This gives you quite some possibilities, because you can provide a central access to content provided by different organizational. If for example your Human Resources (HR) department runs an HR-Portal with Employee Self Services and your Finance Department has a BI 7 system with a BI-Portal that provides some analytical reports on it, you can integrate these two completely unrelated content types into your corporate portal giving your users a central access point so that they do not need to logon to different systems. And this is, after all, the major driver for a portal in the first place.

Of course the decision what content a user can access, is still completely at your fingertips because FPN puts no restrictions on user rights management at all.

In a Federated Portal Network we always speak about two partners, the content provider (where you actually create the content), called the producer, and the consumer of the content (the one people access the provided content on) consequently called the consumer.

Take a look at this picture, to see the general concept of FPN:

As you can see there are three systems here. One central (maybe corporate) portal and two producer systems each with it’s own portal. The central portal consumes content from both producer systems and also provides it’s own content.

An example for this is a Collaboration Portal (with Knowledge Management) that could consume an ESS scenario from an HR-Portal and Analytical applications from a BI-Portal.

Also the BI-System (on the lower left) consumes some Collaboration content from the central portal.

Content vs Portal Federation

You can also see in this picture, that a user is not forced to only use the central portal to access the content. After all, the two producers are portals and therefor provide user access. Wether or not you want to allow your users to access only the consumer or the consumer and the producer portal is totally up to you.

You can also see a second concept in FPN: Portal vs. Content Federation. The difference here is that in Portal Federation there are (at least) two completely different portals that each provide parts of their content to the other portal and the users can logon to each of the portals. In Content Federation there is one central portal that consumes content from one or more producer portals providing a central access. 

Content Sharing Modes

At the moment there are four different variants on how content can be provided and consumed in a portal.

1. Remote Role Assignment
2. Remote Delta Links
3. Remote Application Integration (for BI Content)
4. WSRP – Web Services for Remote Portlets

Remote Role Assignment

With RRA – the earliest available content sharing mode, you create the complete content on the so called producer portal and then just assign users on the consumer to the roles (which of course in turn contain the pages, worksets, iViews and so on). 

Remote Delta Links

With RDL you create the pages, iViews or worksets on the producer and then in the consumer create the roles and using a delta link to include the remote content from the producer in this role on the consumer. Thats the reason why it’s called Remote Delta Link.

Remote Application Integration

This is the newest content sharing method and it’s currently only available for BI applications. The idea behind RAI is to move the content administration from the producer to the consumer. This means you create the iView on the consumer but integrate applications (that is BI apps) from the producer BI system.

Web Services for Remote Portlets
WSRP is a compatibility content sharing mode – if you accept such a strange word crafting by me.

What I mean with this is, that WSRP is the only standards based content sharing mode provide by nearly all software vendors. In theory it should give you the possibility to integrate non-SAP applications in an SAP iView on the NetWeaver portal or vice versa making use of an SAP application on a non-SAP portal.

But, before you excitedly jump on this idea to e.g. integrate your SAP ESS scenario in an iFrame on MS Sharepoint Portal server, be warned, it is far from being complete!

You would definitely have to testrun ANY application to see if this can really work for you.

HTTP-Connection and packet flow

There is one last thing I’d like to mention, because I was asked it so many times by clients, and that is the way a client accesses the portals involved in an FPN.

A lot of customers came up to me with this question: Can I use an FPN to “hide” my producer portal(e.g. my HR-Portal) from the client by providing access to it’s content only through a central consumer portal???

The short answer is NO. The client always, at some point in the communication, also accesses the producer portal! The long answer is this. In content sharing mode WSRP, the consumer portal acts actually like some kind of a proxy by completely consuming the provided application and providing it on it’s own to the client. But keep in mind what I said earlier about this content sharing mode.

If you want to hide the existence of a producer portal, say as a some security measure, then the only valid option, at the moment at least, is to place a reverse proxy in front of your whole portal installation landscape and make all clients only connect to the reverse proxy. This will be the topic in a different blog.

The Wiki-Entry
In this just released wiki entry on SDN you find a step by step guide on what to do to setup an FPN between two SAP NetWeaver Portal 7 systems and then use Remote Role Assignment to consume content on the consumer from the producer.

You can find it here: Implementing a Federated Portal Network on SAP NetWeaver…

Have fun,

   Christian Guenther

As you may know when you upgrade your system from 4.7 ERP to ERP 6, quite a lot of things change. First of all the whole architecture of the Web Application Server 7.0 (the basis for ERP 6), as compared to the web Application Server 6.20 (the one from 4.7 ERP), has changed dramatically. This involves areas like the stack of components, the patch management and also of course interfaces provided by the AS.

