5 things you must know as a Portal Administrator

I was asked by many people and colleagues to provide them a quick reference checklist that covers basics of Netweaver Portal Administration. Even interviewers have a checklist in their mind about what basic topics to cover in an interview. I am not a Netweaver portal expert, but after working over all these years, whatever I think as must know topics for a Portal Admin would be covered in this post. If you think some topic must be there in the list, feel free to comment or contact me.

Usage Types

This is the major difference in Enterprise Portal 6.0 and Netweaver Portal 7.0. SAP came with a concept of usage types to make life easy for administrators. Earlier we had to install Development Infrastructure manually on different server, but after EP 6.0, SAP introduced usage type DI that can install NWDI by just clicking a check box. Isn’t that cool?

Quick Tip- CAF and Guided Procedures are part of EP Core usage type.

SLD

Configuration of SLD is a must know if you call yourself portal administraotr. There are two ways of configuring SLD. Most of the people do it manually. But you would also love to automated way of configuring SLD

JCO

Java Connectors is also one of the major topic to know. As a developer also you need to know how is your webdynpro application fetching the data from RFC

Properties of Iview, workset and roles

Basic properties like delta links, isolation methods and its different values like embedded and URL are must to know. 

Admin Tools

Various tools like Visual admin, Config tool and offline config editor are some of the tools that you must be conversent of.  

SSO and System Configurations

Single Sign On is one of the major feature of SAP Netweaver Portal. You are expected to know about it whenever you go for an interview. What are its dependencies and what are the cases when it would not work are important to know