The New Portal Capabilities in SAP NetWeaver 7.3

In this section you find information on the portal capabilities in the new SAP NetWeaver release SAP NetWeaver 7.3, which is generally available since May 30, 2011. This new release introduces the new portal capabilities and various improvements in the area of business user empowerment and productivity, usability and collaboration, content integration and management as well as an overall reduction of the total cost of ownership (performance and administration effort).

In the following paragraphs you find a description of the main areas of innovations in SAP NetWeaver 7.3 and you find links to the documentation and demos:

Overview Information

Overview information on the portal capabilities in SAP NetWeaver 7.3 can be found in the following documents:

Unified Access to Applications and Processes

• Simplified portal content creation and maintenance
• Advanced wizards for role upload, content creation and transport
• Simplified system landscape management and directory synchronization
• Process desk provides access to necessary end-user functionality (alerts, notifications, workitems) in central Universal Worklist.
• New state-of-the-art default ajax framework page
• Unified transport and change recording for portal content through integration with the SAP Change and Transport System (CTS+).
• Customized error pages and administration traceability
• Advanced caching and memory consumption capabilities

For more information see the presentation: SAP NetWeaver Portal: Unified Access to Application and Processes. For information on the new ajax framework page see this presentation: Modern User Experience with the New AJAX Framework.

Managing and Mashing Up Portal Pages with Web Page Composer

• Intuitive run time authoring environment
• Staging area for live and draft content
• Time-based publication & recall of pages
• Approval workflow for pages
• Interactive (mashup) portal pages using connections
• Searching & tagging pages
• Easy integration and re-use of existing portal content
• Advanced runtime capabilities
• Flexible permission model for delegation
• Customization options

For more information see the SAP NetWeaver Portal: Web Page Composer Overview Presentation. See also the Web Content Management: Web Page Composer in SAP NetWeaver Portal.

Collaborate in Enterprise Workspaces

SAP NetWeaver Portal, enterprise workspaces are an add-on to SAP NetWeaver Portal. They are intended to provide a flexible, intuitive environment on top of the SAP NetWeaver Portal, which allows business users to integrate, organize and use various content such as applications, reports, dashboards, web content and documents either from SAP or Non-SAP systems.

For more information see this SCN overview document on Enterprise Workspaces.

Building Communities with Wikis and Forums

Wikis and forums provide a framework to easily share and contribute knowledge and information in an intuitive way within the company by giving employees, customers, suppliers and partners a framework to collaborative writing and help to save time by making ideas available, sharing knowledge and managing related information. Forums are already available since SAP NetWeaver 7.0 SPS 12 and the SAP NetWeaver 7.3 release contains some new functions. The wiki application is new in SAP NetWeaver 7.3 and is not available in SAP NetWeaver 7.0.

Key Capabilities:

• Integral part of SAP NetWeaver Portal

The SAP Portal Content and Site Management by OpenText is a new offering based on SAP NetWeaver 7.3. It helps you streamline content management processes by integrating content with the workflows and resources available in the SAP NetWeaver Portal component. It improves the efficiency of content creation, management, and storage processes while supporting user collaboration and communication.

For more information, see this SCN overview document on SAP Portal Content and Site Management by OpenText.

• TCO improvements
• Archiving
• Multiple upload
• New risk analysis and housekeeping reports
• Hot Configurable Components
• ACL indexing

For more information on the new features in SAP NetWeaver 7.3, see the presentation Overview Knowledge Management.

Mobile Enablement

For more information see this SCN overview document.

Portal Landscape Interoperability and Openness

• Support of JSR 168/ 286, WSRP 1.0
• Support of SAML 1.0 and 2.0
• Java EE 5 and Java SE 6 support
• Integration of SAP BusinessObjects reports via the Portal Integration Kit
• Exposing the portal navigation structure via a dedicated Web Service
• Advanced capabilities for consuming SAP application into 3rd party portals

Complementary Partner Solutions

• Portal Content Model and Directory
• Navigation Connectors / Web Service
• KM Repository Manager
• JSP Tag Library and Ajax LShape-API
• Connectors for UWL, Collaboration Services
• JSR 168, 286, WSRP
• Java APIs

Examples:

• SAP Extended ECM by Open Text
• Business Package for Confluence Wiki by HLP
• MOSS Integrator & easyWCM by btexx
• Conetweaversuite by CONET
• Pirobase CMS for SAP Portal by imperia
• Click Stream - SAP Portal Analytics by Sweetlets

You can find more information on SAP EcoHub.

Demos

• Demo on Web Page Composer: you can see how easy you can create, edit and publish web pages in the Portal.

See the SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.3 Blogs SDN page.

Documentation, Release Notes and How-To Guides

For more detailed information see SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.3: Documentation and Guides.

For more information see the wiki overview presentation and the forum overview presentation. More information see also Collaboration in SAP NetWeaver Portal. Portal Content and Site Management by OpenText.