What Are Workcenter Roles and Freestyle Roles?

SAP NetWeaver Portal has been designed as an integration layer for reusable objects - such as roles and workcenters delivered by SAP as downloadable business packages - and custom objects created directly in the portal. The sources from which these applications are created can range greatly, and the internal structure of the objects can differ significantly.

The largest semantic unit of content in the portal is a role, which can include folders, worksets, pages, and iViews. The role structure defines the business user's navigation at runtime. The majority of roles imported into or accessed from the portal are provided as business packages from the SAP Business Suite. Their content is designed and ordered according to the strict layout and hierarchy defined in the SAP NetWeaver Standards and Guidelines (S&G) for Pattern-Based User Interfaces . For more information about the S&G and the SAP Business Suite roles, see What Is a Work Center in SAP Business Suite? .

In SAP NetWeaver Portal, roles created according to the SAP NetWeaver S&G for user interfaces are called workcenter roles . These roles can originate from back-end PFCG (automatic) roles, or from the portal itself, using a specialized role wizard for creating roles according to the S&G. All content of these workcenter roles is created and edited directly within the role. Content - pages and iViews - from one workcenter role can be reused in other roles as well. For information about the structure of workcenter roles, see Understanding Workcenter Roles .

In contrast to workcenter roles, the portal also supports roles whose content layout and hierarchy have not been designed according to the standard SAP UI guidelines. These roles - called freestyle roles - can come from SAP business packages, other sources external to SAP NetWeaver Portal, or from the portal itself.