Workflow

Setting Up an External-Facing Portal

• Define User Profiles: Set up the portal to accept anonymous users, and define the users and groups to which anonymous and self-registered users are mapped.

  For more information about setting up the portal to allow anonymous users, see Using Anonymous Logon to Access the Portal .

  For more information about assigning self-registered users to specific groups, see Self-Registration .

• Create and Assign Content to Anonymous/Self-Registered Users: Select the content to be accessed by anonymous and self-registered users, and then assign these users to the content.

  For more information about assigning users and groups to roles, see Assigning Portal Roles to Users and Groups .

  For more information about creating content, see Content Administration .

• Configure the Navigation Cache: To improve performance, the portal caches navigation hierarchies and nodes, so that the portal can retrieve the hierarchy from the cache instead of creating it for each request.

  By default, caching is turned off. After you set up and test the portal, turn on and configure caching by setting the appropriate parameters.

  For more information, see Caching Navigation Nodes .

• Create/Modify Navigation iViews: Create your own navigation iViews, or modify the default light navigation iViews to fit your company's needs. You can use the Navigation tag library to build JSP-based navigation iViews.

  For more information, see Creating Navigation iViews .

• Modify the Light Framework Page: Replace the navigation iViews in the light framework page with your customized navigation iViews.

  For more information about modifying a framework page, see Understanding Framework Pages .

• Customize Styles in the Theme Editor (optional): The Theme Editor now includes styles that are used in the default light navigation iViews.

  For more information about the Theme Editor, see Working with Portal Themes .

• Assign the Light Framework Page to Users/Groups/Roles: Using desktop display rules, assign the light framework page to anonymous and self-registered users, as well as other users who need it.

  Display rules enable administrators to assign different desktops to different users or groups of users. Desktops are combinations of framework pages and themes.

  You can assign desktops based on the URL alias, role, or group, or the user's network bandwidth.

  The following rules are needed:

  • Light Desktop: By default, all users receive the default desktop, which includes the default framework page. Create a rule that provides the light desktop to users who need it.

    For example, you could create a rule that provides the light desktop for anyone who accesses the portal with the light alias, as in http://myServer:50000/irj/portal/light .

  • Default Desktop: Create a rule that provides the default desktop to users who need it.

    For example, you could create a rule that provides the default desktop for anyone who accesses the portal with the default alias, as in http://myServer:50000/irj/portal/default . You could also create a rule that provides the default desktop for anyone in a specific group.

  For more information about desktop display rules, see Understanding Portal Display Rules .

Creating Content for an External-Facing Portal

• Develop Light Content Applications: Develop additional applications that do not consume many resources and are suitable for an external-facing portal.

  For guidelines on developing content applications suitable for an external-facing portal, see Content Guidelines .

  For more information about developing applications for the portal, see Developing Applications for the Portal in the SAP NetWeaver Developer's Guide .

• Create and Assign Light Content: From the newly developed light content applications, package the content into roles, pages, and iViews, and assign this content to anonymous and self-registered users.

  For more information about creating content, see Content Administration .

  For more information about assigning users and groups to roles, see Assigning Portal Roles to Users and Groups .

Maintaining an External-Facing Portal

• Create Quick Links: Create quick links, or shortcuts for content in the external facing portal, so users can easily navigate to the content.

  For example, you may have a page of news. Define the quick link News for this page so users can simply type http://myHost:50000/irj/portal/News to access the content.

  For more information, see Navigation with Quick Links .

• Check and Clear the Navigation Cache: You can enable/disable navigation caching, check what navigation objects are cached, and clear the cache when needed.

  For more information, see Caching Navigation Nodes .

• Check Short URLs: You can enable/disable short URLs and check the list of short URLs.

  For more information, see Navigation with Short URLs .

• Monitor Performance and Usage: The portal's Portal Activity Report feature enables you to check who logged in and what content was viewed. This tool is designed to provide information on anonymous users, as well as details about groups of users, such as all self-registered users.

  For more information about the Portal Activity Report feature, see Portal Activity Report .

  For information on additional portal monitoring tools, see Monitoring .

Other Tasks

• Navigation Connectors: If your portal includes custom navigation connectors, the connectors should support the navigation cache and quick links features. For more information about navigation connectors, see Creating Navigation Connectors in the Portal Developer Guide .

• Search Engine Indexing: You can configure the external-facing portal to allow search engines to crawl and index portal pages. See Search Engine Indexing .

  Recommendation

  A properly defined robots.txt file prevents cooperating search engines and web crawlers from indexing portions of a site's content. For security reasons, we recommend that you add a robots.txt file to the root of your site hierarchy and define a policy regarding the HTML pages of the portal that are exposed to the web.

  For example, the following keeps all crawlers out:

  User-agent: *

  Disallow: /