Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Portal Embedding of SAP UWL into SharePoint

There are multiple alternatives for utilizing SharePoint as presentation layer to SAP functionality. The most basic is portal launch, next comes portal embedding. Portal embedding has some advantages (mainly being rapidly to achieve: you only visually integrate the 2 [SAP, Microsoft] environments, without any direct systems/applications integration and interoperability), but remains a rather poor man's approach to portal integration. The typical SAP UI / Look and Feel is very different from the SharePoint UI (standard or company-customized), and the SAP Portal pages exhibit themselves browser navigation in addition to the SharePoint navigation.
Andre Fischer a.o. from SAP recently published the whitepaper Integration of SAP Universal Worklist into Microsoft Office SharePoint. This paper contains an example of the portal embedding approach, while also addressing the double navigation issue. In particular it describes an approach to integrating the SAP Universal Worklist into SharePoint context. Basically it comes down at making sure at the SAP Portal side that the portal pages are rendered headerless, without the portal navigation. The elegance of the sketched approach is that it is limited to SAP Portal configuration and customization work, there is no custom development required at either SAP nor SharePoint side.

No comments:

Post a Comment