Evaluation of Enterprise Portals - MS Sharepoint /WebSphere, SAP Enterprise Portals & Oracle 9iAS

[Quoted] I am shortlisting vendors for evaluating among different portal solutions. We are a large enterprise customer and we use many back office systems including SAP R/3, Siebel, Clarify,etc.

I have been told that SAP Enterprise Portals is the best portal and it is claimed to be the only best portal solution that as seamless integration to SAP R/3. I am not sure about this claim. I have already looked at SAP enterprise Portal 5.0 in detail the portal solution needs the following components and in most cases each of these components are running on individual Windows servers:
- COntent management server

• Trex retrieval and classification server
• web server - Microsoft IIS
• Persistence layer - MS SQL Server
• iView Server - with a J2EE Web Server-Allaire JRun
• LDAP Server - Novell
• SAP Unification Server
• SAP ITS Server
• SAP DCOM Connector Server
• SAP JCo connector

If you are interested you can find more info on SAP Portals (documentation) at http://help.sap.com > mySAP Cross Industry Solutions > SAP Enterprise Portals

Looking at the myriad technologies there is just mind boggling the SAP Enterprise portal as 2 MS SQL Server databases , SAP are saying they are replacing that by two Oracle databases. There is a Allaire JRun server, MS .Net, MS IIS, SAP DCom Server and SAP Java JCo connector.

The technology in there is just confusing and mind boggling there are so many moving parts atleast I would imagine to get one portal running there are atleast 5 ro 6 Windows 2000 Servers needed and 2 database instances, so many SAP connector technologies. I am wondering how many people would be needed to run this spaghetti cocktail of so many technologies from Microsoft, Java, Oracle, COM/DCOM, IIS, Novell all put into one kettle. Apart from that these myriad cocktail of technologies how could they be even managed there seems not one consistent modelling and management tool. First experiences with some of customers trying SAP Enterprise portals as indicated it is not easy to just plug and play SAP portals against SAP R/3 there is lot of ABAP and other coding needed to put together the SAP Unification Server and only then it will all breathe. If something stops working in this myriad grouping of technologies I feel it would be so difficult to discover what broke and why ? since there is hardly any management tool within the SAP portals.I am also sceptical about the scalability of a solution built with so many point solutions all glued together.

Apart from it I am not seeing enough 3rd party momentum in building the so called iViews unlike Sharepoint where the portlets are called Webparts and in the Java world the Portlets there is no big momentum of 3rd party ISVs building so called iViews similar to Portlets for SAP Portals.

Considering all this I am wondering can somebody point me what are the advantages/disadvantages of implementing a portal solution using WebSphere portal or MS Sharepoint or Oracle 9iAs Portal. Please throw some light of the limitations of SAP Enterprise portals if you know of any since at this stage the only one solution I have researched is SAP Portals. The only serious contender to SAP I have heard is Web sphere not sure about the MS Sharepoint portals. Can you please provide your experiences with some of the portal solutions are using/implementing.

Thanks
Belinda Received on Mon Jan 13 2003 - 11:02:43 CET