The 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 per user to portal information, services, and applications distributed on portals throughout the entire organizational network.
The major benefits of implementing a federated portal network are:
Reuse of content and applications throughout the network
Increased autonomy of business units
Integration of non-SAP portals into the SAP NetWeaver platform, allowing the exchange of WSRP-compliant applications within SAP NetWeaver Portal
Higher return on investment (ROI) achieved by optimized reuse of human capital and hardware resources within the company
This scenario applies to two major use cases:
Content federation : A network comprising two or more portal installations - one functions as the logon portal for all users and the remaining portal installations function as content providers. This allows you to separate application execution and rendering from the main portal server.
Portal federation : A network comprising two or more portal installations - each portal installation can function as an autonomous entity serving its own content and users, but also exposing and consuming content to and from other portals in the federation. Portals can also rely completely on remote content from other portals, thus avoiding the need to create and maintain local content.
Before implementing a federated portal network, you should understand the business requirements and technical conditions of your landscape and the benefits offered by SAP NetWeaver.
Each use case supports different business scenarios. For more information, visit the Federated Portal Network area on SAP Developer Network at https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/nw-portal.
For more information about when to use the Federated Portal Network or Application Integration, see the SAP NetWeaver Portal - Application Integration and Federated Portal Network, when should I use each solution? blog on SAP Developer Network at http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/19219.
Using the federated portal network capabilities in SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment (CE), you can integrate your composite applications into an existing SAP NetWeaver 7.0 or 7.3 runtime environment. For more information, see Running CE Portal Content in a Remote Portal Using FPN .
Each portal in the federation can be a producer, consumer, or both, depending on whether it exposes its content for other portals or uses remote content exposed by other portals.
Producer portal : A portal installation that provides other portals (consumers) with remote access to its locally-deployed applications.
Consumer portal : A portal installation that accesses remote applications provided by another portal (a producer).
Each portal can support both local and remote users.
SAP NetWeaver Portal provides consumers with different tools for using remote content exposed by SAP NetWeaver and non-SAP producers in the federated portal network. A decision to choose one tool over the other depends on several factors, such as the vendor of the producer portal, the type of remote content, and what the consumer intends to do with the content once it has been created on the portal. For more information, see Content Usage Modes .
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 |
|
Create content as remote delta links |
|
WSRP-based application sharing |
|
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 |
|
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, monitoring, or to solve lags in performance between portals.
Implementing a federated portal network also does not offer any manual or automated functionality to synchronize portals and their content.
This documentation may contain references to functionality that is not fully supported in this release. For information on where to find SAP Notes describing known issues and limitations related to this scenario, see Limitations, Known Issues, and Workarounds .