TÜV Rheinland Employee Portal Relies on FirstSpirit™

CMS with SAP portal integration for global intranet

TÜV Rheinland Group has relaunched its employee portal with the Content Management System FirstSpirit™. The new solution consists of a company-wide platform for communication, work, and applications which supplies detailed information and news from the entire company and allows user-defined configurations for employees for their own information and areas of interest. Considering the capability for seamless integration of the CMS in the current SAP NetWeaver portal which the "Business Package for FirstSpirit™" module enables, the e-Spirit solution made perfect sense as an addition to TÜV Rheinland's SAP strategy.

Integration of the portal with SAP was a central project requirement which FirstSpirit™ enabled in a comprehensive way. "Among the features that were most attractive to us were the automatic integration of portal content with the SAP NetWeaver navigation structure, including all privileges, the diverse multilingual capabilities, and the sophisticated search functionalities in the portal, not to mention its user-friendliness for our online editors", explains TÜV Rheinland project manager, Christian Nonnenmacher, summing up the criteria that were critical in selecting a CMS.

Working together with the developers, e-Spirit, and the IT solution provider, HLP, with its expertise in SAP, the company was able to implement the new CMS in just eight months, including the live launch of its first projects. The primary project goal was to transfer existing information and processes to the new employee portal, named "blueye", and to broaden the global communication functions. To accomplish this, at first the existing content on the German- and Spanish-language intranets were integrated with FirstSpirit™. Now information flows into "blueye" from all the other intranets worldwide. The employee portal then bundles the information coming from and going to all 13,300 employees and that is expected to simplify knowledge sharing in the company even further.

Seamless SAP portal integration

With the Business Package for FirstSpirit™, content and navigation elements are automatically displayed with the look & feel of the TÜV Rheinland portal. "Achieving a truly deep portal integration with a CMS hinges on the ability to elegantly integrate content with the internal portal navigation structure", explains Jörn Bodemann, CEO of e-Spirit AG. "That's why we create content objects right inside the portal. What that means is that there is no loose coupling or linking from NetWeaver to a page that's being maintained by us. This way you can continue using the role and privilege concepts in the portal and thus avoid storing redundant data."

For editors at TÜV this "deep" portal integration means that they can focus entirely on creating and maintaining content without prior knowledge of the workings of SAP. Thus, for example, a link can be placed on another page easily and simply using a tree selection screen, even though the background portal references that are generated are actually rather elaborate from a technical standpoint. Here the FirstSpirit™ CMS ensures link consistency even in cases where the referenced element is expected to change location. A single sign-on feature, which includes an automatic check for write privileges, allows for seamless transition between the CMS and portal servers and thus enables content to be efficiently modified as well.

A critical requirement for the new "blueye" was the design and usability of the central interface. The idea was to bundle information, applications, and processes in one interface and ensure that it was easy to use, even for inexperienced users. To achieve this, it was necessary to adapt the standard SAP portal layout on this basis, and using "Portal Layout Tuning" to ensure consistency with TÜV Rheinland's specific requirements. One of the challenges here was to accommodate extensive use of SAP standard portal functions in the "Knowledge Management & Collaboration" area, which HLP combined with the CMS elements of FirstSpirit™, while making necessary adjustments in view of all the applicable standards. With its cleverly designed navigation concept, the customized portal search function, the innovative personalization options, as well as various detailed features such as an event calendar, there were strong incentives built in for daily use of the portal.

For more information on SAP portal integration with FirstSpirit™, visit www.e-Spirit.com/SAP and www.hlp.de .