Benefits of enterprise portals

Backed by more than a decade of collaboration, HP and SAP provide fully integrated, open portal solutions to joint customers worldwide.  HP Services is the SAP global consulting and implementation partner, leveraging in-depth experience in designing and implementing SAP Enterprise Portal.

The business world is moving toward pervasive networking. Colossal amounts of information accumulate within and beyond the enterprise. Intelligently leveraged, this information supports corporate decision makers in all business arenas, ranging from purchasing and sales to research and development and product design. Internet-centric middleware solutions (such as Web services) help lower the cost of inter-company collaboration to help companies to benefit from new business models driven by better collaboration with supply-and-demand partners.

Portals are the access technology that harness the wealth of structured and raw information distributed across the Internet or buried in business applications, databases, data warehouses, e-mail, and other documents.

SAP Enterprise Portal collates critical information provided by many sources in various formats, processes this information, and makes it available to users according to their role in the company. Users can benefit from information that would otherwise be unavailable or hidden under a mountain of data.  Portals also provide a considerable amount of information that business applications cannot deliver easily or clearly.

SAP Enterprise Portal helps users access, analyze, and share data within and beyond corporate boundaries. This solution consists of the following modules:

Unification - Getting the job done typically involves data in various formats from numerous sources, such as CRM systems, ERP, e-mail, etc. Many portals allow users to access these systems in side-by-side frames within the portal, but no other portal allows users to work between them.

Business intelligence – SAP Enterprise Portal eases ad hoc analyses of information through its patented Drag & RelateTM technology. It allows users to quickly and efficiently perform analyses that used to require expert skills as well as much time and effort. This complete, open end-to-end analytics platform supports unprecedented protection and cost-effective reuse of investment in data warehouses and enterprise applications.

Knowledge management – SAP Enterprise Portal includes a unified knowledge management solution that collates unstructured information for efficient handling, enabling the company to convert data to knowledge for enhanced competitiveness. This solution includes a cutting-edge retrieval and classification and a sophisticated collaborative functionality.

The Internet – vast amounts of information that used to require tedious research is now available for free. SAP Enterprise Portal makes content from sources such as Yahoo! and Dun & Bradstreet accessible and seamlessly integrates this information with the portal, making it available for analysis by Drag & Relate.

Business Packages – portals need to provide the right kind of information for each user's requirements. That's why SAP has designed Business Packages – preconfigured collections of portal content for various user roles. These packages can be deployed out of the box or customized to meet company requirements.

SAP Enterprise Portal not only facilitates collaboration, data access, and data analysis, but also provides guidance derived from greater knowledge.

Roles -content is provided to users based on their roles within the organization. More than 300 industry-specific and multi-industry role templates are available for fast and easy adaptation and customization.

Personalization - SAP Enterprise Portal is easily personalized to reflect users' needs and interests. Features like visual presentation, language and content can be tailored to each user, while content that is irrelevant to each user is hidden or disabled.

iViews - these portal applications push content to users according to their roles and help to address key issues in each user's job.

Content management – this feature offers a wide range of functions used in creating content, including authoring, classifying, structuring, and delivering content.

Drag & Relate - enables users to move objects from one source to other items of information by simple drag and drop, thus finding role-specific answers not available from a single source. 

Security - single sign-on and Internet security technologies are used for trusted authentication and safe communication between users and various resources. 

Rapid implementation - business packages save implementation time and administration effort.

Open - the application is completely open. Virtually any kind of application, information, or service can be integrated, regardless of access appliance or point of origin.

Standards based - full compliance with platforms such as Java and .NET and with security standards such as LDAP, XML, X.509 and SOAP.

Help Desk efficiency - single sign-on means that users no longer need to remember a multitude of passwords and ID names. This enhances user friendliness and reduces the chances of users forgetting their ID tokens, contacting the Help Desk for new log-in data.

Security - single sign-on also enhances security. The more passwords a user needs to memorize, the more likely it is for that user to violate security rules by documenting and storing this information in accessible places. Single sign-on also supports LDAP, digital certificates and SSL based on HTTPS.

Scalability - SAP Enterprise Portal is highly scalable, allowing thousands of users access at the same time from any device. This is achieved through a platform-independent multi-server approach that can be scaled to span the entire enterprise.

Ease of administration - nothing other than a Web browser needs to be installed on the user's local device. Automated server configuration tools help the administrator to get entire departments up and running within a few hours.

Mobility support - users can access information at any time, anywhere, from any appliance.