SAP’s portal offering has evolved from a single product to a portfolio of products available via various deployments options to address your specific business needs.

• SAP Cloud Platform Portal is SAP's future portal strategy and it is the recommended solution for building modern, cloud-based portal sites that range from internal portals for employees and workforce to external portals ranging from supplier portal, partner portal, support portal and more.
• SAP Enterprise Portal is primarily suited for continuing to run sophisticated application portals and corporate intranets, which integrate a great number of applications and content while budiling out the cloud strategy over time.

In the planning phase you should start with an inventory of your current on-premise SAP Enterprise Portal content:

• Identify your Portal use cases and scenarios (Supplier Portal, Employee Portal, Application Portal etc.)
• Identify all applications, portal content, services, and document repositories you use in your current portal.
• Evaluate the usage of your Portal functionality (Business Packages, Universal Worklist, KM, Collaboration, Web Page Composer)
• Identify your used UI technologies (Web Dynpro Java, Web Dynpro ABAP, SAP GUI, BSP etc.)
• Check landscape dependencies between the SAP Enterprise Portal and other connected systems (SAP and 3rd party)

This inventory should be documented and be ready for comparison with the applicable solutions in the SAP Cloud Platform Portal.

Performing a transition is very customer-specific and depends on the required use cases, used portal capabilities, business requirements for the new portal, and your cloud strategy. There are options for a full or partial transition with a hybrid approach.

If customers are not yet ready to completely embrace the cloud-based portal service due to complex on-premise scenarios or unsupported applications that will require some re-development, they can take the first step in direction of the SAP Cloud Platform Portal with a hybrid portal approach. They can keep their on-premise Portal and create a hybrid environment with SAP Enterprise Portal as a content provider for SAP Cloud Platform Portal and bypassing a full transition.

In cases of complex on-premise portals we recommend planning a transition to the cloud as a gradual move in a scenario-oriented approach. You could start for example with the external facing Portal scenario (supplier portal, dealer portal) etc. and later implement the Employee Portal scenario. Check again the Portal deployment guide which outlines the recommendations for typical Portal use cases.

The SAP Cloud Platform Portal is built upon two architectural principals. First, we have the Fiori Launchpad that has the same standard and look/feel as the on-premise Fiori Launchpad. These UI technologies are based on Fiori, the tiles, and the home screen.

Secondarily, we have the SAP Cloud Platform Portal - freestyle edition that is based on a responsive Web 2.0 technologies. A rich set of widgets allow you to build out a consumer-grade portal.

To easily modernize user experience, it is recommended to use standard SAP Fiori Cloud applications when available. These can be integrated into to both the Fiori Launchpad or the freestyle edition. A list of available standard Fiori apps is available from the Fiori Apps library.

You should also consider developing frequently used custom apps as SAP Fiori/UI5 apps.

Some UI technologies such as Web Dynpro ABAP, SAP GUI for HTML or SAP Screen Personas are supported and can be integrated into the cloud. In such cases, the runtime remains on the remote system. Read also Working with Backend Apps. 

Which UI technologies are not supported on SAP Cloud Platform?

Usage of Web Dynpro Java (e.g. custom development) or HTMLB is not supported. It this case a redevelopment to the supported cloud technologies would become necessary. Also, capabilities such as OBN or dynamic runtime URLs are not supported.

If you prefer to avoid a redevelopment, the scenario "Use SAP Enterprise Portal as a content provider for Cloud Portal" would be a solution for you during the period of developing a new strategy for the unsupported technologies. In this case, you keep your SAP Enterprise Portal, the on-premise apps are exposed and can then be added to a launchpad site on SAP Cloud Platform Portal.

SAP classic UIs include SAP GUI, Web Dynpro ABAP, and Business Server Page (BSP) applications. These UI technologies, which are hosted on SAP Netweaver ABAP systems, can be integrated directly with SAP Cloud Platform Portal by creating a connection between their on-premise host system of the application and the SAP Cloud Platform Portal. This is done by creating a destination in the SAP Cloud Platform Subaccount that points to the respective backend. You can choose to expose these UI technologies from the internet or only make them accessible within your intranet. This is determined by the access type, which can be set to either external or internal.

integrate or

SAP EP as a content provider

Yes

See SAP note 2574306 and Configuring In Place Navigation for Classic UIs.

SAP EP as a content provider

Yes

integrate or

SAP EP as a content provider

Yes

See also Configuring In Place Navigation for Classic UIs.

integrate or

SAP EP as a content provider

integrate or

SAP EP as a content provider

SAP EP as a content provider or

Re-develop in SAPUI5 or

Integrate (via URL)

Yes

No

SAP EP as a content provider or

Re-develop in SAPUI5 or

Integrate (via URL)

Yes

No

SAP EP as a content provider or

Re-develop in SAPUI5 or

Integrate (via URL)

Yes

No

SAP EP as a content provider or

Re-develop in SAPUI5 or

Integrate (via URL)

Yes

No

Universal Worklist Workflow support?

