Maybe you are evaluating SAP Employee Self-Service (ESS) for your company or perhaps you need to get up to speed with the technical and functional aspects of ESS. Either way, this article can improve your understanding of ESS. I’ll give you a behind-the-scenes look at the technology layers that work together to provide ESS functionality. If you are not familiar with ESS terminology, refer to the sidebar, “Glossary of ESS Elements,” which is applicable to both SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) 5.0 and 6.0. First I’ll briefly review ESS from the more familiar end-user perspective starting with the Overview page, which is the user’s entry point to ESS (Figure 1). The system displays the page when the user selects the ESS tab in the portal. From there, users can drill down into areas to find the service they want to use. By selecting the Benefits and Payment link, a user can navigate to the benefits and payment area (Figure 2). Selecting a service link on the benefits and payment page takes the user to the relevant page for that service — in this case, the page for the Employment Verification service (Figure 3).       Now that I have reviewed the basic flow of ESS, let’s see how to achieve your chosen page flow. Configure the page flow in the Homepage Framework configuration steps by going to IMG transaction SPRO. Expand the IMG tree by menu path Cross-Application Components>Homepage Framework. The Homepage Framework creates the navigation links on the ESS pages. Area groups, areas, subareas, and services are organizational elements of the Homepage Framework that you can use to arrange the links. ESS Overview is an area group page; Benefits and Payment is an area page; and Employment Verification is a service page. In the Homepage Framework, the developer assigns services to subareas, which are displayed on the area page. The links to area pages are assigned to an area group that is shown on the area group page. Figure 4 illustrates the end-user view with services, subareas, areas, and area groups.   The Employment Verification service belongs to the Payment subarea of the Benefits and Payment area page. The Benefits and Payment area is one of six areas on the Overview area group page. A configurer or developer can configure area groups, areas, and services to contain descriptive text to guide the users through their choices. During configuration, the developer connects definitions for area groups, areas, and services to their portal pages. The developer creates the connection through another Homepage Framework element called the resource. Figure 5 shows the Homepage Framework definition for the ESS area group and the resource definition that links the area group to a portal page. The Link Resource field contains the name of the resource definition. On the resource definition the URL of PCD Page field contains the URL of the Portal Content Directory (PCD) page. Similarly, areas and services are linked to portal pages. A developer builds the page flow for ESS by defining the page links within the Homepage Framework configuration that SAP delivers for ESS. He or she can change the order, hide delivered framework elements, or add new ones. For further information on the Homepage Framework, go to https://help.sap.com/erp2005_ehp_03/helpdata/EN/aa/9f75620a8d4a2e9181db37f2fa2a62/frameset.htm.   Portal pages are just one kind of content object for SAP NetWeaver Portal. The Business Package, which is a set of delivered SAP NetWeaver Portal content objects, contains iViews, pages, worksets, and roles. Let’s see how these appear to an end user of ESS. Figure 6 shows the ESS Overview page in the portal with the ESS role, worksets, page, and iView highlighted.   Now, I’ll take a closer look at the SAP NetWeaver Portal components of ESS from the behind-the-scenes perspective of a portal content administrator. An iView is a holder for the content that is displayed in a portal page. It shows a view or screen of an application. While a page can contain many iViews, ESS services generally have one iView per page. You’ve already seen that pages act as the connection points for the Homepage Framework resources. Within SAP NetWeaver Portal, pages are grouped into logically related user tasks called worksets. An example of a workset is the Employee Search workset, which is a grouping of Employee Search, Who’s Who, and Change Own Data. You use roles and worksets to define high-level navigation within the portal. In Figure 6, the ESS role is presented as a top-level tab and the worksets within the ESS role are second-level tabs. Users can navigate through ESS either by using the links (which are defined in the Homepage Framework) or by clicking on a workset. Generally in ESS, each area page has a corresponding workset. Clicking on a workset tab takes you to the default page for the workset, which is the corresponding area page and the first page in the workset. The portal content administrator defines this page. The services in the area correspond to additional portal pages in the workset. Figure 7 shows the ESS portal content objects in the Portal Content Studio, the development tool used by the portal content administrator to manage portal content. The portal content administrator groups pages into worksets within a role. The left task bar contains a list of the available portal content objects in the ESS Business Package. On the right side, the detail of the selected ESS role object illustrates how pages are grouped into worksets and how worksets are combined within a role.   You can reuse an iView, page, workset, or role in your design. The ESS Business Package delivers one role for ESS. However, it might make sense at your company to have more than one role. For example, contractors might not have the same services as employees. You can nest worksets and roles: a role within a role and a workset within a workset. In Figure 7, the Employee Search workset is one of many worksets contained in the Employee Self- Service workset, which belongs to the Employee Self-Service role. Some companies might need to customize the portal objects, iViews, pages, worksets, and roles. It is standard practice to create your own portal objects and create a delta link to any standard iViews, pages, worksets, or roles that you wish to use instead of making a copy or directly changing a delivered object. A delta link is a copy with a reference to the portal content object from which you copied, and it allows you to overwrite any attributes that you’d like. Any attributes that you don’t overwrite are taken from the original content. This process ensures that when you upgrade the ESS Business Package, you automatically receive any updates to attributes you have not specifically changed. As a holder for content on a page, the iView’s job is to initiate an application and display the application’s user interface in the iView part of the portal page. Most ESS iViews kick off a Java Web Dynpro application, although some of them kick off Business Server Page applications (e.g., E-Recruiting services), and others kick off an ABAP Web Dynpro application (e.g., company loan). Figure 8 shows the connection of the Web Dynpro application EmploymentSalaryVerification in the Web Dynpro property category of the Employment Verification iView. The portal content administrator maintains the iView properties in the portal content studio.   The EmploymentSalaryVerification Web Dynpro application is an example of a Web Dynpro application for an ESS service. The Java Web Dynpro application for ESS calls programs in the ECC system to read the data that is displayed to the end user and to save any updated data. Besides the Web Dynpro applications for individual ESS services, there is a Web Dynpro application for the area group pages and the area pages called XssMenu. When the Overview area group page is presented to the user, the Overview iView launches XssMenu, which reads the Homepage Framework configuration in ECC to determine a user’s selections. XssMenu finds the areas that are assigned to the area group for the Overview page and displays them, as shown in Figure 4. When the user selects area links on the Overview page, the system presents the selected area page to the user. The iView for the area page launches the XssMenu Web Dynpro application with parameters that provide where to look in the Homepage Framework configuration to find out which subareas and services to present on the selected area page. When the user selects a link for a service, such as Employment Verification, the system displays the portal page for that service. As part of presenting the page, the iView launches the Web Dynpro (or other application) for that service. The Web Dynpro for a service then displays data from the database or allows the user to make updates. To recap, ESS contains components from several technologies. The ESS Business Package contains the SAP NetWeaver Portal components. The ECC system includes the Homepage Framework, the human resources data, and the ABAP code to access the HR data. The Java Web Dynpro applications use the ABAP code to access the data and present it to the end user via the portal components. The portal components provide navigation and a framework for integrating Java Web Dynpro applications and other technologies into ESS. Use the Homepage Framework to define the page flow of ESS. Figure 9 shows the ESS components and their locations in the conceptual architecture.