SAP Enterprise Portal: Getting Started

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Getting Started

SAP Enterprise Portal (formerly known as SAP NetWeaver Portal) offers a single point of access to SAP and non-SAP information sources, enterprise applications, information repositories, databases, and services inside and outside your organization - all integrated in a single user experience. SAP Enterprise Portal also provides pre-assembled content bundled as business packages for completing business tasks.

Portal in General

SAP Enterprise Portal plays a key role in SAP’s user interaction strategy to increase people’s productivity through innovative solutions. SAP Portal portfolio delivers a flexible SAP HANA-based, enterprise-wide UI aggregation hub for on-premises and cloud scenarios with innovative user experience. SAP HANA Cloud Portal is the new flexibe cloud-based solution for building attractive business sites and extending on-premises and cloud scenarios. SAP Fiori LaunchPad integrated into SAP Enterprise Portal facilitates access to SAP Fiori applications, documents and reports and offers a multi-channel, web-based aggregation point.

SAP Enterprise 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. To get more details, see the following assets:

• SAP Portal 7.5: highlights
• Portal 7.4 Overview and Roadmap
• Solution in Brief
• Portal Portfolio Movie

Here are some details of of the Portal portfolio:

SAP Fiori integration into SAP Enterprise Portal

SAP Fiori launchpad running on the SAP Enterprise Portal is a key milestone in aligning the SAP UI Clients (Fiori launchpad, Portal, NWBC) with the Fiori UX design. The new Fiori launchpad on the SAP Enterprise Portal is the recommended approach for consuming the SAP Portal on mobile devices.

Scenarios for Fiori integration into SAP Enterprise Portal

• Integration of SAP Fiori applications (via SAP Fiori iView and/or remote catalog consumption)
• SAP Fiori launchpad as alternative user experience (new Fiori Framework Page, theme and browser support)

The Fiori integration is available since SAP Enterprise Portal 7.4 SP8 and 7.31 SP13

SAP HANA Cloud Portal

SAP HANA Cloud Portal is the name for a new cloud-based portal solution that delivers easy site creation and social consumption at end user level, while leveraging SAP’s differentiating assets: in-memory computing, business applications and installed base. 

SAP HANA Cloud Portal is based on SAP HANA Cloud platform for Java-based applications. This solution provides out-of-the-box secure and accelerated integration with customers’ on-premise system, allowing for content reuse. SAP Cloud Platform and SAP HANA - together with SAP Gateway - provide the means for developing new innovative applications that are deployed to the cloud and easily embedded into the sites.

Portal Content and Knowledge Management

The SAP Portal Content Management by OpenText is a new Document Management offering embedded into SAP Enterprise Portal and Enterprise Workspaces. It helps you streamline content management processes by integrating content with the workflows and resources available in the SAP NetWeaver Portal component.

Knowledge Management (KM) is the basic content services within SAP Enterprise Portal. It provides the basic capabilities that customers need to run their scenarios as well as extension framework for custom implementations.

The Web Content Management capabilities are provided by Web Page Composer (WPC). This tool enables your business users to manage most of the business-relevant WCM tasks (for example creating and updating web sites, pages, and content) in an easy and effective way without the involvement of administrators or portal experts. The Web Page Composer (WPC) enables managed content scenarios for key users from the line of business to easily create and mash up enriched portal pages, blending business applications and user-generated content using intuitive authoring services.

Collaboration and Social

The collaboration capabilities of SAP Enterprise Portal enable individual users and teams to communicate and collaborate within their business processes and access shared data in Enterprise Workspaces. Business users can now use drag-and-drop functionality to create enterprise workspaces inside the SAP Portal component. As shareable virtual environments, these workspaces increase productivity and collaboration. Most enterprise portals lack the end-user flexibility offered by consumer-oriented Web portals such as iGoogle or My Yahoo! Having grown accustomed to this level of flexibility as consumers, workers now demand the same from their enterprise portals. Enterprise workspaces – an optional extension to the SAP Enterprise Portal component – can help.

Basic people-collaboration solutions such as forums, wikis and collaboration rooms are integrated with SAP Enterprise Portal. Those capabilities are included in the portal offering and require no additional licenses. SAP will continue to offer its existing collaboration capabilities so that customers are not forced to replace their solutions, but those scenarios will be maintained in their current state.

Portal Administration and Development and Predefined Content 

To make a portal useful to all the people it seeks to serve, it must not only provide a platform, but also content designed specifically to serve users in various industries and business areas. SAP provides such pre-assembled content bundled as Business packages for completing business tasks.

In essence, the business packages provide out-of-the-box portal applications that can be easily modified to suit a customer's needs. If you would like to learn how to develop your own portal applications, see Developing for SAP NetWeaver Portal.

SAP Portal Releases on SCN

The information on the SCN pages on SAP Enterprise Portal (formerly known as SAP NetWeaver Portal) refer to the Portal releases based on SAP NetWeaver 7.0 and the new release SAP NetWeaver 7.3 and 7.4.

See also the following links for overview information:

What is New in SAP Enterprise Portal 7.3?

SAP Enterprise Portal 7.4 Overview