Universal Worklist is an SAP Enterprise Portal component that allowed users to see the tasks they needed to work on and had to complete. For example, approve a leave request or other transactions. Universal Worklist has been replaced with the Fiori My Inbox application in the cloud that allows for the display of notifications and tasks that needs to be completed by the user. For more details about how to migrate from Universal Worklist (UWL) to My Inbox go to SAP Note - 2538184.

Workflow is an old concept in SAP and Fiori applications support workflow as it is configured in the backend systems. This is, of course, supported when executing the Fiori Applications in the SAP Cloud Platform Portal. In addition to the backend or LoB application's workflow SAP Cloud Platform has a workflow service that is supported and can be used in the SAP Cloud Platform Portal. An example of this would be self registration and approval before allowing a newly self registered user to access the portal.

With SAP Fiori Cloud and its pre-packaged SAP Fiori apps for SAP Business Suite and SAP S/4HANA, SAP provides a rich set of out of the box apps that can accelerate your transition to cloud. This pre-packaged, cloud-based business content is delivered for various lines of business and customers benefit from automatic updates and maintenance of the frontend UI parts. Check the available applications in the SAP Fiori Reference Library.

Existing SAP EP business packages cannot be consumed if they are Java based. Web Dynpro ABAP can be integrated (see the section: How to transition UI technologies). You can also use EP as a content provider scenario to be still able to use your existing business packages.

In addition, the SAP Cloud Platform Portal comes with pre-defined templates or starter portals that can give you a boost on creating your portal but these pre-defined templates do not contain the applications, but rather a shell for you to get started with.

Customers can brand SAP Cloud Platform Portal sites using the UI theme designer on SAP Cloud Platform to update all colors, corporate brand, fonts, and more. Advanced branding can be done by updating the CSS.

You might be familiar with the traditional L-shape navigation, which can be used for a complex role structure in SAP Enterprise Portal. In addition, the Fiori Framework Page was also introduced to SAP Enterprise Portal in order to renovate Portal UX according to modern SAP Fiori design.
The Fiori launchpad is part of both portal offerings – cloud and on-premise. Thus, SAP Fiori launchpad is one of the available templates for SAP Enterprise Portal and SAP Cloud Platform Portal. If you have already used SAP Fiori end user UX on SAP EP, it will make the transition to the cloud much easier. If you have never used SAP Fiori design on SAP EP, you will need to map the traditional portal L-shape hierarchy into the Fiori launchpad structure on SAP Cloud Platform Portal, which is based on a content model with widgets/tiles, pages, groups, catalogs, and roles. For more information, check the documentation on SAP Fiori launchpad sites.

In addition, there are freestyle sites, which are also based on templates. The templates are either provided out-of-the-box from SAP or they may be created by your developers in SAP Web IDE. You can also use a mixture of freestyle and SAP Fiori launchpad sites.

Depending on the selected UX approach of launchpad or freestyle sites, you have to define the relevant content and permission structure. The best practice is to simplify current information architecture to fit modern UX approach and achieve a more intuitive portal with easy to consume content hierarchies and navigation.

SAP Enterprise Portal offers a migration tool to support the transition process (this tool is valid for SAP NetWeaver 7.3 and higher). This migration tool can be downloaded from SAP Software Download Center and it supports the following iViews types: Web Dynpro ABAP, SAP GUI Transaction, BEx Web Application, and Web-Based URLs. In addition to iViews, the migration tool will migrate the roles and system objects used in the folder structure you would like to migrate.

• iViews become tiles in SAP Cloud Platform Portal
• Roles become catalogs in SAP Cloud Platform Portal
• System Objects become a destination in SAP Cloud Platform Portal

For more information: see documentation and this blog. Note that this migration tool in only available for SAP Cloud Platform Portal on Neo environment.

SAP Partner Egnyte supports the migration of Knowledge Management content from SAP Enterprise Portal to the cloud. Learn about the partnership of Engyte and SAP. Watch this video showing how KM content is migrated from SAP Enterprise Portal to SAP Cloud Platform Portal.

Note that this migration tool in only available for SAP Cloud Platform Portal on Neo environment.

Customers can use any SAML2 based Identity Provider (IdP) to authenticate users who are accessing SAP Cloud Platform Portal. Trust needs to be configured between SAP Cloud Platform and IdP for SSO to work.

Authorizations are always maintained in the respective backend system as PFCG roles. SAP Cloud Platform Portal provides options to determine which authorizations are required to run back-end content from the SAP Fiori launchpad on SAP Cloud Platform, see also on SAP Documentation.