13-Sep-2006

New GUI for SAP Portal -- New name for SAP TREX

The German giant is making some interesting portal waves in the footsteps of IBM. Shai Agassi, president of SAP's product and technology group, recently stated that "the next version of SAP's portal, code-named Project Muse, will use AJAX-style development to improve the navigation of SAP application's screens." According to an SAP blog: "Project Muse is being built from the ground up as an open, standards-based architecture -- using Flash and Flex technologies from Adobe/Macromedia." While the screenshots do indeed look interesting, I would rush to add that Flash and Flex are more proprietary than open standards. I guess that's what they meant by "AJAX-style." The concept of Web 2.0 still seems alien to SAP. As readers of the Enterprise Portals Report know, mastering the current SAP Portal interface requires a sharp learning curve and ample training. Beta versions of the new release should be out later in 2006 and are expected to become widely available in 2007. Meanwhile, SAP has taken some of the wraps off its TREX search engine, which the company will be releasing as "SAP Enterprise Search" next year.

- Submitted by: Janus Boye, Contributing Analyst

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