SAP Portal Deployment Options Recommendations for cloud and on-premise deployments

Yariv Zur, Aviad Rivlin, Thomas Hensel Version 5, updated in November, 2017

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Table of Contents

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ................................................................................................................................... 3

SAP PORTAL DEPLOYMENT OPTIONS – OVERVIEW ................................................................................. 4 SAP Cloud Platform Portal ............................................................................................................................. 4 SAP Enterprise Portal ..................................................................................................................................... 4

TYPICAL PORTAL USE CASES ...................................................................................................................... 5 Self-Services Launchpad ................................................................................................................................ 6 Line of Business Homepage .......................................................................................................................... 7 External-Facing Portal..................................................................................................................................... 8 Corporate Intranet ........................................................................................................................................... 9

COMPARISON: SAP ENTERPRISE PORTAL AND SAP CLOUD PLATFORM PORTAL .......................... 10

ROADMAP AND OUTLOOK .......................................................................................................................... 11

MAINTENANCE END FOR SAP ENTERPRISE PORTAL 7.0X .................................................................... 11

DETAILED COMPARISON ............................................................................................................................. 12

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES ........................................................................................................................... 13

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Executive Summary

SAP portal solutions help thousands of customers around the globe to provide their employees, partners and customers a central and intuitive entry point for information, business applications and analytics.

SAP’s portal offering has evolved from a single product to a portfolio of products available via various deployments options to address your specific business needs.

Recommendation

SAP recommends adopting SAP Cloud Platform Portal for new projects, and for existing SAP Enterprise Portals gradually transition them to SAP Cloud Platform.

• SAP Cloud Platform Portal is the recommended solution for building modern, cloud-based portal sites such as application launchpads or line of business home pages.

• SAP Enterprise Portal is primarily suited for sophisticated corporate intranets, which integrate great amount of classic SAP content (e.g. Web Dynpro ABAP/Java, SAP GUI for Windows, HTMLB) and require advanced web content and document handling.

This document provides an overview of available deployments options of SAP based portals and gives recommendations for choosing the best approach. SAP and partners offer professional services and workshops to analyze your specific use cases and requirements to define a sustainable portal strategy for your organization.

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SAP Portal Deployment Options – Overview This section describes the available portal options as part of the SAP Portal portfolio.

SAP Cloud Platform Portal

SAP Cloud Platform Portal (aka Cloud Portal) was introduced to market in 2012 as one of the first true Portal PaaS (Platform as a Service) offerings in the market, according to Gartner1. Cloud Portal is a major service of SAP Cloud Platform (SAP CP). The SAP Cloud Platform Experience Maker services provide a set of integrated services that deliver delightful user experiences across various digital touchpoints, enabling innovation without disrupting core business processes.

Furthermore, SAP Cloud Platform allows organizations to simplify the development of business applications. It offers comprehensive tools & services combined with the benefits of a flexible and agile platform to develop, extend and consume enterprise applications via cloud services.

Customers leverage the cloud portal service to create flexible, mobile-ready business sites to engage with employees, customers and partners. Common scenarios are Employee Self-Service Portal/Launchpad, Supplier Portal and Partner Portal.

SAP Enterprise Portal

SAP Enterprise Portal 7.5 is SAP’s incumbent on premise portal product, based on SAP NetWeaver Java platform. It is a proven portal solution that has been in the market for many years – with thousands of productive customers. SAP NetWeaver 7.5 marks the latest major version and was released in October 2015.

SAP Enterprise Portal enables customers to build large-scale intranet and extranet sites, bringing together applications from SAP and non-SAP, documents & web content, analytics, business processes and people.

SAP NetWeaver is typically installed on premises: either directly inside the customer’s data center or offered as managed cloud (e.g. SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud).

