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Janus Boye

SAP NetWeaver Portal moves slowly ahead on wiki support

8-Apr-2008

Tags: Portals and Content Integration, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, SAP NetWeaver

In recent news from the SAP Community Network, wiki functionality will soon get included in the SAP NetWeaver Portal offering. Actually SAP expects to ship a beta in Q3 2008, which will be built based on Clearspace Jive and integrated via iViews (SAP-speak for portlets), with support for portal roles. However, a final release is not slated until Q2 2009 -- a rather long time in wiki-years.

Many other vendors have recently added wiki functionality to their products, including:

• Stellent built it themselves back in February 2006. Stellent was later bought by Oracle, which has a somewhat problematic integration using an open source wiki with its WebCenter suite.
• Microsoft drummed up hype about integration with wiki vendor Atlassian in October 2007.
• FatWire bought a local wiki vendor in November 2007.

What I find particularly interesting in SAP's announcement is their overall approach. Clearly SAP is filling an unmet need among their customer base, but they are suggesting a solution that does not (yet) implement SAP product standards when it comes to usability, performance, maintainability, security, and licensing terms. Also the wiki will not integrate into "workspaces" in the portal, which reduces its value somewhat.

SAP also cautions that this initial beta version comes without any future guarantees of backwards compatibility. Specifically SAP states that, "in case of an upgrade, content cannot be saved. The beta version is only a test version." So, if you want to experiment with a wiki inside the enterprise, my recommendation is that you look outside the SAP universe for a better alternative, at least until the expected general availability release.