What is SAP Portal?

SAP NetWeaver Portal [1] (formerly known as SAP Enterprise Portal, EP) offers a single point of access to information, enterprise applications, and services both in and outside your organization. It provides you the tools to manage this knowledge, to analyze and interrelate it, and to share and collaborate on the basis of it. With its coherent interface, role-based content, and personalization features, the portal enables you to focus exclusively on data relevant to your daily decision-making processes. SAP Enterprise Portal is one of the building blocks in the SAP NetWeaverTM architecture. Users only need a desktop and a Web Browser, and can begin work once they have been authenticated in the portal.

Tightly integrated into SAP Enterprise Portal are the knowledge management and collaboration capabilities of SAP NetWeaver, which allow users to share information, and to work together using that information.

Knowledge Management offers capabilities that everyone can use to distribute and access unstructured information within an organization through a heterogeneous repository landscape.

Collaboration brings users, information, and applications together to ensure successful cooperation. All collaboration tools and channels are easily accessible directly from the portal. These tools include collaboration rooms, instant messaging, chat, e-mail, and calendar integration.

SAP Unification Server enables an enterprise to integrate the resources of its information systems and provide unified access to its structured data. It is the engine driving the unification of databases, legacy systems and enterprise applications in SAP Enterprise Portal.

The Portal is used for different purposes.

* Internationalization
* Personalization
* Integration
* Authorization

SAP NetWeaver Portal is the platform for running Web Dynpro applications or Dyn Page applications created by SAP or custom designed for connecting to some ERP functionality.