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

i have been a portal architect for several years now and have implemented several vendor's products (including SAP's previous product workplace 2.11, TopTier 4.5, and every sp version of the current EP5 product) so perhaps i can at least clear up some of the issues in the first post.

1. Knowledge Management solution consists of the two pieces Content Management and TREX. KM install is optional, but generally done. it is by no means best-of-breed but the integration is fairly good and should be included in the portal license.
2. EP5 still relies on TTP4.5 IIS mechanisms, but with each sp release this is diminished. sp5 is due mid-feb'03, but the true unix port EP6 is due GA mid'03. EP6 will pull many of the moving pieces back into the dB. IIS is their main webserver at this point, but it functions little more (as portal infrastructure) than NTLM authentication passthrough as all calls are interstically filtered/handled by SAPJ2EE.DLL ISAPI. this does all the redirection to the servlets doing the real lifting. obviously if you write ASP functionality and point iViews to them IIS will do more.
3. MSSQL dB required for portal infrastructure alone is ~20Mb out of the box, and only grows minimally w/o KM. i am running named instances on some smaller implementations.
4. i have some small implementations <1k named users running on a single portal server that has a full stack of IIS,base portal,KM,dB. this is obviously not HA, but you can get away with a smaller HW set than you post indicates. TREX and J2EE performance will be your bottlenecks.
5. iView Server - use their SAP J2EE Integration Engine (formerly InQMy). it started small like Oracle's licensing of Orion, but they're working on it. JRun will not be supported in the future according to some slides and they're shipping their new engine as OEM for the new R/3 modules CRM and B/W. it will eventually merge with Web Application Server ( now 6.20 ) that is also J2EE.
6. LDAP - used iPlanet, Novell, MS Active Directory personally and they did their biggest on Siemens product. not much goes in there (~7object schema extension in 3OUs in MSAD) and it will be sucked back into the dB in EP6 anyway.
7. you listed 4 different connector techs to get into R/3. there are at least 5 more that come to mind. you will need to use the one to connect to particular R/3 modules. it will vary greatly depending on your R/3, but there's also Drag&Relate mixed in with your listing and role synch/automation. this can get extremely complicated quickly. ITS was the previous web enabling tech that DOES NOT need EP to produce HTTP R/3.
8. you can get some contacts at ASUG, but generally for a medium sized infrastructure many shops have one "Technical Consultant". add developers as needed and leverage existing dBAs, HW support, et al. perhaps a CM person if that starts growing.
9. there are some other R/3 connector vendors(used them and they can be as complicated as EP), but most shops would rather stick with SAP-on-SAP. SAP may release actual transaction numbers, so i won't comment here, but what you're missing from your discussion is the architectural detail that NLB Nodes can be added to the front for capacity (i believe ~11 is the limit but there are ways around that). i've also seen other load balancing techs used besides MS-NLB.
10. licensing is another whole ball of wax, SAP will find a way to get money out of you, but chances are that if you have an R/3 mySAP.com license that you may already have portal license rights. at this time, EP5sp5 will even include the MSSQL license. MS-AD is free and Novel comes bundled free. you can get downloads from www.iviewstudio.com but they generally don't just snap-in quickly (from my experience).

EP is not you father's portal, and expect to spend some time figuring out the installation or hire professional services, but eventually you'll endup with the portal if you upgrade your R/3 as their roadmaps clearly imply. BEWARE! not all professional services vendors are created equal and with this product there is NO substitute for actual implementation experience with the EXACT version that you plan to deploy. with ~1500 person SAP organization devoted to the portal, this thing evolves quickly.

hope this clears up a bit, there are some yahoo groups, but ASUG is your best bet for actual info Received on Wed Jan 15 2003 - 20:03:38 CET