot change these attributes when personalizing a page that has locked content.

This feature was developed as part of the Customer Connection program. Have a feature you'd like to add to Enterprise Portal? Place it in the ideas place - https://ideaplace.brightidea.com/.

Role-Based Access in Page Personalization

Gitit Sagiv — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 14:59:43 GMT

A new ability has been added to portal page personalization. You can now see a new content area named "Role-Based Content".

Expanding this content area reveals the navigational structure available to the end-user at runtime.

To enable this ability, the administrator needs to perform the following:

1) Navigate to Content Administration -> Portal Content Management -> Portal Content -> Portal Users -> Standard Portal Users -> right-click "Personalize Page" and open the Page editor.

2) Open the "Personalize Page Application" page.

3) Check the “Visible” checkbox next to the "Role-Based Content" iView, and save your changes.

Now, end-users will be able to personalize their content using the navigation hierarchy they are familiar with.

Relevant SAP Note - 1794555.

This feature was developed as part of the Customer Connection program. Have a feature you'd like to add to Enterprise Portal? Add it to the ideas place - https://ideaplace.brightidea.com/.

Resolving Integration conflicts

mrudula jarugula — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 19:34:57 GMT

Resolving integration conflicts.

Integration conflicts are reported between two versions of a resource automatically by the DTR if the version being integrated as a part of the activity is neither a predecessor nor a successor of the currently active version of the resource in the workspace.

In the current scenario there are two tracks in the lanscape.

Track1 : D-->Q-->R

Track 2 : F-->S-->P

The two tracks are not connected by track connection. So to move the code from R-->F, the sca files are manually copied from track 1 to track 2. As the old sca files are not deleted and new sca files are copied to the track 2, the components run into conflicts. If the conflicts have to resolved while moving the code FàP. it they are not resolved the assembly of the components would fail.

Checking for conflicts in DTR.

Logon to the DTR with theuser id which has admin credentials and on the right most corner there will be symbol for conflict search.

Click on the conflict serach and select the workspace, conflict state and click on show.

The open conflicts in the selected workspace are shown beow.

Procedure to resolve the conflicts.

Open the NWDS. Logon to the track (the track with the conflicts) with the logon credentials.

Open the view integration conflicts. In this view we will be able to see the conflicting files in red under each DC.

To resolve a conflict we have to select the conflicts from inactive DC and right click. Then from the context menu select resolve conflict à choose one of the following options.

· Accept colliding

· Accepting Active

· Merging versions

In the current process we select accept the active version.

To accept the active version, it asks for an activity. So create an activity.

When we click on ok. The conflicts in the inactive would be resolved. When we check in the activities back into the DTR, then the conflicts in the active also would be resolved.

Once the activities are realeased, there will be no more conflicts in the integrations conflicts view.

Portal framework page unavailable

Tobias Hofmann — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:07:24 GMT

This is a topic I wanted to blog about since a few years.

The most annoying errors are the ones that spontaneously appear. Yesterday it worked; today you get an error message. Worse when the usual root cause and solutions do not help. This is even more disturbing when suddenly the whole SAP Portal is inaccessible. LIke this error: "Error occured while trying to access frameworkpage. [...] The object does not exist or you are not authorized to access it".

When you are the administrator and get the above message: this means problems and work for you. There are several discussions and solutions available here on SCN that indicate that you do not have the permissions to use the framework page; that you should try to access the PCD directly, and so on. In case these tips do not help, read on (maybe you`ll learn something about SAP Portal too).

Trace down the problem

Use NWA to see the logs. Taking a close look at the reported error messages, the application sap.com/com.sap.portal.navigation.service did not start.

Clicking the link provided in the filed Message ID does not help, as the wiki page does not exist in SCN. Following the error message flow, the root cause seems to be JRA.

That an error related to JRA causes the portal navigation to stop working looks a bit strange. To confirm that, check the portal navigation application status.

