SAP

Success Story

With 12 million users, 96,400 installations, and more than 1,500 partners, SAP is the world's largest inter-enterprise software company and the world's third-largest independent software provider overall. SAP employs more than 34,000 people in more than 50 countries.

Challenge

In 2002, SAP introduced SAP NetWeaver*, an open application development and integration platform. As part of this strategic move, the company wanted to introduce a corresponding developer network for the SAP technical community to obtain and share the latest information.

Hosted at www.sdn.sap.com, SAP Developer Network began in 2003 as a comprehensive content and collaboration hub for developers, partners, consultants and system administrators. Built on SAP NetWeaver and SAP Enterprise Portal, the site offers a variety of resources including technical information, advice and code samples. To offer users secure, role-based access to the site, SAP needed a scalable directory to manage user identities.

Novell solution

The SAP Developer Network integrates information from several different sources to provide content and tools in a single interactive format. SAP selected Novell® eDirectory™ to manage user identities and provide users with personalized access to the developer portal. A key consideration in the decision was the fact that the Novell eDirectory is certified for SAP NetWeaver.

"Novell eDirectory is a great fit with SAP Enterprise Portal," said Ran Cliff, Director of the SDN Platform Team at SAP. "eDirectory is extremely scalable so we can easily manage our more than 250,000 user identities and give users role-based access to our SAP Developer Network."

With Novell eDirectory, SAP administrators give users a single user ID and password to access all the resources available through the developer portal. Novell eDirectory authenticates users to the site and provides personalized access based on the user's identity and role. Users can easily update their own personal profiles, which are stored in eDirectory, and even have electronic business cards that they can share with other users.

"The SAP Developer Network serves internal SAP employees, as well as partners, customers and other public users," said Ziv Carthy, Vice President of Developer Programs at SAP. "We needed to control access to the site, but also needed the flexibility to provide specific information to certain groups of users. With Novell eDirectory, we can give our users access to information relevant to their relationship with SAP."

Since its inception, the SAP Developer Network has successfully created a large and active SAP technical community that has dramatically improved collaboration among developers and SAP NetWeaver enthusiasts. The site offers Web-based training, evaluation systems and discussion forums to help customers and partners build enterprise applications, extend existing systems and champion integration projects.

"We are extremely proud of the community we have created with the SAP Developer Network in the past few years," said Carthy. "We get great feedback from our users and have been impressed not only with the number of registered users, but also with the amount of collaboration. This site has had a big impact on our customers' success with SAP NetWeaver."

Novell eDirectory is based on standard LDAP protocols so SAP developers can easily integrate third-party tools to its portal, such as a discussion group application to manage forums, as well as several statistics and reporting tools that enable SAP to learn more about its users.

"Having Novell eDirectory at the heart of our developer portal allows us to maintain a secure site," said Cliff. "We can ensure that users get the right information, whether they are internal or external. We can also run usage reports to learn more about the locations and interests of our users."

Because the developer portal requires high availability, SAP uses eDirectory to synchronize user information on two different servers so that if one server goes down, the other will continue to function without interruption. This configuration also supports rapid growth as the company is adding thousands of new users each month.

Results

Novell eDirectory has streamlined identity management for the SAP Developer Network and helps provide a secure and content-rich site for a growing SAP technical community. The site now has more than 250,000 registered users with thousands of unique visitors per day.

The SAP Developer Network has also reduced helpdesk calls because so many answers to user questions are now available on the Web site and in discussion groups. The site receives approximately 1,200 messages a day and most questions are answered within an hour from users across multiple time zones.

"Novell eDirectory helps us effectively manage both the users and the applications in our SAP Developer Network," said Carthy. "Many of our customers are working on complicated and extensive projects. Having secure and easy access to our developer portal greatly reduces their implementation time and increases their rate of success. In turn, their ability to collaborate and share solutions helps thousands of other users."