Sap's Enterprise Portal example essay topic

SAP Portals Summary: In order for SAP to embrace the web, they have had to purchase, partner, rewrite, and develop all new code so that they could claim they run business in a browser. SAP's latest announcements are around the development of their own independent web server, application server, search engine, classification engine, and enterprise portal. They feel that with their failed knowledge, they can develop a better solution than BEA, IBM, Verity, and PeopleSoft combined. Just like their modified kernel of a decade ago, this is just another example of 'we build it all here, and now our customers must buy it'. 1. Why Integrate when it can work out of the box? a.

SAP purchased their portal technology from Top Tier and are now working to bring it into the SAP world. This is a common trend as they have done similar work on the integration side with WebMethods. At the end of the day they will continue to have a hard time getting everything to "work together". At PeopleSoft, our portal and apps are on the same common Pure Internet Architecture and thus work together seamlessly. There is no big, costly integration effort.

2. Find a vendor that works in your world... a. Their portal is built to run best on MSFT stack while also requiring the SAP proprietary application server. We have taken a fundamentally different approach in leveraging the strengths of BEA and IBM. We recognize that appserver technology is rapidly being commodotized and most customers have chosen either websphere or weblogic as their platform of choice. Fundamentally our view is to work well in our customers existing infrastructure rather than ask them to move to a proprietary solution.

This is typical SAP. 3. Ease of Use and Maintenance SAP's Enterprise Portal is just pre-defined static HTML pages, based on what the administrator has defined as a Homepage. There is no way for the user to choose the iViews (page lets) they would like to see on their Homepages.

In fact, the architecture requires the Portal Administrator to create a new page / tab for every combination of roles and information in the enterprise. For example, instead of just haveing a tabbed named Manager (likePSFT can), a uniquely separate tab / page must be created for each 'type' of Manager (Sales, HR, Development, Accounting, etc.) because the information displayed is different for each. Very quickly, an unmanageable matrix of pages, roles, and information is required to get the right information to the right people. In addition, there is no concept of distributed administration, as the PeopleSoft Portal has. As a result, Line of Business Owners cannot control the content of their portal, and the Portal Administrator can not receive his / her burden of managing content for others.

4. Flexibility b. SAP Portals supports the following: i. MS SQL Server 2000, SP 1 or 2 ii.

Microsoft IIS 5.0 Other Portals supports the following: Databases: DB 2 UDB 7.2 DB 2 OS/390 6.1 MS SQL Server 2000 Oracle 8.1 Oracle 9 Operating Systems AIX 4.3 AIX 5.1 HP-UX 11 Solaris 7 Solaris 8 Tru 64 Unix 5.1 Windows 2000 Windows NT Which portals offers the most flexilibility? Who is truly OPEN? 5. Business Context c. We have a unique view in the portal market. Our view is that aggregation is NOT the answer, but context is.

A portal should be there to facilitate better business decisions, not be a one-stop shop for links to information. Our approach to do this is Context Manager - a decentralized way to provide contextual information to transactions. So no matter what the application, PeopleSoft or not, users are presented with information they need to make a decision. For example, signing up for benefits in HCM a user is presneted with analytics on how many employees have signed up for a given plan, contact information for the plan administrator, a document explaining pre-exisitng conditions, a discussion thread of people who are currently enrolled in the plan etc, etc.

In the end all this information makes the best decision. d. SAP has a similar view of the world and attempts with with a technology they call "drag and relate". The difference is that they are talking about a technology, we are talking about a business solution. To have drag and relate work involves heavy, heavy IT work and it is hard-coded.

In fact, most of their own systems are not built to support drag and relate (KM iViews) Bottom line - it never gets working. Context Manager is decentralized so line of business people can use it and it provides value quickly without burdening IT. 6. Why doesn't the SAP Portal have embedded workflow? Collaboration in the portal world is everything. Content gets routed and approved, reports get written and published, and events trigger other events - all of these require workflow.

The SAP Portal must rely on external, non-native, workflow to handle a critical aspect of the portal's work. PeopleSoft embeds a comprehensive workflow engine in all of our products, as well as allowing for external workflow systems to integrate easily with the environment. 7. Organizational challenges Why did SAP create new companies (SAP Portals, and SAP Warehouse) only to merge them into SAP AG within two years?

Perhaps a Lack of Sales, o poor execution? You can see this by the latest gartner MQ that speaks to the poor product quality in EP 5.0. There also seems to be confusion in the fact they they are launching a me-too strategy with App Connect, calling their platform NetWeaver, but launching 6 months after PeopleSoft. Bottom Line: SAP is behind. Their technology is a mish-mash or products and is inflexible and rigid.

It ends up being less user friendly and more difficult to manage -- -.