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Use

The portal is the Web front-end component for SAP NetWeaver - the comprehensive integration and application platform that facilitates the alignment of people, information, and business processes across organizational and technical boundaries.

The portal offers a single point of access to SAP and non-SAP information sources, enterprise applications, information repositories, databases and services in and outside your organization.

You can access the portal from desktops and from mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets.

The portal provides you the tools to manage and analyze its information resources, and to share and collaborate on the basis of them.

With its role-based content, and personalization features, the portal enables users - from employees and customers to partners and suppliers - to focus exclusively on data relevant to daily decision-making processes.

The technology and architecture of the portal ensures it is built for the enterprise, providing a secure and scalable environment.

Integration

The portal provides the following:

  • Platform-independence: The portal runs on a wide range of operating systems, including Windows and UNIX.

  • Portal on device: You can access the portal from mobile devices, using mobile Web browsers.

  • Multi-language interface: The portal supports many languages to make a global deployment more efficient and usable.

  • High performance and availability: Clustering and caching mechanisms provide high performance and high availability.

  • Security: The portal allows businesses to expose their resources to partners, suppliers, and customers, while maintaining rigorous confidentiality for restricted business information. The security features of the portal include authentication, single sign-on, authorization, integrated user management, and secure communications.

  • Navigation: The portal offers a flexible and open navigation layout design that supports almost every usage scenario.

  • Federated portal network scenarios: The portal supports federated portal and content scenarios through the use of open standards, wide platform support, multi-language support, global deployment and scalability, and delegated administration.

Features

The following table highlights the key capabilities of the portal:

Key Capability

Description

Runtime environment

Provides end users with a single point of access, in a fully customizable Web-based portal desktop or mobile desktop, to internal and external information, applications, and services that are relevant to their role in the organization.

Advanced administration environment

Provides a complete set of tools to maintain, manage and monitor the portal within one coherent environment. These administrative tools are designed as modular portal pages or iViews, enabling you to delegate administration tasks according to your business scenario.

Enterprise-centric content

Portal-based content delivers information from heterogeneous sources to users of a single desktop. Portal content enables access to links and documents, transactions and data in underlying business applications, internal and external services, and to reports and analytics.

  • Development: Developers can stay with their preferred programming model and within their preferred development environment to create content for the portal. The portal development tools enable programmers to develop their own content from scratch.

  • Business Packages: Predefined role-based portal content, in the form of business packages, is ready for immediate use in the portal. Business packages are available from the Portal Content Portfolio on SAP Developer Network at sdn.sap.com .

  • Role-based portal content: Helps various user groups to be more productive more quickly.

Support for custom-built applications

Developers can build their own portal components for displaying custom content, as well as portal services for providing custom processing. These custom components and services can make use of many built-in portal services, that enable, for example, creating navigation links, transforming XML content or implementing client-side events.