1 “SAP HANA Cloud Portal is a Front End for SAP Innovation”, Gartner, 2013

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Typical Portal Use Cases The scope of portal implementations is typically very customer-specific and can vary significantly between one customer to the other. The following aspects help to describe the scope of the planned scenario and get a detailed understanding of the required capabilities for implementation:

- Reach: internal employees vs. external users (e.g. customers or partner)

- Branding: SAP standard look & feel vs. fully branded/customized design & page layout

- Content types

o Applications and processes (SAP and non-SAP)

o Workflow and tasks

o Analytics and reports

o Web Content (e.g. documents, news, articles, images, videos, etc.)

o Collaboration (e.g. social, streams, activities, feeds, groups, etc.)

- Integration: local portal content vs. remote integration (from backend system)

- UI technologies: applications based on HTML5, SAPUI5, Web Dynpro ABAP, Web Dynpro Java, Java, non-SAP, etc.

- Operations: portal hosted by customer, partner or SAP The following section outlines typical SAP Portal use cases and describes the deployment option recommendations for each scenario. These recommendations should be validated according to your specific business requirements and company maturity to adopt cloud solutions.

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Self-Services Launchpad Use Case Enable users to easily access business processes and tasks from desktop & mobile devices – helping them to complete their daily work efficiently (e.g. employee services, application portal). The main focus is on applications, with limited use of web content. Recommendation: Cloud Portal Leverage the SAP Fiori launchpad experience (a dedicated site template) integrating both Cloud based applications as well as on-premise applications, by integrating classic UI technologies, e.g. Web Dynpro ABAP, SAP GUI for HTML, SAP Screen Personas, SAP Business Explorer (BEx) reports, and others. Customers benefit from pre-defined SAP Fiori Cloud applications for typical use cases such as HR, Sales or Procurement. With My Inbox and workflow service you can easily expose notifications, tasks and approval scenarios to your end users. Examples: Merck, IVV, SAP Alternative: SAP Enterprise Portal SAP Enterprise portal offers standard L-shape (Ajax Framework Page) or SAP Fiori launchpad experiences that integrates well with classic SAP content (Business Packages) and UI technologies. SAP Enterprise Portal is recommended when:

- Complex role and navigation structures is required

- Strong focus on dashboards integrating SAP Business Warehouse / BusinessObjects reports

- Massive investment in Knowledge Management and (Web Dynpro) Java

- Wide use of Universal Worklist for tasks and approvals

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Line of Business Homepage Use Case Domain-specific area of pages with managed content such as information, news and self-services for line of business professionals, e.g. human resources (HR), sales or support organization. The site is usually adapted to corporate branding guidelines with specific site layout, navigation across multiple pages and customizations. Recommendation: Cloud Portal Editors can quickly create customized sites based on predefine templates or even develop custom page layouts. Depending on the visual design requirements, you can combine a web-content oriented “freestyle” design with application-focused SAP Fiori experiences. Cloud Portal offers a dedicated Web Content Editor perspective to easily manage and publish information and news. Use a variety of out of the box web content templates or build your own custom templates. Furthermore, the portal offers a smart integration with modern document and web content solutions from partners such as built.io, Egnyte or ShortPoint. Customer can leverage various extensibility options for SAP solutions such as SAP ERP, SAP S/4HANA, SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer or SAP SuccessFactors to integrate business content and processes. Examples: HR Portal @ IVV, Empowering Sales @ SIKA Alternative: SAP Enterprise Portal Use the portal framework and APIs to create customized experiences, develop own framework pages (layouts) and navigation menus. The portal offers a comprehensive document repository and framework with Knowledge Management (KM). Editors can publish news and web content through Web Page Composer. Optionally, you can complement the portal implementation with leading Web Content Management solutions from our partners, e.g. from VANTAiO or e-Spirit. Furthermore, you may consider to expose your existing content (e.g. KM documents) from the SAP Enterprise Portal and make it available through SAP Cloud Platform Portal. Such a hybrid setup provides the opportunity to leverage investment in EP, while building up a cloud-based entry point for mobile / VPN-less access to information.

