Archive - Edition 5: Collaboration

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SAP Collaboration Projects

 

SAP Collaboration Room (mySAP Enterprise Portal Edition)

By Martin Kreyscher, SAP AG – September 12, 2002

 

Introduction

SAP Collaboration Room provides "virtual project rooms" for work groups or teams, based on mySAP Enterprise Portal technology. SAP Collaboration Room follows the same navigation paradigm as the standard portal by using standard mySAP Enterprise Portal concepts such as iViews, pages, and worksets. More importantly, it can reuse and integrate existing portal applications. In addition to giving work groups a single point of access for document and information sharing, it provides task coordination and synchronization with the users' groupware solutions by offering a unified calendar function. Through the integration of real-time collaboration tools like the WebEx Meeting Center, the SAP Collaboration Room extends the work environment to meet the needs of any distributed project team. The creation of Collaboration Rooms is based on templates, which are tailored to different collaboration scenarios (for example, sales opportunity, development project, or event organization). The template concept enables a company to define best practices and standard processes for project management, thus supporting their work groups with predefined Collaboration Rooms.

This article describes the basic concepts of Collaboration Rooms with mySAP Enterprise Portal (EP) 5.0, and takes a look at the future of Collaboration Rooms in mySAP EP 6.0.

 

The Concept of Collaboration Room Versus Portal Roles

The role concept in the mySAP Enterprise Portal allows the portal administrator to make information and tools available for specific user groups. For example, employees can access company news and self-services, whereas managers can have additional access to cost center reports, and sales people to the latest competitor news (figure 1, left). This concept works perfectly, as long as the number of user groups involved is not too large, otherwise the administrative effort becomes too much.

Project teams and working groups are organized on a more granular level. It would be impossible to handle the creation of a large number of project rooms if the portal administrator had to define roles for each of the teams individually. Particularly problematic would be the administration of the team members, who may be assigned to a project temporarily, and therefore cannot be dealt with by central administration.

Therefore, SAP Collaboration Room assigns the administration of the Rooms to authorized portal users. These users do not have full portal administration authorization, but are authorized to create new Collaboration Rooms. When a user creates a Collaboration Room he becomes the Room owner and is responsible for the new Room. After creation, only the owner has access to the Room, and other portal users have to be explicitly invited by the owner to access the Room. The owner can also delete a Room if it is no longer used.

Nimbus/Focus-Modell

Figure 1: Structuring the portal content for different user groups through portal roles (left). The portal administrator defines the content available to the individual. With SAP Collaboration Room (right), every authorized portal user can create new Rooms. The Room owner is responsible for the content of the Room and can invite other portal users into his Room.

 

Navigation and Room Structure

Users who have authorization for the Collaboration Room have a Rooms entry point in the top-level navigation (figure 2). In the second level navigation, users have an overview page where they can access the Rooms of which they are members. Additionally, the user can display their favorite Rooms in the second level navigation for faster access (figure 2).

Nimbus/Focus-Modell

Figure 2: Access to the Collaboration Room using top and second level navigation. The overview page is the central entry point to all Rooms of which a user is a member (detailed navigation to the left). Favorite Rooms can be placed in the second level navigation for faster access.

Navigation between individual Collaboration Rooms is based on standard workset navigation. Each Room consists of a workset, which contains pages and iViews. The pages of a workset can be structured in a flat list or, if the room is a large one with lots of pages, in a hierarchical structure (see example in figure 3). The detailed navigation allows users to move from page to page, as they are used to in the standard portal (figure 3).

Nimbus/Focus-Modell

Figure 3: Navigation between pages of a Room uses the standard detailed navigation.

 

Collaboration Rooms Templates

Collaboration Rooms are based on templates. The structure and the content of the Room are predefined, which makes the creation process very convenient for the portal user. The templates are defined by the portal administrator. They can be tailored to different collaboration scenarios (for example, sales opportunity, development project, event organization). The template concept enables a company to define best practices and standard processes for project management, thus supporting their work groups with "off-the-shelf" Collaboration Rooms.

At the moment SAP ships the following two templates as separate business packages through the iViewStudio:

These templates can be used as examples of what a Collaboration Room can look like. In addition, they are a starting point for modifications when customers want to create their own templates, according to their specific requirements.

 

Collaboration Tools

Key functions of the SAP Collaboration Room delivered with the two standard templates, a general template and a project template (see figures 3 and 4) include:

These features and tools cover only a small part of the possible content of a Collaboration Room. SAP Collaboration Room uses the standard portal technology, which means that any content running in the mySAP Enterprise Portal can be reused in Collaboration Rooms.

Nimbus/Focus-Modell

Figure 4: Collaboration tools (from left): Session History, Team Calendar, and Team Tasks, which are part of the shipped project template.

 

Future Development

With mySAP Enterprise Portal 6.0, new key functions will be added to SAP Collaboration Room. We plan to support a Drag&Drop function between different Room iViews and to add a hierarchical representation of all objects (for example, documents, tasks, business objects) related to a Collaboration Room. Additionally, SAP Collaboration Room will be extended to support communities, making it possible for users to search for and register themselves in public Collaboration Rooms. This will add another level of self-organization to the portal. Portal users will be able to find Rooms and gain access to the contents not only by invitation from portal administrators or Room owners, but also by actively requesting access to a public Room or by registering themselves with a community.

 

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