NWA -> Operations -> Systems -> Start & Stop -> Java Applications

It is clear that the portal navigation is stopped because a dependency failed. Opening service com.sap.portal.naviation.service lists the failed dependency.

This service depends on sap.com/com.sap.portal.ivs.global.bridge, which itself depends on sap.com/tc~epbc~prt~apps~restricted, that depends on sap.com/com.sap.prt.application.rfcframework, that on sap.com/tc~bl~jra~api, depending on sap.com/tc~sapjra. The last one is not stopped because of a failed dependency, it failed to start:

Conclusion: the SAP Portal navigation depends on SAP`s JRA.

When you know what JRA means, you know where to look for the error. For those who don`t know, SAP gives you a hint in the resource tab of the application.

NWA -> Configuration -> Infrastructure -> Application Resources -> Resource Adaptors -> SAPJavaResourceAdapter15

That is the standard resource adapter from SAP that servers as a template for other resource adapters to connect to SAP ABAP systems.

A not so obvious but very important parameter is:

MaxReaderThreadCount

In case RA is not configured, this value is 0 => meaning NetWeaver won`t start a single thread for this adapter and therefore not activate / register it.

In case this parameter is set to >= 1, a thread will be started during start up of the server and the adapter thread gets activated / registered. When nothing else is configured or the server is not available, JRA won't start. As shown above, this has a huge impact on the portal. To make sure that JRA won't start use the adapter, change the value to 0. After changing the value to 0 the failed and stopped services can be started using NWA or by performing a restart of the portal.

Short: if this resource adapter is configured, the configuration needs to valid. If not, the service won`t start.*

Conclusion

This behavior is valid since at least CE 7.2. I did not test this now explicitly with 7.3 too, but in 7.2 the JRA also fails to start when the server configuration in the resource adapter is valid, but the server is not reachable. I do not know why the portal navigation depends on the JRA service to be up and running. I also do not know why setting the MaxReaderThreadCount to >= 1 leads the JRA component to fail when all the other parameters are not set. When the configured backend ABAP system is not available - system decommissioned, name/IP changed - the same error will occur. I think a misconfiguration of the resource adapter should be treated more gracefully by NetWeaver. For instance, why not check if a server is configured and available?

In case this error only occurs when using the standard resource adapter SAPJavaResourceAdapter15 and not on a copy of it, why not make this RA read only or simply ignore its configuration? (did not test that scenario)

Final remark: SAP, when you provide a link in an error message, make sure that the link is working.

*I read somewhere in SAP Help that you should create a copy of the default resource adapter.

The Quirks of Browser Rendering

Simon Kemp — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 05:45:04 GMT

In this post I would like to describe a recent problem I came up against when trying to embed a Web Dynpro Java (WDJ) application into another website. This is quite a common scenario where you have a leading portal in your organization (e.g. SharePoint or some other Intranet/Internet site) and also an SAP Portal or perhaps other SAP web applications (like Web Dynpro) and you want to present the user with a integrated view so they can see everything on the one page. So you embed (usually via an iframe) the SAP web application into the leading portal page.

Let me start by describing the typical situation and also showing you the problem I was facing...

So I had a new website that was embedding some Web Dynpro Java applications directly into it using an iFrame. It worked OK with Chrome, with Firefox it told me that "Web Dynpro isn't supported" (that's another issue) but in IE9 strange things were happening... the WDJ app seemed to load OK in the iFrame but when you would click on the input field of the form the field would shrink to be really really small and you could not see what you were typing in it. (see the video below to understand this better).

First I thought this was some sort of styling issue or JavaScript problem with the "onfocus" method of the input field, so I played around with different scenarios and tried to debug using the developer tools in IE and Chrome to see what was going on... I wasn't really getting anywhere, I could see the standard SAP JavaScript libraries doing something on the onfocus event of the input field (i.e. when you clicked on the input field to put the cursor in the box and start entering something) but it wasn't really helping me out... I was stuck.

