What do we really need SAP portal for?

[Former Member]

Hi,

We already have a portal platform for intranet (not SAP based). I am trying to assess what I need SAP portal for. Looking at what we are likely to deliver, I can only spot 3 requirements for SAP Portal. Can someone let me know what else i have missed?

SAP things we want to do:

- SSO. SAP Portal not required. Can access AD using NTLM

- Web Applications. Again SAP Portal not required. We can write web dynrpos or expose web services using the web server in SAP ERP or CRM.

- Adobe E-forms. Again SAP portal not required as it can be rendered within SAP web server

- ESS/MSS. Yes, SAP portal required. Plus any other business packages we might want to use in the future

- Universal worklist. Yes, SAP Portal required

- Guided Procedures. Yes, SAP Portal required

- Enterprise search. SAP portal Not required

- Mobile. Blackberry/smartphone support. SAP Portal not required.

- BW web reports. SAP portal not required.

- Visual Composer. Not sure. Do we need SAP portal for this???

- Anything else??

Looking forward to your help.

[Former Member]

Hi KC,

Lots of great information in these answers (why are you not giving them any 'points'?). There are two short answers to your question:

a) You HAVE to use the portal since BW (7.x) does no longer use the old Web Application Server (6.4) and web rendering is done in the portal (if you want reports on the web).

b) Security features of NW/BI 7.x are on the portal..

The rest of the posts are great (and accurate) also.

Dr. Berg

[Former Member]

If you are not using SAP backend systems then having SAP portal doesn't make much sense.

[Former Member]

Yes, we have SAP ERP and CRM

[Former Member]

If you and your organization are already satisfied with the offering of your current portal then you might not need to migrate the portal. You could use the federation features which most portals offer to integrate content from SAP into your portal and have the best of both worlds.

Thanks,

GLM

[Former Member]

Yes, the challenge is to combine the two and make them work together and transition seamlessly. Using the federated features from SAP Portal can help. We will have to try that and see how well ESS/MSS, UWL, etc will surface in our portal platform.

[Former Member]

Hello buddy,

The arguments which you have mentioned surely hold true and the same arguments might hold true for any portal not just sap EP. Portal in general gives the end user unified access which is role based which can be controlled centrally. I will reiterate through the points which you have mentioned to give my insight.

- SSO - Now this is a feature which used NTLM to authenticate the logged in user. Good to have while implementing an intranet in any organization

- Web Applications - You can surely develop dynpros, but to distribute it using roles you will either have to build the logic in dynpro or use the roles framework delivere dby the portal

- ESS/MSS. Yes, SAP portal required. Plus any other business packages we might want to use in the future

- Visual Composer. - You can always run the apps developed in visual composer without a portal, it will run on the WAS. But how would you distribute the URL's of various application?

Hope what i have mentioned helps.

Thanks,

GLM

[Former Member]

Hi GLM,

Thanks for the quick reply. We already have a portal platform. We are not keen to replace it with EP. So it is a case of trying to find out what we need EP for. And only use EP where it is absolutely required. Eg: UWL, ESS/MSS, etc.

Good point about the roles. I guess we would need to find another way to map SAP roles in our portal system and distribute the webdynpros/VC by these roles. Thanks for that. Are there any other SAP functionalities that need SAP portal?

Cheers,

KC

[Former Member]

The other thing which comes to my mind is the KM / Collaboration platform. It offers a good way to orgainize your data online. If you look forward to the NW 7.2 release you will also have collaboration spaces which will feature wikis if you would be looking for a feature like that.

SAP NW Portal also allows you to link together your transactional systems ECC, SRM, CRM, BI and also acts like the ticket issuer for SSO for those systems. Not sure how you would be able to link your transactional systems with your current portal platform?

Would like to hear your experience integrating SAP application with anther platform, do share it.

Thanks,

GLM

[former_member206159]

In addition to the above SAP Portal is more compatible and easy to integrate other SAP systems when compare to other portals.

There are other inbuilt functionality like KM, collaobration services, instant messaging, document subscription, taxonomies, classification, East content or news publishing, xmlform builder etc....

Raghu

[Former Member]

Our current portal platform has collaboration features, web 2.0 technologies and a very strong content management capability. This is why we are keen to keep using it. So it is a bit hard to justify a complete migration to EP.

I have read that SSO can work without using SAP Portal to issue login tickets. All applications (SAP and non SAP) can access Microsoftu2019s active directory using NTLM to get authentication info.