Funny you should ask this....the project I just rolled-off was a BPM blueprint project for what is to be SAP's BPM vision. From your post, I think you're concerned more with BPM than Workflow. But here I go at trying to answer both...
(1) Workflow via the portal IS the idea. Check out all documentation you can find about the Universal Worklist (UWL). That is "workflow central" of the portal.
(2) To your second (underlying?) question, yes, the portal is positioned to be the human interface/presentation layer on top of *BPM. SAP is still a way off with a true BPM solution but getting very close with XI 3.0. It features a process modler that is pretty sweet! Do searches here for "XI" and "BPM" and you will find some really good info.
*for those wondering, what we are talking about is "Business Process Managment". SAP is very good at tracking a single business process...say for instance "customer credit check". That is a fairly easy process. But let's take it up a notch...."customer credit check" may be but one part of the "making the deal" overall process along with "create/edit customer", "create/edit contact", "create quote", "create order", etc. What BPM tries to achieve is managing the whole, overall process. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to get a view of exactly what, how many, etc is at any point along the process? A lot of the coming NW04 products will bring companies closer to this level.....XI, MDM, EP, etc are all keys to this.
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.