SAP NetWeaver Portal Features

SAP NetWeaver Portal offers a single point of access to SAP and non-SAP information sources, enterprise applications, information repositories, databases, and services inside and outside the organization—all integrated into a single user experience. It provides you with the tools to manage and analyze this knowledge and to share and collaborate on the basis of it. With its role-based content an ersonalization features, SAP NetWeaver Portal enables users—from employees and customers to partners and suppliers—to focus exclusively on data relevant to daily decision-making processes. As a unified interface to these applications, the SAP NetWeaver Portal helps each user quickly access the right resources and be as productive as possible.

SAP NetWeaver Portal

This section focuses on introducing the important and more commonly used features of SAP NetWeaver Portal. We introduce the basic concepts without going into too much detail in this chapter. At the end of this section, you will have a feel for what SAP NetWeaver Portal is all about and how it fits into the overall SAP NetWeaver strategy. Subsequent chapters of this book will then focus on the specific topics and go into the details of implementing each feature.

The portal platform runs on SAP Web Application Server’s (hereafter referred to a AS Java) Java EE stack and is deployed as a Java EE application. The portal platform consists of the following:

Portal framework

The portal framework is a virtual environment that enables the portal as development and runtime environments. Applications that run on the portal—both out-of-the-box and custom applications, and both business and portal-related applications—are developed with various technologies such as Portal Developmen it (PDK) components, Web Dynpro, Visual Composer, Web Page Composer, Business Server Pages (BSPs), and so on.

The portal framework provides a set of services to enable existing SAP and non- SAP business applications to be integrated into the portal, as well as to build new applications. Such services include navigation, object-based navigation, Portal Content Directory (PCD) services, and so on:

Database

The portal stores data required by the portal at runtime in the same databas used by AS Java. All of the system configurations as well as custom configurations are stored in this database. This database can also be used for storing custom application-specific data.

EE User persistence store

User persistence store is the storage area containing information about users, such as directory servers. This system works with the mechanism that implements security systems for authentication and authorization, the User Management Engine (UME), which is an SAP proprietary mechanism that allows access to various content using