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External-Facing Portal Use Case An external-facing portal is a portal that serves users outside of the organization, for example: Customer Portal, Partner Portal and Supplier Portal. Recommendation: Cloud Portal Typically, this portal will expose business data from on premise and cloud systems side-by-side with unstructured content. It usually has public landing pages and a restricted area, which requires the user to login to access specific information and services. Leveraging a cloud service is strongly recommended and beneficial over setting up and maintaining a dedicated portal infrastructure in front of your firewall / in your DMZ (demilitarized network zone). The security and identity management services of SAP Cloud Platform help you to securely provide access to relevant information and services to your audiences. Examples: Danone, Genband, EMPRESAS IANSA, Yaskawa

Alternative: SAP Enterprise Portal Organizations may manually set up and operate a dedicated instance of SAP Enterprise Portal in their DMZ, if the functional scope requires capabilities that are currently only available with SAP NetWeaver / Portal.

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Corporate Intranet Use Case Corporate Intranet is a horizontal portal serving the organization as the single access point for self-services, web content (news, articles, etc.), workflows, reports and processes. It typically requires advanced web content and document management services to centrally manage and orchestrate a huge number of sites and content pages. Option 1: SAP Cloud Platform Portal Depending on the functional requirements, modern, cloud-based intranet portals can be implemented using Cloud Portal in combination with SAP Jam. The portal supports all major SAP UI technologies for integrating local cloud apps or remote applications from the SAP backend (e.g. SAP GUI for HTML, Web Dynpro ABAP, SAP BEx Reports, etc.). Cloud Portal also offers a rich web content editing environment and advanced web content and site templates, which strengthen the capabilities for building advanced intranet sites. This includes basic (e.g. title, text, image, video) and advanced web content widgets (e.g. article, image, grid, and image carousel). Alternatively, customers can use integration with modern document and web content solutions from partners such as built.io, Egnyte or ShortPoint. SAP Jam Collaboration can complement the portal service to allow employees to easily explore information and collaboratively drive business processes. Social services empower users to create, share, discover, rate, and discuss content with their peers. Leverage SAP Jam as comprehensive collaboration solution in combination with portal sites:

- Freestyle sites enriched with SAP Jam widgets (e.g. activity feeds, documents) - SAP Jam as collaborative intranet with integration of Portal/launchpad for self-service access

Option 2: SAP Enterprise Portal SAP Enterprise Portal is a proven solution for building highly customized intranets leveraging various services such as flexible UI framework for customization, application integration (SAP / non-SAP), Reports, Universal Worklist, Mobile Documents, Knowledge Management, Web Page Composer and XML Forms. Especially for customers who are highly invested in classic SAP UI frameworks and technologies, incl. SAP GUI for windows, SAP Enterprise Portal provides out of the box integration capabilities. The implementation might be complemented by partner solutions for advanced Web Content Management solutions (e.g. by VANTAiO or e-Spirit.).

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Comparison: SAP Enterprise Portal and SAP Cloud Platform Portal

While it may seem that there are many different options, in reality there are few decision points. The following section highlights the key criteria’s.

• Functional scope: SAP has developed and enhanced the SAP Enterprise Portal significantly over the years, resulting in advanced administration tools, customization options, public APIs and tools for managing web content and integrating (third-party) applications. Check the documentation for details on supported features and capabilities. SAP Cloud Platform and the Portal service are evolving quickly and delivering new capabilities based on a bi-weekly release cycle. Most of the capabilities you know from SAP NetWeaver have similar counterparts in the cloud. You may check the cloud technology roadmaps and documentation to learn more about available capabilities and upcoming enhancements.

