EP and/or Sharepoint?

[Former Member]

Good evening, this is my first post here but will be visiting much more often and will hopefully be able to share some of what we learn in our company. We are on 4.6C Oil & Gas for the OLTP system and BW 3.5 (WAS 6.40 Netweaver) for OLAP. We are implementing a Sharepoint architecture (including K2 for workflow and Meridio for document management) as a corporate portal, we are an MS shop on the desktop including email. There is a ton of overlap with this suite of products and those of SAP Enterprise Portals (eventing, knowledge management, etc.). We continue to evaluate Enterprise Portals since licensing is not a concern and we already have a huge investment in SAP as well. We prefer package software with the integration over custom development when possible. After much research and attending the Enterprise Portals seminar in Orlando last week I keep coming back to the question: why do we need two portals? My manager showed this in practice by linking a dynamic BW 3.5 web report (hosted on a Netweaver WAS 6.40 without Enterprise Portals) into our test Sharepoint team site, everything worked just fine except for the single sign-on issue which should be fixable. So it seems to me that we only need ITS/WAS 6.20 for a version 4.7 or older system, or WAS 6.40 in the Netweaver world, then one could still use Sharepoint as the corporate portal without ever installing Enterprise Portals? Any thoughts or ideas on direction from here? I will share what we find out as we go along if anyone is interested.

Regards,

Shannon

Message was edited by: Shannon Giacomo

Found what I was looking for at https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/servlet/prt/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/9e891378-0601-0010-5386-a33...

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Shannon

The single most important reason is single sign on.

Particularly if you have RRI (jumping from BW to R/3) without maintaining trust relationships you can easily navigate to R/3 with single sign on. I'm not sure that sharepoint will have single sign-on option.

If your WEB query is stateful then you have to write logic to kill the HTTP session it creats in BW system, whereas in portal this is automatically handled by DSM terminator.

These are the ones just came to my mind , but there might be more.

Thanks&Regards

PRadeep

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

You could also publish reports to the portal and then use all of the collaboration features in the portal to discuss those reports. There is also a web based tool for creating reports.

There is also the abilility to use Visual Composer if you use the portal.

There is a role that deals with all of the BW integration in the portal that comes standard with the portal. As licensing isn't much of an issue I would encourage you to setup a sandbox.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks all. We are going to pursue standing up a Sandbox, although we have had several issues with the install on AIX UNIX. I will keep you all updated with any new things we discover.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I did a SR1 install on AIX 5.2. Feel free to look up my business card and contact me if you need help.

[Former Member]

I am posting in this thread becuase we are facing similar situation in our organization, and I hope you could help me to address our issue.

I believe that there is quite some overlap between SAP Enterprise Portal and Office Sharepoint 2007 or Sharepoint Services. A lot of managers in our organization like to get Sharepoint. Our top management already decided to get SAP ERP. We already got SAP Portal also.

I hope you could let me know from your experience the result of implementing both products. Also, how I can approach this matter and provide my recommendation.

This is because our management have formed a committee to study our needs for software and applications, and put a Standard to control this area. If our business requirements for Document Sharing and Team Collaboration could be satisfied by SAP Portal and related products, then why we have to deploy Sharepoint ?

Appreciate your reply.

Tarek.