5.1 PFCG Overview

The figure below shows how transactions User Maintenance ( SU01) and Role Maintenance ( PFCG), SAP Easy Access , and SAP NetWeaver Business Client are related to each other and is followed by an explanation:

In transaction PFCG you can configure roles . In real life, a role corresponds to the work that a person does within a company or the position held, for example, a sales person or someone working in support. In transaction PFCG, roles are defined matching the real life roles that people play within a work situation. More specifically, a role within transaction PFCG is a set of transactions that persons within specific roles would need for their daily work. In this example, a sales person could have a role that requires transactions to add new customers, display customer details, or to enter a new lead.

Given the existence of roles within transaction PFCG that describe the typical work persona, use transaction SU01 to assign these roles to specific users. A user in the system can have any number of roles assigned, which reflects the real work that the person does within the company.

Given the roles in transaction PFCG, the SAP Easy Access menus are displayed directly after logging on with SAP GUI. These are effectively the menu trees as expressed in one or more roles for each user. This allows the user to quickly start the relevant transactions for their daily work.

NWBC builds on this same PFCG infrastructure in the ABAP system. The NWBC runtime retrieves all roles assigned to a specific user and makes them available to the shell. The shell uses exactly the same role information to show the user the possible transactions that might help them with their daily work.

For this reason, the shell in NWBC is in the first instance another expression of the SAP Easy Access menu, providing roughly the same functionality.

However, the NWBC runtime also extends the usage of transaction PFCG to make additional functionality available or to depict the configured data in a different fashion. This chapter looks at the relevant parts of transaction PFCG that are used by NWBC, and also at the additional features that can be configured within transaction PFCG for NWBC.

In addition to the role name and the description, the settings on the following tab pages are relevant for the NWBC:

• Description

• Menu

The other tab pages in transaction PFCG are currently not particularly relevant for NWBC. Remember, however, that your settings are only activated once you have assigned a user name on the User tab page and saved your settings.