Collaboration in SAP NetWeaver Portal

To compete successfully in the global economy, organizations need flexible ways to team up, interact, and exchange information with people in various geographic locations and across different time zones. Organizations of every size are searching for ways to manage information overload, deal with the challanges of distributed information storage, and overcome the obstacles of distance.

The collaboration capabilities of SAP NetWeaver enable you to effectively connect to the right people with the right information. People can use collaboration rooms for common access to and organization of documents, applications, and ideas. By forums and wikis the collaboration capabilities are added a community-driven approach.

Below you can find detailed information about the different topics:

Getting Started

The collaboration capabilities of SAP NetWeaver enable individual users and teams to communicate and collaborate within their business processes and access shared data in collaboration rooms. In addition SAP offers tools to integrate third-party products. By forums and wikis the collaboration capabilities are added a community-driven approach.

Check out the SAP NetWeaver Collaboration strategy:

SAP NetWeaver offers basic people-collaboration solutions such as forums, wikis and collaboration rooms integrated with SAP NetWeaver Portal. Those capabilities are included in the portal offering and require no additional licenses. SAP will continue to offer its existing collaboration capabilities so that customers are not forced to replace their solutions, but those scenarios will be maintained in their current state.

  • In the context of an evolved market around collaboration solutions, SAP does not intend to compete in the market of pure people-collaboration suites. SAP has an explicit policy of openness. If customers would like to implement scenarios beyond the supported scope, they can optionally extend the solution by integrating complementary third-party collaboration services, such as groupware (e.g. e-mail and calendar), team workspaces, profiles, real-time collaboration tools (e.g. instant messenger), tagging or blogs.
  • SAP recommends to utilize SAP NetWeaver as the leading portal for accessing business applications and managed content and - if necessary - integrate third party solutions for people-collaboration scenarios. Customers can take advantage of SAP's professional network of Special Expertise Partners for supporting such integration projects. In particular there are special how-to guides and best practices for interoperability with Microsoft and IBM products available.

Collaborative Writing with Wikis

Companies often meet the challenge that their employees cannot easily share and exchange their knowledge and experiences with their team members. The Line of Businesses today heavily depends on IT to create, manage and publish business content. Wikis provide a framework to easily share and contribute knowledge and information in an intuitive way within the company. They give employees, customers, suppliers and partners a framework to collaborative writing and help to save time by making ideas available, sharing knowledge and managing related information.

SAP provides a wiki application - that is based on a third-party vendor wiki application - as a standard component of SAP NetWeaver Portal with the new SAP NetWeaver release 7.3. Wikis are not included in SAP NetWeaver 7.0.

By including wikis in the SAP NetWeaver Portal offering, SAP will enable customers to collaborate across the network in the context of business processes and events.

With wikis, SAP customers will be able to create communities of practice that allow their employees and customers to create collaborative websites and to organize, identify, create, capture, acquire, share and leverage knowledge.

Some key capabilities of wikis at a glance:

  • Advanced document and content management through open and simple editing, encouraging participation by many users
  • Access control to wiki content and document creation (by permission concept and interceptors)
  • Easy-to-manage versioning control and version comparison
  • Easy self-publishing by contributors
  • Enhanced knowledge building, sharing and searching possibilities

More information on wikis see :

Discuss in Forums

The forums are designed with intuitive user interfaces that enable users to discuss common issues and topics, post questions and announcements to the community, watch forums (with notifications) and get updates on posted comments. Users can also create draft versions of postings, personalize their forum themes, or vote in polls.

Forums include extensive and easy-to-use moderation features such as content control by approval processes, by deleting and moving content, and also by closing discussions. The web-based forums admin tool makes it easy to delete, edit and move messages, manage permission-levels and organize the hierarchy of categories and forums.

Look at the material below to get a better understanding on the forum features within SAP NetWeaver Portal.

Forum Overview Presentation 
New Forums Features in SAP NetWeaver 7.3

Demos:

How-to Guides and FAQs: 

Collaborate in Collaboration Rooms

Collaboration offers rooms as configurable virtual working environments for portal users. In a room, the members of teams or project groups can collaborate across time zones and between geographical locations. Rooms are virtual workspaces that can be set up for any topic or purpose. They are especially convenient for teams or work groups, since the rooms ensure that all required tools, services and information sources are available from a single point of access. Collaboration rooms are based on room templates that define the room's structure, content, and access authorizations.

Rooms have the following capabilities:

  • a single point of access to all business-relevant information from documents and business applications
  • ability to share business information and work globally across locations and time zones
  • corporate best-practice standards using template-based rooms that can evolve during their life cycle (the functions of rooms can be extended)
  • integration with 3rd-party groupware systems

For more information look at the following documents:

  • Presentation on Rooms and Room Administration (PDF 1 MB)
    This presentation provides an overview of rooms and explains all administration aspects: Creation of room templates and room parts, room creation, collaboration with team members in rooms, and life cycle management for rooms. 
  • Presentation on Room APIs (PDF 674 KB)
    This presentation covers the following topics: Integration of rooms into SAP applications, Collaboration rooms infrastructure and framework, and the use of the Collaboration room API.
  • Presentation on Room Extensions (PDF 374 KB)
    This presentation provides an overview of room extensions, explains the mapping plan, and how to develop an extension.
  • Presentation on Rooms and External Business Partners (PDF 1.1 MB)
    This presentation explains how to collaborate in virtual rooms with trusted external business partners.  

Integrating Complementary 3rd Party Collaboration Services

Third-party integration helps protect customers' existing investments and lets users work with tools they are familiar with. SAP NetWeaver Collaboration offers various possibilities to create either own collaboration services or integrate complementary 3rd party collaboration services.


Access to e-mail and calendaring services
SAP NetWeaver Portal provides a flexible framework for the integration of e-mails and the calendar services from your groupware server, for example, Microsoft Exchange Server or Lotus Domino Server. For more information, check the presentation about the Groupware Framework. This presentation provides an overview of the groupware framework, and explains how to configure groupware integration for e-mail and calender.

 

Access to synchronous collaboration services (such as instant messaging or web conferencing)
The Synchronous Collaboration Framework (SCF) can be used to connect various synchronous collaboration tools, such as Webex or Instant Messenger, with applications such as rooms that can benefit from this integration. For more information see the presentation on the Synchronous Collaboration Framework.


Application sharing is an interactive collaboration service that allows portal users to share their desktop or run applications with other portal users regardless of their physical location. It can be used for light-weight collaboration scenarios for small user groups. For enterprise-wide use of real-time collaboration services, please consider the integration of third-party real-time collaboration tools. Not sure if your collaboration scenario fits? - Take a look at the document Real-Time Collaboration - Going Forward  or the Administration Guide.

Administrating and Extending SAP's Collaboration Solution

Additional information on how to administrate and extend SAP's Collaboration solution is available in the following resources:

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