Need some advise/recommendation for Federated Portal implementation (FPN)

[Former Member]

Hi All

We are planning to have FPN. (Content federation)

What we have :-

Dual stack (ABAP+JAVA) systems like CRM,SRM, BI 7.0 and ESS/MSS running on ECC 6.0, and PLM R/3 systems.

Each of above R/3 systems have JAVA stack installed.

Now, we have two suggestions / choices given .

*Choice 1 :- *

We can run Potal (EP / EP Core) on each of JAVA stack to make them as a Producer Portals. i.e CRM,BI,SRM portals will become Producer portals connecting to Consumer Portal.

Install Business packages (BP) of respective R/3 system on respective host where application is installed, for example:- CRM BP will go on CRM Portal ..... SRM BP will go SRM portal.

Choice 2:-

Do not install portal (EP and EP Core) on individual JAVA stack, but create a Single Producer Portal ( Stand alone JAVA stack) and install all BP's of CRM, SRM, on this Single Producer Portal and this portal will connect to main consumer portal.

I want to know:-

What are advantages and disadvantages of above choices given?

As far as I know in choice 1 ( since we do have already JAVA stack installed ), I can run Portal on JAVA stack, thus reducing the requirements of additional Hardware. Easy for maintenance (not to worry about BP dependencies )

Can you please give any more advantages and disadvantages

like performance impact, Administration cost,Maintenance ?

Thank You,

[Former Member]

Hi Sandeep,

Our FPN rollout is on hold due the to confusion in SAP strategy that you have cited.

We have a consumer portal and are focusing on rolling out producer portals on the java stacks of each of the producer components. There is a problem with this though. Our consumer uses LDAP users and groups while our SAP backends rely on their ABAP UMEs. Portals on dual stack systems must use the ABAP UME as their data source. This means that remote roles do not work because the LDAP groups in the consumer cannot be seen and linked in the producer portal. As you know a significant reason for implementing FPN producers is remote roles and the graceful security solution they provide.

The expensive answer to this for now is that we must place a standalone producer portal in between the consumer and the producer backend. This solves the security problem between the 2 systems and provides the integration both ways the FPN was intended to achieve. The cost of this solution however, both from a physical and TCO perspective, has kept us from deploying it in our environment.

We have complained to SAP about this problem but no solution has yet been offered. For now, we are using App Integrator IViews again in place of the FPN solution.

jwise