Take a look at these two pictures. I know they are very rough, but they might give you a glimpse on what has changed from a patch management point of view, that is in the way one applies patches or adds new functionality – I’m referring to the Enhancement Packages about which I’d like to talk in a different Blog (link is going to be added soon).

SAP 4.7 ERP architecture

SAP ERP 6 architecture

But it’s not only in the architecture of the Web Application Server, the whole user interface area also has undergone major changes – as an example take the introduction of Web Dynpro (first for Java and then for ABAP) as a mid-range replacement for BSP.

Moreover, complete new ideas such as how to create UI’s or design processes were brought into the NetWeaver application server. I guess I will have to write a lot of Blogs just to tackle all this new things, but right now, I just want you to get this point: A lot of things have changed and that means, you can’t go on like you used to but have to do something. What that is? I will try to answer this in this blog-series.

Challenges you face

The bottom line of this introductional part of my blog series is this: Implementing HCM with ESS is not only a technical upgrade of your HR system. It’s actually a major change in the architecture, landscape and technology used by your company where you need to adapt to.

Common questions you should ask yourself:

• Do you have any Java knowhow in your company?
• Does your SAP Basis group know how to implement, run and operate an SAP NetWeaver system landscape consisting of ABAP and Java colmponents?
• Is your backup/restore strategy fit for the challenges/changes that come with WebAS Java?
• Do your application developers know how to extend, create, or at least customize Java based solutions provided by SAP?
• Is your organization setup to govern user rights and roles management in a heterogenous environment consisting of ABAP and Java components?

If you happen to answer no to any of these questions, read the next articles of this Blog.

So far,

Christian Guenther

If you got some feedback lately about a ugly error in your blogs sidebar, go get the update and don’t forget to deactivate it first before replacing the files.

PS: I recently updated the widget to WordPress 2.5, did you noticed? Abesh is probably right and I should submit it to the WP Plugin databse.

To install close FF, locate your profile directory and copy TwitterFox.jar to [profiledir]\extensions\twitternotifier@naan.net\chrome\

The fix will remove the ability for TwitterFox to locate a tab, that has the URL already opened but I can easily live without that.

The author is informed and we will hopefully see an official update shortly.

Update: After logging out/logging in everything seems to be fine again.

My blog is running on WordPress. Because I didn’t had any experience with PHP I found the del.icio.us widget by Automattic, Inc. very useful as a basic example for a plugin including how to build the widget configuration view. Frank Bueldges work on WP-RSSImport fitted well for reading the blog feed. Nigel James pointed me to curl which did a great job fetching a SDN Business Card related website to parse it for the name and total number of points.

The widget is called SDN Contributor and now available as version 1.0 and you can see it running on my new blog. I’ve set up a wiki page with all further information like installation instructions and download location. If you’re a SDN member and have a WordPress blog under your own control, give it a try.

1. If you have your own del.icio.us account, I would prefer you add me to your del.icio.us network. You will get a RSS feed for the bookmarks of all the people in your network. And people in your network will see that you added them and will get a chance to add you back to their network.
2. Consume my del.icio.us feed in your preferred feed reader.
3. My bookmarks are still available as a widget in my blog.

“We are about to go to a conference and spend a small fortune on fees, food, hotels and travel. What if you took a small portion of what you are going to spend on TechEd and made some contribution to help someone break out of poverty?”

The post got a lot of feedback in the comments and Craig and Dennis Howlett wrote about it to support the idea.

There will be over 1000 attendees at TechEd this year, spending up to 2500$ just for entry fee and an another couple of bucks for hotel and expenses. If only a small amount of this could go into charity, this could make a big difference and help a lot of people who really need it. I will do my best to support whatever may come out of this and I hope you will think about it too.

Update: Dennis Howlett commented on the efforts that James Governor and RedMonk is planning on their community day track at TechEd. Great first step!

“We have had an additional opening for the SDN Community sessions at SAP TechEd ’07 Munich, and your session was the next one in line from the voting. Your session “Unit Tests for Enterprise Portal Applications” is now an approved SDN Community session for Munich.”

Looks like someone didn’t took his chance and that would be my ticket to Munich. Fine for me. The final voting results should be up on SDN at any time today. I know for sure that Chris got an approval for both of his sessions so he will be in Munich too.