Examples of key portal-related services on SAP NetWeaver vs. SAP Cloud Platform:

Area SAP NetWeaver SAP Cloud Platform

Content Business Packages for SAP Business Suite

SAP Fiori apps for SAP Business Suite and SAP S/4HANA

Tasks and Workflow

Universal Worklist, BPM

My Inbox and workflow service

Branding UI theme editor UI theme designer

Web Content Web Page Composer Site designer, Web Content Editor

Documents Knowledge Management

Document service, document center, SAP Jam

Collaboration Collaboration Rooms SAP Jam Collaboration

Authentication UME / Logon Tickets Identity authentication & provisioning / SAML

Analytics BW Reports Smart Business service, SAP Analytics Cloud

Development Eclipse Eclipse and SAP Web IDE (SAPUI5)

• Business content: SAP Enterprise Portal benefits from a rich set of Business Packages2) which are based on classic on-premises SAP Software (SAP ERP, SAP CRM, etc.).

Cloud Portal provides standard widgets to integrate different types of cloud and on-premises content. SAP offers pre-packaged SAP Fiori apps for SAP Business Suite and SAP S/4HANA. This prepackaged, cloud-based business content is delivered for various lines of business through cloud subscription model: customers benefit from automatic updates and maintenance of the frontend UI parts. Check the available applications in the SAP Fiori Reference Library. Customers can also integrate regular SAP transactions based on Web Dynpro ABAP, SAP Screen Personas and SAP GUI for HTML (Web GUI).

Furthermore, the portal service can be used to integrate and extend SAP cloud solutions such as SAP Hybris Cloud for Service (Support Site), SAP Hybris Cloud for Sales (Partner Portal) and SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central.

2 Check the Fiori Apps Reference Library and available SAP Portal Business Packages

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• Competency: Setup, configuration and the learning curve for Cloud Portal is typically lower than for SAP Enterprise Portal, as the admin focuses on the business content and portal artefacts and not on operating the underlying platform (as this is done by SAP).

• Complexity of role structure: SAP Enterprise Portal supports a very complex role structure, built from years of experience running complex business applications in multiple industry scenarios.

Cloud Portal has a simplified role-based authorizations concept that allows managing user access permissions at site and page levels. The launchpad integrates with PFCG to retrieve the necessary authorization roles for launchpad catalogs. You may leverage SAP Cloud Platform Identity Authentication with your corporate Identity Provider and use the provisioning service to make required user information also known in the cloud.

• Innovation cycle: SAP EP is usually updated via regular support package stacks 3-4 times a year. A cloud service offers more frequent innovations and enhancements on a bi-weekly basis. This delivery pace means an important aspect of agility and flexibility, but also brings frequent changes (e.g. improved user interface, enhanced configuration editors) you need to track.

• Relationship to SAP Fiori launchpad: SAP Fiori launchpad is a role-based, personalized, real-time aggregation point for business applications and analytics. It runs on multiple devices, using the responsive design paradigm, and is deployable on multiple platforms. It is designed according to the simple and intuitive SAP Fiori user experience, while supporting established UI technologies. In many ways, one can consider SAP Fiori launchpad (the UX together with the backend services) as the next generation of an application portal. The ability to aggregate content, SAP Fiori apps and 3rd part applications is a big part of what is expected from a portal.

As SAP renews its UI/UX around the SAP Fiori paradigm and applying it to all major SAP technology stacks, SAP ensures the launchpad is part of both portal offerings – cloud and on premise. Thus, SAP Fiori launchpad is one of the available templates for SAP Enterprise Portal (as of release 7.31) and SAP Cloud Platform Portal.