I then decided to write a little test program, I fired up NWDS and created a very simple Portal Application that was basically a JSP page with an iFrame that embedded a simple WDJ application - this was the same scenario as with the standalone website so I expected the same result. When I ran it I was surprised to see that it worked fine, no weird shrinking input field... humm so what was different?

I then ran both scenarios side by side and used the IE developer tools (press F12) to look in more detail. What I noticed was that for my standalone website the browser was using so called "Standards Mode" to render the page, but for the portal component I wrote it was using "Quirks Mode"... I had read a little about Quirks mode before and knew that it had something to do with IE rendering web pages for backward compatibility, but I needed to do a bit more reading. Quite quickly I found a reference to how IE9 determines what rendering mode to use and how it applies that mode to embedded pages (e.g. iFrames). Here are some of the pages I found:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3717932/will-an-iframe-render-in-quirks-mode (thank you stack overflow!)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg558056(v=vs.85).aspx

So it turns out that since IE9 the rendering mode is inherited from the parent frame, so what was happening in my case was that since my standalone website was triggering the browser to use Standards Mode that was then inherited by the WDJ app that was embedded in the page and the WDJ app doesn't like standards mode it needs Quirks mode.

Now that I sort of knew what the problem was I jumped onto SAP Support and searched for any notes related to this. Now at least I knew enough to do a decent search and construct some decent search terms, before I had just been guessing ("Funny Input field error" ). So I searched for "IE9 Quirks iFrame" and BINGO... up came this note:

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1590563

This note described the exact issue and does a good job at it and even provides a work around of sorts. By putting the following tag into the parent page you can tell the browser to use a different rendering mode.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Emulate8">

This of course means that if you really need standards mode for your page this work around doesn't really help. In my case I tried this out and it worked.

Here is a little video that shows the problem and the solution

I wanted to share this with the community in case anyone else has a similar issue and also just to make people aware that browsers have different rendering modes and it is not obvious which mode the browser has selected to render the page. By using the right tools, digging a bit deeper and writing my own test program I managed to work out what was going on, get enough knowledge to ask the right questions and found an SAP note that explained exactly what was happening.

Hopefully as time goes by all the SAP web technologies will support standards mode and we can say goodbye to quirks for good .

Thanks for reading this. Please share your views, opinions and insights below.

Simon @skemp on Twitter

Portal Link Checker Tool

Shilpa Nandigam — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:13:22 GMT

Background: In Portal there are lot of pages which are changed/upgraded on a regular basis. These updates to the portal pages can result in some broken links. Currently there is no mechanism to cross reference links in Portal and identify broken links.

Impact:

Inconvenience to end users
Wasted effort on trouble shooting

Solution:

There is a need for an automated tool which can identify broken links in portal.

Benefits:

The Link Checker tools gives provision to identify the broken links in the entire website
We get lot if issues reporting broken links and causing frustration to the end user. This tool can reduce these incidents and improve user experience and confidence in the portalor any website
Reduced trouble shooting effort by Technical Team for broken link issues
Some tools even offer some extended functionalities like spell checker, check for orphaned pages and errors in HTML code

Objective:

The automated tool should be able to:

Crawl all the portal pages recursively
Identify broken hyper links in portal pages
Pace execution and reduce unnecessary load on the portal
Generate reports on broken links to assist in fixing them

Tools evaluated :

Web Link Validator
DeepTrawl
Link Checker Pro
Screamingfrog
LinkTiger
Xenu’s Link Sleuth

More details on these tools can be found in the Appendix

Summary:

After evaluating all the tools we recommend Web Link Validator,
as this tool has below features:

Identifies broken links across the entire portal
The pace of execution can be configured in the tool minimizing any adverse impact on the system
It is possible to retrieve broken links with the specified page level depth
Ability to generate report on broken links
Ability to Email the generated report