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Use

The standard federated portal network (FPN) capabilities of SAP NetWeaver enable you to share content between SAP and non-SAP portal systems that are distributed across your landscape; thus providing a single portal access point to portal information, services, and applications distributed on portals throughout the entire organizational network. In SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment (CE), you can develop composite applications and then use FPN to integrate these composite applications into an existing SAP NetWeaver 7.0 or SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.3 runtime environment.

Example

A central corporate portal running SAP NetWeaver 7.0 or 7.3 can operate as a central access point for all end users, and include local content, such as knowledge management, collaboration, and various business packages. The SAP NetWeaver CE portal serves as a production runtime platform for new composite applications. Through federation, these composite applications are exposed to the central portal. Customers benefit from the advanced composition capabilities offered in SAP NetWeaver CE, while keeping their corporate portal in a stable and less frequently updated environment, ensuring a consistent end-user experience.

Note

The SAP NetWeaver CE portal is qualified to function as a producer portal only. It is not designed to support business users directly, and has not been qualified to do so.

Integration

The FPN documentation focuses on the following scenario (see also the figure that follows the procedure):

  1. You deploy your applications, which have been modeled and developed in SAP NetWeaver CE, to your SAP NetWeaver CE portal (referred to as the producer portal ).

    For more information, see Guidelines for Developing Composite Applications and Working with GPAL Repositories

  2. You integrate the deployed applications as local content in the SAP NetWeaver CE producer portal.

    For more information, see Integrating Content into the SAP NetWeaver CE Portal

  3. You expose content in the SAP NetWeaver CE producer portal to an SAP NetWeaver 7.0 or 7.3 portal (referred to as the consumer portal ).

    Note

    While the main focus here is sharing content through remote role assignment and remote delta link usage, you can also share WSRP-compliant content with a remote non-SAP consumer portal.

  4. From the SAP NetWeaver 7.0 or 7.3 consumer portal, you consume the remote content exposed by the SAP NetWeaver CE producer portal.

  5. Portal business users, logged on to SAP NetWeaver 7.0 or 7.3 consumer portal through their browser, run local content and remote content shared by the SAP NetWeaver CE producer portal.

Features

The following is a list of the portal features used to implement a federated portal network:

Feature

Description

Single user persistence

All portals in the federation connect to a global user repository.

Assign users and groups to remote roles

  • User administrators on a consumer portal can search for and assign users to roles on a remote portal (producer).

  • The role is executed on the remote producer portal at runtime.

  • The remote roles are defined, configured, and maintained solely on a producer portal, thereby minimizing content maintenance by the consumer.

Create content as remote delta links

  • Content administrators on a consumer portal can browse the Portal Catalog of a producer portal, and then create remote delta links to iViews, pages, worksets, and roles residing on the producer portal.

  • The remote delta link content can be reused and customized locally on the consumer portal, while maintaining the ability to keep unmodified content synchronized with their source objects on the remote producer portal.

WSRP-based application sharing

  • Content administrators on an SAP NetWeaver consumer portal can integrate WSRP portlets from remote non-SAP portals into SAP NetWeaver Portal.

  • SAP NetWeaver developers can create WSRP-compliant iViews that can be consumed in non-SAP consumer portals.

Dedicated caching

A portal-based caching service for the federated portal scenario can be used to reduce network traffic by storing semantic objects on the consumer portal for reuse.

Consistent user experience

  • End users can personalize remote iViews the same way they personalize local iViews, for example, configuring iView properties.

  • End users can personalize remote pages in a manner similar to the way they personalize local pages, for example, removing iViews from a page and changing the page layout. In some cases, limitations do apply (see Personalizing Content).

  • End users can personalize themes and languages.

  • The portal look-and-feel can be consistent for all integrated content.
Constraints

The federated portal network tools are optimized for content sharing across multiple portals. The tools are not designed to provide support for remote site management, global monitoring, or to solve lags in performance between global portals.

More Information

Visit the Implementing a Federated Portal Network area on SAP Developer Network at https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/nw-fpnInformation published on SAP site.

Planning and Concepts

Version Interoperability

Workflows (Quick Reference)