Including interesting features in the new Collaboration Portal

The majority of Internet users are getting very familiar in working with Web 2.0 technologies to customize their user interfaces. With the usage of Ajax SAP provides for the users of the collaboration portal a new UI. This UI is similar to the experience, which most of the web users already have and due to this reason they can create easy their own work environment very quickly and intuitive. The delivered features offer a lot of creative work. Only the iView integration itself makes a lot of tools available in the collaboration workspace, e.g. URL iViews, a Web Dynpro Application, R3 Application, etc. Working with the Collaboration Portal we have included some interesting features, which I would like to present here:

Google Integration - Google is already an established Web 2.0 leader on the web. The collaboration portal itself is based on the Google Web Toolkit. This means it will be possible to make those two great solutions work together. For this reason we have integrated Google Gadgets as iParts in the Collaboration Portal. The integration of the Gadgets can be done very easy using an URL iView, which has same modified properties. The Link in the URL iView is the HTML Code for embedding a Gadget in a website.




 
 
Afterwards an iPart template has to be created by using:

• Portal Application: com.sap.portal.coll.iViewProxyIPart
• Portal Component: IViewProxyComponent
  

After that the iPart template (iView) has to be open for editing, and set the following properties in the Property Editor:

•  iView to Expose: The PCD address of the URL iView to display in the iPart
•  iView Properties to Expose: A set of iView properties to expose in the iPart

The iParts based on Gadgets offer very useful functions like Google Talk for quick communication, translation e.g. Leo, Wikipedia, Deutsche Bahn, etc. The functions based on the Gadgets are organised in several Pages, which provides a good workspace overview. The result looks like: