Header Area 
Definition
The part of the portal desktop that is always displayed when you navigate from one page to another. The header area is comprised of the masthead, the tools area, and usually top-level navigation.
Masthead
The masthead contains:
· Company branding, with company name and logo
· Welcome text, usually consisting of a welcome message and your user name
· Language dropdown list, enabling anonymous users to change the portal language.
If the anonymous user logs on to the portal as an authenticated user, the dropdown list disappears and the language changes to the language that was defined for the user.
· Function links:
¡ Help – By default, launches the SAP Help Portal. From there you can navigate to view the current SAP NetWeaver Portal End User Guide for your version of the portal.
Your administrator can change the URL value when editing the masthead items, in which case, you may reach a different site than the SAP Help Portal when clicking this link.
¡ Personalize– Opens in a separate window a page containing personalization options for your portal’s look and functions. For more information, see Personalizing your Portal. This link is not displayed if you are logged on as an anonymous user.
¡ New Session– Opens the current portal in a new browser window, with complete functionality.
¡ Log Off–Terminates your portal session and returns you to either the portal Logon screen, or an external logout page that was associated to the portal. This link is not displayed if you are logged on as an anonymous user.
¡ Log On – Appears only if your portal is configured to support anonymous users. This link lets you log on as an authenticated user. For more information, see Logging On to / Off the Portal.
You may not see all of these features because your portal administrator can hide or display each function by setting its property accordingly in the masthead iView.
Tools
The tools area appears only if you have Knowledge Management (KM) installed with your portal. It contains:
· A Collaboration link to the optional Collaboration Launch Pad
· A Search tool for searching Knowledge Management (KM) data repositories
Top-Level Navigation Bar
The top-level navigation bar is your entry point for navigating the content assigned to your roles.Depending upon administrator-determined settings, it consists of either:
· One level of tabs
¡ The first level tabs are the highest-level folders assigned to you by the portal administrator, and usually reflect the tasks of a specific role.
¡ Clicking a tab displays all subsequent levels of content, including additional roles and folders that are assigned to you, in a tree structure in the Detailed Navigation iView of the navigation panel.
· A first level of tabs and a second level of subtabs
¡ Clicking a tab displays its subtabs.
¡ If your administrator has enabled the hover effect, then pointing to a first level tab displays its subtabs. Note that a portal that has its Accessibility flag turned on will have its hover feature disabled.
¡ The subtab folders compartmentalize the role into manageable tasks. Folder contents can include other folders, pages and iViews.
¡ Clicking a subtab:
§ Displays onwards of the third level of content folders in the Detailed Navigation iView.
§ Launches a service or page that provides relevant content, if there is no third level of content.
Your administrator sets the tabs and subtabs available to you. Your administrator can also choose to configure a portal with no top-level navigation. In such a case, all your content is displayed in the Detailed Navigation iView.
Caching the TLN iView
To improve performance, especially during logon, your administrator may have activated a caching mechanism that stores for a preset amount of time the contents of your top-level navigation iView. In such a case, if your roles are modified, resulting in changes to your tabs and/or subtabs, you may not see the changes until the cache validity period has expired and the top-level navigation iView is refreshed.