Using the Portal as a Frontend 

Within the portal layer, the user interfaces and processes are provided to the user in a role-based manner.

The smallest visible unit in the portal is an iView, the basic element of a portal page. It is a small application that retrieves information, processes it, and displays it in the portal desktop client. In SAP NetWeaver CE, the portal can be used as frontend to run composite applications in a test and a production environment:

·        After the development of your composite application you use iViews to integrate it into the portal pages.

More information: Integrating Applications into the Portal

●      Using the portal content modeling tools of Visual Composer you can model and deploy portal content objects, such as roles, worksets, iViews, and pages. Additonally, Visual Composer enables the integration of composite applications as well as the ability to include advanced portal navigation technology, such as object-based navigation (OBN).

More information: Modeling Portal Content with Visual Composer

●      If your composite application includes processes with human activities to which tasks are assigned, end users will use the universal worklist (UWL) to manage their tasks from different systems. The UWL provides a central access not only to tasks also to alerts and notifications. The UWL is accessed by the end user through the portal.

More information:   Managing Tasks and Alerts in the Universal Worklist

The portal provides a set of tools to administer, manage, and monitor the portal. More information: Managing the Portal

Other Portal Capabilities

Application developers can use the APIs provided by the portal to create applications that take advantage of the portal functionality and services, as well as access portal content and objects from within a Web Dynpro or Java EE application, or customize the portal user interface.

More information: Developing Applications for the Portal

SAP recommends to use the SAP NetWeaver CE 7.2 portal only for development and testing of the portal content and applications. For production, use the federated portal network capabilities of SAP NetWeaver to seamlessly expose applications running in SAP NetWeaver CE 7.2 to an existing SAP NetWeaver 7.0 production portal.

More information: Running CE Content in a Remote Portal Using FPN