User Management Engine (UME)

SAP User Management Engine (UME) consists of a user management service in the J2EE Engine of SAP Web Application Server Java that connects to and manages user and group data stored in the user persistence store. As such, the individual portal applications do not have to rely on their own user management and administrators can administer user data centrally through UME.

UME allows you to leverage existing user data repositories in your system infrastructure by connecting to a wide range of repositories using configurable persistence adapters. You can read data from and write data to multiple repositories in parallel.

In addition, you can use different repositories for different sets of users or attributes. For example, global user attributes, such as telephone number, email address, and so on, are written to a corporate directory while SAP-specific data is written to a database.

Furthermore, you can replicate user data from UME to external systems. For example, if you are using UME with SAP Enterprise Portal and want an SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to work with the same user base as the portal, you can configure UME to replicate all user data from the portal to the CRM system.

The following diagram illustrates the architecture of UME:

UME user data can be stored in one or more repositories. Each type of repository has its own persistence adapter. The persistence manager consults the persistence adapters when creating, reading, writing and searching user management data. The application-programming interface (API) is a layer on top of the persistence manager.

Persistence manager consults the persistence adapters when creating, reading, writing and searching user management data. The application-programming interface (API) is a layer on top of the persistence manager.

Persistence adapters for the following types of repositories are available:

·        Database

·        Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory

·        SAP Web Application Server 6.20 and higher

Users can also be stored in several different physical LDAP directory servers, or in different branches of the same LDAP directory server. For more information, see User Management Engine.