Transition from SAP Enterprise Portal to the Cloud
Thousands of customers around the world run SAP Enterprise Portal successfully to provide their employees, customers, and partners a central and intuitive access point to business applications, information, and services. Get here some recommendations regarding a transition of your on-premise SAP Enterprise Portal to SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
General recommendations about SAP Enterprise Portal Transition
As a general strategic approach, we recommend to transition your SAP Enterprise Portal use cases to SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), multi-cloud environment. Note that a transition to the Neo environment is not recommended. SAP BTP is SAP’s strategic unified, business-centric platform with an open architecture that turns data into business value.
SAP follows a multi-cloud approach, which enables organizations to run the platform and its services on the cloud infrastructure of selected hyper-scaler partners (Alibaba, Amazon, Google, Microsoft). To help driving innovative digital experiences initiatives, SAP further invests in flexible UX services, tools and UI technologies to develop custom apps and extensions using SAP Business Application Studio and SAP Fiori tools.
Going forward we recommend SAP Enterprise Portal customers considering a transition to SAP BTP multi-cloud environment, in particular to SAP Build Work Zone.
SAP Build Work Zone is part of the new SAP Build portfolio, which was announced at SAP TechEd 2022. SAP Build brings together SAP Build Apps (formerly SAP AppGyver), SAP Build Process Automation (formerly SAP Process Automation), and SAP Build Work Zone (formerly SAP Work Zone and SAP Launchpad service) into a unified experience with new innovations to rapidly build apps, automate processes, and create business sites. SAP Build Work Zone unifies SAP Launchpad service and SAP Work Zone into a single offering empowering business users to build & publish business sites. It is offered in two editions: standard edition (formerly known as SAP Launchpad service) and advanced edition (formerly known as SAP Work Zone).
SAP recommends adopting SAP Build Work Zone (standard or advanced edition) for new projects, and a gradual transition of existing SAP EP based scenarios to SAP BTP.
Why a transition to SAP BTP ?
- The further development of SAP NetWeaver products will be limited primarily to bug fixing and the provision of transition tools to the cloud. Do not expect new functions for SAP Enterprise Portal!
- Cloud offers a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by eliminating the need for complex on-premise infrastructure, systems and costly upgrades
- New, innovative solutions such as SAP Build Work Zone, and other centralized services such as search, and notifications, will be developed and offered exclusively on SAP Business Technology Platform.
A Transition is not a Migration!
- If customers decide for a transition to SAP BTP, they should consider it is not a 1:1 equivalent to SAP Enterprise Portal; hence there is no tool which automatically moves customers from EP to the cloud.
- It is a transition from technology platform SAP NetWeaver to SAP BTP. Besides a transition to SAP Build Work Zone, it needs to be considered which additional services should be used.
- Planning a transition is customer specific and requires detailed analysis depending on use cases, business requirements, capabilities, and your cloud strategy.
- Doing the transition as a gradual process, starting with specific focus scenarios.
- Transition also means cleaning your SAP Enterprise Portal: consider which applications / services should be transferred to the cloud and which are not needed anymore (example custom development).
- Consider that some content / UI technologies from SAP Enterprise Portal can be easily migrated, some should be integrated and some require new development. Transition requires a comprehensive analysis and preparation that probably involves re-thinking and re-design.
How to Reuse Your Legacy On-Premise SAP Enterprise Portal Content
Many SAP customers have rich implementations of on-premise SAP Enterprise Portal that include many classic UIs such as Web Dynpro ABAP, SAP GUI, BSP, and other applications. To expose their legacy on-premise SAP Enterprise Portal apps on SAP BTP, customers can configure their SAP Enterprise Portal as a content provider and bypassing a full migration.
As a System Administrator, you can configure the SAP Enterprise Portal as a remote content provider to SAP Build Work Zone on SAP BTP. This enables you to expose your existing Enterprise Portal content (such as BEx, SAP GUI Applications, Web Dynpro ABAP, and Java) side by side with new content (such as SAP SuccessFactors and SAP S/4HANA) in one single entry point. More information, see this section in the SAP Help Portal.