Archive for the ‘Portal’ Category:
Web 2.0 Reality Check, against SAP Portals
Dennis Howlett has stirred up a hornets nest recently by pointing out that the Web 2.0 Emperor has no clothes, especially when it comes to the enterprise.
Enterprise has had enough of incremental step change where the ROI is questionable at best. The trending down of technology prices goes some way to redressing that imbalance but arguing that technology is cheap ergo high ROI is facile. As I have repeatedly said on this and other blogs, there are genuine barriers to adoption that make even free look expensive. My Irregular colleague Susan Scrupski thinks that’s a griping argument. Sure. But it is recurrent and current with few easy answers in sight. I suspect a part of the problem is because those most active in pushing these solutions have little idea about organizational dynamics or what makes people tick. I don’t say that lightly. Check out Oliver Marks blog and his experiences at large organizations.
Why does this matter in the SAP world ?
For a realistic comparison, my last SAP implementation (not upgrade) had a gloabl reach, required 5 nines reliability (scheduled application downtime is 6 hours every 3 months), and a Disater Recovery metric of 30 minutes RTO (with an RPO of 10 minutes) after a data centre disaster, for multiple mult-terrabyte databases. The customer’s management team was experienced, knew the implicit difficulties in this, and knew it would cost money. However, they were able to justify the spend, based on their business requirements.
Compare this SLA against the Google Apps Mail outages in March 2008, the Google App Engine failure (June 2008) and another Google Apps outage in October 2008.
You don’t have control over the cloud, which means you don’t have control over your data, whether you’re talking about the physical security, or secured access once the data is available.
On the other hand, with tools like ESME, the wikis and rooms available on SAP Portals, and sensible well designed Web Dynpros, under pinned by the new Java Engine architechture, you have the technology to provide your users and customers with Web 2.0 like systems, in a secure, scalable, stable environment.
Howto avoid irj/portal in the portal URL
Actually, its a bit of a cheat. What happens is that you’re telling the J2EE WAS that if there is no page specified (such as …/index.html), then open the page …/irj/portal.
1. Go to j2ee visual administrator
2. For each Server, Navigate to Cluster-> Server -> Services -> HTTP Provider
3. Enter /irj/portal in the Start Page Text Field
4. Click on Save Properties
5. Restart this service from visual administrator
Access http://yourserver.yourdomain.com and your portal login page should come up.
This means that your SAP J2EE Engine Start Page will still show up if you http://yourserver.yourdomain.com/index.html
SAP Enterprise Portal 7 - Modify Default Ports
An SAP portal installation, by default, selects a port for http and https access based on your system number. For example, if your system number is ##, then the default port for portal access would be
* 5##00 for http access
* 5##01 for https access ( aka SSL )
Many Project teams wish to shorten this long url (http://yourserver.yourdomain.com:5##00\irj\portal). Fortunately, there is an easy way to modify the portal http and https ports and keep it to 80 and 81 ( or anything you wish).
Follow the below given steps to achieve this.
1. Start the j2ee visual administrator tool
2. navigate to cluster -> dispatcher -> HTTP Provider
3. Choose Ports
4. Change the port number to 80 for http and 81 for https
5. Thats it - You’re done!!!!
One extra step that’s required if you’re also running IIS (for example, if you’re using an ITS to communicate with an older R3 system or running TREX), you need to make sure that your J2EE ports do not conflict with any of the IIS ports (including the default web server). The best way of doing that is to ensure that the IIS default web server is pointing at different ports AND is stopped.
SAP Enterprise Portal 5 - Modify Logon Page
The logon page is FormLogon.asp found in the SAPPortal directory of the Default Web Site under IIS
For those familiar with later releases of Enterprise Portal, you need to remember that when EP5 was released, the Web Application Server release of SAP had yet to be released. This meant that the portal server had to provide its own web server.