Overview of Portal Components 

 

The Enterprise Portal consists of the following components:

·       Portal Server

·       Knowledge Management

·       Unification Server (only available for users with a unification license)

On the client side the Enterprise Portal is displayed in a standard browser. For information on which browsers are supported, see the Platform Availability Matrix on the SAP Service Marketplace. Users do not have to install any additional components to use the Enterprise Portal, with the exception of the SAP GUI for Windows if they are using SAP transactions in the portal that are displayed in the SAP GUI for Windows. The browser communicates with the Portal Server via HTTP or HTTPS requests.

In the backend, you can connect applications, systems, unstructured and structured data to the Enterprise Portal.

All of these different parts are illustrated in the following diagram:

In the Portal Server, the iViewServer provides a runtime environment for both Java-based and .NET iViews. At runtime it fetches the content of iViews based on client requests. Content metadata and user data is stored in the persistence layer. For iViews that allow hyperrelational navigation with the iPanel, the information on how to relate one set of data to another is retrieved from the Unification Server and unifiers.

The Page Builder assembles the portal pages that are then displayed in the Enterprise Portal. The Web Server is in charge of surfacing all HTML data to the client (Web browser). The browser displays the pages, getting the output for each iView from the iViewServer.

The Knowledge Management component offers a range of iViews providing services for managing unstructured information across multiple repositories, for automatically classifying incoming documents, and fuzzy searching across heterogeneous repositories. All these iViews are Java iViews that run on the iViewServer using the API of the Java servlet engine.

The Unification Server enables your Portal for Drag&Relate (hyperrelational navigation). This means that you can relate business data across applications and/or databases for which you have installed a unifier on your Unification Server. Moreover the Unification Server provides functions to display data from the installed database unifiers.

Which databases a company can connect to depends on the unifiers that are installed on the Unification Server. The Unification Server comes with a built-in database unifier and the possibility of installing additional unifiers for enterprise applications from software vendors such as Oracle and Baan, and for SAP applications such as BW and R/3.