Sunday, February 14, 2016

Exploring scenarios for upgrade of SAP Portal based application

In our company we’ve set up multiple end-user business applications on the same physical SAP Enterprise Portal landscape. Due diverse reasons, our Portal landscape is still on version 7.01 and getting outdated. From Application Life Management responsibility we’re now looking into upgrade of our Portal landscape. However, as everyone involved in SAP architecture and usability is very much aware, SAP has not stood still the last years, and as result the landscape to select from has been severely broadened. We can upgrade our SAP Portal landscape to the newest version 7.5. Or we can decide to introduce Fiori Launchpad as new entry point for our logical applications. Another solution option is the NetWeaver Business Client. Or the HANA Cloud Portal. And then there are all kinds of mixture scenarios thinkable. Amongst the decision criteria for the diverse scenarios are off course money and effort/time. But the most important is the usability of the new solution. And another is to careful watch what direction SAP is heading, to avoid that we go into a direction that SAP will not be committed to in [a] near future.
Current I’m defining the architecture plan for the new solution. In this plan I outline the diverse scenarios, and weight each of them on pros and cons for our situation. To form more feeling by what SAP is doing, we attended 2 workshops: one arranged by SAP specific for our company, and another setup by VNSG (the Dutch SAP User Group) for multiple invited companies. Especially in the last it was clear that we’re not alone in/on our quest: multiple organizations (among remarkable a lot of Universities) are struggling on what step(s) to take next on [SAP] portal area.
In the coming months I will regular post updates on first our decision path, followed by the progress of the eventual implementation(s).