Implementing a Multitenant Portal 

Purpose

A multitenant portal extends the capabilities of SAP NetWeaver Portal by enabling a single service provider to offer granular services based on SAP technology and applications to multiple customers from a single portal infrastructure.

The service provider partitions a single portal installation into several logical units. Each partition is a portal with its own dedicated content and navigation for the exclusive use of a customer. The term tenant is used to describe each logical partition.

The service provider sets up parallel entry points into the portal—one entry point per tenant. Each entry point is referenced by a unique URL gateway, also referred to as a portal alias. The users of a tenant can access only the information of their tenant.

The following figure shows a layered multitenant portal architecture with three tenants:

This guide:

·        Describes the multitenant portal environment 

·        Explains how to configure a single portal landscape to support multiple tenants

·        Outlines how to secure the multitenant portal environment to make sure that content belonging to one enterprise is not delivered to members of other enterprises.

·        Discusses administration tasks, such as initial preparation, configuration, and daily maintenance

·        Details how to manage the customized portal content of individual enterprises within a single portal landscape

·        Details how to manage the users in a multitenant portal environment

·        Details how to customize the look and feel of each portal tenant to incorporate the customers' corporate identity

The information in this guide is arranged according to the following sections:

·        Glossary

·        Planning

·        Workflow

·        Activities for Administrators

·        Activities for Business Users

In addition to this guide, see also SAP Note 863837, which provides additional information, such as known integration issues, workarounds, and updated information not included in this guide. This note is updated on a regular basis.

For information on where to find a list of known limitations regarding multitenancy in the portal, see Limitations.

 

Implementation Considerations

·        To have a viable multitenant portal environment, the service provider must have an existing SAP system in which to store every tenant’s user data.

·        Users of the different tenants are defined in separate ABAP clients; all the clients can either be in one system, or distributed over several systems.

 

Integration

When you implement a multitenant portal, you enable tenants to:

·        Share generic applications and services running on a single portal infrastructure

·        Have a centralized portal administration

·        Maintain secure and customizable tenant-specific portal objects

Tenant users are authenticated in the SAPsystem, which also checks their authorization level as it pertains to requested data. In addition, the retrieved information is presented in the tenant under the branding and corporate identity of the relevant customer.

The current portal solution focuses on business process outsourcing (BPO) service providers—enterprises that manage business processes for other companies—the service provider owns and operates the portal as a multitenant portal. However, this solution can also be used to structure the portal for different business units, as well as subsidiaries within the same organization.

For the BPO service provider, a business process describes the ongoing activities and procedures related to a core business, such as claims processing, invoicing, human resources and payroll, finance, procurement, and customer support.

This scenario variant currently supports portal-standalone scenarios only. Other SAP NetWeaver capabilities, such as Business Intelligence (BI), Content Management (CM), search and classification engine (TREX), Collaboration, and Universal Worklist (UWL), may have functionalities that are not supported by a multitenant portal configuration. SAP ERP scenarios and SAP applications which make use of these capabilities have not been tested and qualified within a multitenant portal environment; therefore, they are currently not supported.

 

Features

The infrastructure of a standard SAP NetWeaver Portal:

·        Enables organizations to provide an integrated single point of access to heterogeneous systems

·        Unifies enterprise applications, information, and services, from both SAP and non-SAP sources, into a coherent interface.

The following portal features support the multitenant portal environment:

·        Multi-language user interface support

·        Delegated administration for setting up different customized content

·        Customer-specific branding and corporate identity

·        Mass editing and transport operations

·        Per user/group/role permission infrastructure for controlling access to portal content

·        User management filtering mechanism for controlling access to users, groups, and roles per tenant

Within a single portal infrastructure, the service provider can:

·        Provide content which is unique to different user groups

·        Isolate the content of a group

·        Apply access controls and permissions to customized content on a per user, group, or role basis

 

Example

For an example of a multitenant portal, see Example: A Multitenant Portal Landscape.