How to Buy a Portal?

[Former Member]

Hello,

first to my situation: I am working for a midcap IT Company as SAP Portal Consultant. My task is to Developing Java programms (iViews, Portal Services) for the SAP Portal and do all technical Tasks regarding the Portal (Security Concept, Administration). Now i want to build a sapportal for my own Internet Page (with EP6.0 when it is aviable). I want to build a Portal with knowledge management focus for me and some kollegues and Friends who are working in SAP Java developing. I think it is very usefull. Because i can access all my documents from the every place in the world, we have a very powerfull full text search engine, and, and, and. So i want to buy a Portal license for myself. I want to make it on a server at home and access it via Internet (DSL Flat rate with DynDNS).

But SAP want sell me one License (i don't need support!). The answer from the sales team was that they have "many thousand euros" (direct speech minimum volume :-(. For my this is in the moment not a problem, but i see some problems with this in the futere for the Development Community.

When i read the Presentations about the EP 6.0 i see that the Development envroyment is a part of the portal.

And now?

All freelancers and small cap IT-Companys can not develope portal content, because they cant buy a portal. I can only develope software when i have access to a portal! Normaly i am programming in my homeoffice or in the hotel (becaus it is much more silence there). But without a portal at home, how can i do this?

I think you (SAP) must think about to sell a non supportet Lizenz to get a bigger and satisfied developer community. Developing at home it is very important for a developer (in my opinion).

Best Regards,

Patrick Hoefer

[htammen]

Hi,

I would like to come back to Patricks first suggestion: Low cost portal without support.

I´m an independent IT-consultant and work in the field of portals for more than one year now. The EP looks very good to me and I would like to do more development for this. Unfortunatly I cannot show my work to customers or interested people who could get customers because of the price policy of SAP.

What I would like to do is developing various iViews and deploy them to my own EP that should be available via DSL and DynDNS. This way I would have the possibility to show people what I AND the SAP portal are able to do.

Because of the actual situation I go the following way at the moment:

- Developing portlets using JSR-168 (Java Portlet specification).

- Running an open source portal that is free of charge.

- Waiting for EP that they support JSR-168.

The drawback of this solution is that I have to work with and spend time on more than one portal and the portlets I develop using JSR-168 are not so powerful than the EP iViews because there has to be done a lot to the portlet specification in the future. The specification does not support all the features of the EP framework.

Another drawback is the difficulty to convince customers bying SAP EP when the portlets are also running on an open source portal. This is more a drawback to SAP but also to me because I could develop more powerful iViews and integrate them better into EP. Furthermore I could lead non - SAP customers to SAP products this way.

All-in-all it could be a win-win situation.

So, I would extremely welcome a more flexible sales policy that supports a bit more the low budget developers.

The succes of the various open source projects should have showed SAP that this could be an advantage for all parties.

Additionaly I would remark that also big companies can get under pressure from the open source community (look at Linux and Windows). Beside the open source portal solutions there are already some open source ERP´s available that are not real competitors to SAP yet but the open source community is growing fast and such solutions can be interesting especially for SMB customers.

Hope someone from SAP reads this.

Helmut

[Oliver_S]

dont worry David or Patrick,

There is already a Developer Version for EP60. But due to internal restrictions, so far only available for rampup customers. In the future I will not agree again to this restriction and beta releases will also be available for Developer (but no support surely).

The EP60 PDK is reastricted to 3 users for a unlimeted time and will be available with SP2, which means End of October.

Sorry about that.

Oliver

[Former Member]

Hi Patrick,

for now (officialy) you have PDK (EP 5) that is running on Tomcat server for download at iviewstudio.com freely available. For 6.0, PDK will be a part of the full blown portal (anyway, you'll need Eclipse and a few plugins), and I don't know if it will be available for public, but I suppose it will, because of the SAP policy to give more broader developer community chance to develop Portal functionality.

BR, Ivan.

[Former Member]

Hi Ivan,

in the moment i develope with Eclipse and test and debug in the Tomcat PDK.

The reasen for my question was the problem to get the EP 6.0 and the presentation about the Portal ver. 6.0. There was the hint that development envroyment in ver. 6.0 is include in the portal - i think this means that we have no more Tomcat portal ( and there comes a patch for the SAPJ2EE that it learns remote debugging in the nearly future.)

I hope the Portal in ver. 6.0 was for Development (and educational use) free.

Best Regards,

Patrick

[Former Member]

Hi Patrick,

You are correct regarding EP 6.0. The PDK for EP 6.0 is a business

package. There is no light-weight development environment for EP 6.0.

In addition to the licensing issue, keep in mind that you will need a very

powerful laptop to run a full-blown EP in order to develop in your hotel room.

You should address these concerns to the EP 6.0 team. Are you able

to access the contact list for EP on the SAP Service Marketplace?

Best Regards,

Jeremiah

[Former Member]

Hi Jeremiah,

we see us in many Threads

I write to the SAP Portal team regarding my request and keep you Informed in this thread.

Best Regards,

Patrick