Roadmap and outlook Both SAP Enterprise Portal and SAP Cloud Platform Portal have published official roadmaps, which are available at https://www.sap.com/solution/roadmaps.platform-technology.html

Maintenance end for SAP Enterprise Portal 7.0x Important note for customers running on SAP NetWeaver 7.0x:

Application Server Java [incl. portal] within SAP NetWeaver 7.00, 7.01, 7.02, 7.03 will be supported in mainstream maintenance to end of 2017. Extended maintenance will not be offered. (SAP Note 1648480 - Maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 Software)

Learn more about the options and recommendations on http://sapsupport.info/future-of-ep:

1) Upgrade to SAP Enterprise Portal 7.5 Benefit from latest enhancements and improvements of the SAP NetWeaver Java stack Check pre-requisites for upgrading your portal and (custom) applications

2) Migrate your scenarios to SAP Cloud Platform Drive UX modernization and innovations via flexible and agile cloud-based development and extension platform

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Detailed Comparison The following table deep dives into the main concepts and capabilities for both products:

SAP Enterprise Portal 7.5 SAP Cloud Platform Portal

Approach on-premises public cloud

Description Proven, secure, mobile-ready enterprise portal platform

Modern portal platform as a service (Portal PaaS) for fast time to value and increased business agility

Release SAP Enterprise Portal 7.5 with quarterly support packages

Cloud service with bi-weekly release3

Hosted on Customer’s on-premises landscape SAP Cloud Platform

Managed by Customer, partner or SAP SAP

Trial usage Trial version on Cloud Appliance Library

Trial version on https://account.hanatrial.ondemand.com

Software Licenses4

SAP NetWeaver license + annual maintenance fees

Monthly subscription for SAP CP account + relevant services

Mobile consumption

via dedicated SAP Fiori framework page

Built-in responsive site design; SAP Fiori launchpad as an out-of-the-box site template

SAP Fiori and launchpad integration

Check feature matrix for required release level

Latest features such as SAP Fiori 2.0 design and concepts automatically available

Target audience

- Large corporations with IT infrastructure resources

- Customers, who prefer in-house hosting

- Corporations with focus on cloud - Organizations, who would like to drive

user experience innovations - Lines of business, who like to extend

the core functionality of their solutions

Authentication SAML 2/1.1, X509, Basic Authentication, SAP Logon Tickets

SAP Cloud Platform Identity Authentication, SAML2, oAuth

Theming UI theme designer UI theme designer, inherited5

Key benefits - Conforms with traditional IT - Full control over deployment

(hardware / operating system) and flexibility in customization

- Individualized sizing - Comprehensive set of portal

services for building intranets / enterprise portals incl. application integration, content and document management

- Classic business packages and connectors

- Agile, flexible portal PaaS for creating attractive, mobile-ready business sites

- Fast time to value - Easy integration of on-premise

solutions and services - Less effort for setup and configuration

(e.g. portal server hardware) - Easy branding, theming and layouting

via standards based, open platform - Leveraging innovations of SAP Cloud

Platform - Pre-packaged SAP Fiori cloud apps

connected to on-premise system

Access and getting started

Manual download and installation of files from SAP Service Marketplace

Simply access the provisioned SAP Cloud Platform account and launch the portal service

3 Cloud Portal offers innovations on a bi-weekly release cycle without disruption. 4 For detailed information about licensing of SAP products, please reach out to your SAP account executive. 5 When part of the extension package for SuccessFactors, the Cloud Portal inherits the theme from BizX

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Additional resources Roadmap documents: https://www.sap.com/products/roadmaps.products-solutions.html SAP Cloud Platform Portal

- Overview: https://cloudplatform.sap.com - Portal overview: https://cloudplatform.sap.com/capabilities/ux/cloud-portal.html - Trial account: https://cloudplatform.sap.com/try.html - Community: https://www.sap.com/community/topic/portal.html - Documentation: https://help.sap.com/CP > Portal

SAP Enterprise Portal

- Documentation: https://help.sap.com/viewer/p/SAP_NETWEAVER - Community: https://www.sap.com/community/topic/portal.html - SAP Fiori launchpad on Enterprise Portal

o Overview: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-58340 o SAP Fiori Integration with SAP Enterprise Portal - SAP Note 2031108

- Maintenance: SAP Note 1648480 - Maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 Software

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