SAP Netweaver Corner

When a company would like to start a portal project, there will usually have the persons to take responsibility on the following roles (one person can have more than one role)

1) Project Manager
Role description in brief: Manage and monitor the whole project in term of business requirement, design, analysis, implementation and team leadership.
2) Business Analyst
Help in outlining and developing the business requirement of the project. Comunicate with business owner, users and content manager to gather business data required by the project.
3) Technical Project Lead
Lead the technical team (solution architect, developers, system administrator) in technical design and implemenatation.
4) Solution Achitect
Layout the overall portal architecture design for the project implementation. Configuring hardware (i.e. server), portal installation and other portal infrastruture.
5) System Administrator / Portal Basis Administrator + Security Administrator
After portal installation, responsible for standard setup and configurations within the portal. His/her responsibilities included security settings, backend connectivity, content migration and other user management tasks(i.e. setting up LDAP server for user management engine).
6) Several Portal Developers
Developers are the person actually develop the custom portal applications that cannot be configured through standard portal configurations. There are different sub-roles in development: content development, connectivity with backend system, Knowledge Management & Collaboration, or Business Intelligence and etc.
7) Content Manager
Manage and intergrate content that built by developers and take care portal overall look- and-feel. Tasks included configuring page layouts, iviews, roles, worksets, navigations and etc.

I will cover their specific tasks in detail in the future (especially developer's tasks).

To be a fully qualified SAP Netweaver Developer, you need the following skill sets to do the most common development project: (At present, SAP Netweaver Portal can be developed using two different skill sets : Java + WebDynpro technology OR ABAP + Webdynpro - I will only cover the first case)

1) Java / J2EE + Web Development skills
2) SAP Netweaver Framework Concepts
3) SAP Portal Framework, i.e. iView development and other content development skills. (Will cover in depth in the future)
4) Development Tools: SAP Netweaver Developer Studio (Eclipse based platform) +Java Development Infrastruture
5) Special development areas, i.e. Knowledge Management & Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Exchange Infrastruture and etc.
6) Some SAP backend systems knowledge, like R/3 (most common - HR and Logistic) , BW, CRM and etc.
7) Some functional knowledge (business), i.e. Human Resource Management (most common - Employee Self Service and Manager Self Service), Customer Relationship Management and etc.
(Usually, a developer will only focus in one or two functional area.)

The first 4 items will qualify you as a SAP Developer. To be a good or high demand one, you have to fulfill all of them.

(The following diagram is taken from http://help.sap.com - an official SAP Help Library.)

As you can see from the daigarm, our web browser will be the client, and the portal server that contain the Portal Framework - I call it as prt (portal runtime) framework will process all the request of the client.

SAP EP will provide a Single-Sign-On access to the clients through the portal to access all the backend systems / applications and enterprise resources in a secure channel (authorization and authetication process will be taken place during the sign on process).

In prt, it contains three main areas, which are : Portal Components , Portal Services, and Connectivity Framework. As a developer who develop portal application that deploy into the portal server, these are the components that the developer will be developing.
A portal component is custom Java code that is executed according to user requests, and generates HTML output for display on the client. It is a reusable component that can be combined with other portal component in another portal application.
A portal services act as the middleware, that is, interfaces that are enabled to exchange procedures and data. They offer functionality to portal components, and other services.
Connectors Framework enable integration between Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) and application servers and enterprise applications in the Portal Platform.

I will further explain the main features and functionalities of these components.

The bottom part will be the "Information Source" - it can be any data source systems like SAP System (i.e. BW , CRM, SEM and etc) , Business Information System, databases, and any resources (i.e. documents and applications that sit in the backend)

SAP Netweaver is the latest technical backbone and platform for all SAP systems and enterprise applications in an organization. Netweaver is the fulfillment of Enterprise Service Architeture(ESA) of SAP.
SAP NetWeaver includes a comprehensive set of components and tools. These included:
1) SAP NetWeaver Application Server
2) SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence
3) SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure
4) SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management
5) SAP NetWeaver Mobile
6) SAP NetWeaver Portal (includes Knowledge Management and Collaboration)

Most of the companies are implementing their portals by using SAP EP, IBM Websphere, BEA Weblogics and etc.

Web Portal is not a website, intranet or web application. It is the combination of all of them.
Web portal unifies critical information and applications to give users role-based views that span the enterprise, enabling you to take full advantage of your information resources throughout the organization internally and externally.

This blog is for SAP Portal beginners/developers to search for SAP Portal/Netweaver topics, discussion and FAQ.