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The federated portal network capabilities of SAP NetWeaver enable you to share content between distributed portal installations, both SAP and non-SAP; thus providing a single portal access point per user to portal information, services and applications distributed on portals throughout the entire organizational network.

Using the federated portal network capabilities in SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment, you can integrate your composite applications into an existing SAP NetWeaver 7.0 runtime environment. Note that a portal running SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment can function as a producer portal only; hence, consumer capabilities are not supported.

Example Example

A central corporate portal running SAP NetWeaver 7.0 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 Composition Environment portal serves as a production runtime platform for new composite applications. Through federation, these composite applications are exposed to the central portal. Customers benefit by taking advantage of the advanced composition capabilities offered in SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment, while keeping their corporate portal in a stable and less frequently updated environment, ensuring a consistent end-user experience.

End of the example.

Integration

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

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

    More information: Guidelines for Developing Composite Applications and Generic Portal Application Layer (GPAL) Repositories

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

    More information: Integrating Content into the NWCE Portal

  3. You expose content in the SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment producer portal to a SAP NetWeaver 7.0 portal (referred to as the consumer portal).

  4. From the SAP NetWeaver 7.0 consumer portal, you consume the remote content exposed by the SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment producer portal.

    More information: Workflows

  5. Portal business users, logged on to SAP NetWeaver 7.0 portal through their browser, run local content and the remote-based content shared by the SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment producer portal.

This graphic is explained in the accompanying text.

Features

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

User persistence

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

Remote role assignment

  • 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 a 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 portals. The tools are not designed to provide support for remote site management or global monitoring.

More Information

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