Facelift For SAP Portal

The NetWeaver connection signifies that Enterprise Portal, which SAP acquired in 2001 with its purchase of portal vendor TopTier, is now fully integrated with SAP's mainstream products.

With version 6.0, available now, SAP's portal software works with Unix server software, supports European and major Asian languages, includes enhanced knowledge management and collaboration capabilities, and permits delegated administration. This last feature allows different managers to oversee subsets of a company's portal, relieving administrative bottlenecks.

"Delegated administration is very important for our clients," said Adolf Allesch, global SAP portal leader at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Cincinnati. "With centralized administration, you need a really rigid governance process, but when you go decentralized, you can customize the maintenance and governance programs. That lowers the cost of ownership."

With this new release, customers can use Enterprise Portal on Windows Server 2003 and Unix servers from a variety of vendors, including IBM, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. The previous version supported only Windows NT.

Walldorf, Germany-based SAP also has packed in improved collaboration features and capabilities. These include the ability to set up collaboration rooms. Such virtual workspaces provide a place where people can share calendars and "to do" lists, as well as create and track steps in the workflow between team members. Additional collaboration capabilities include instant messaging with user authentication, and a quick-poll feature that enables realtime surveys that can then be tabulated and distributed.

But as packed as Enterprise Portal is with new features, its greatest strength might be its architecture, Allesch said. "It's a federated portal, which [means that] a customer logging on gets a different look and feel than a vendor or a partner or an employee. It's part of the NetWeaver architecture. This really shows the portal is no longer the product of an acquisition."

SAP declined to discuss pricing for the software.