Hiding certain areas from the overview page of ESS in portal

Question

HI All,
We have a requirement where we need to hide/disable certain areas from the "Overview" page of ESS in portal.
In Overview page, we have certain links like Employee search,Life and work events,
Purchasing and travel and expenses.
I m not able to find these pages under overview workset also.
We have to hide 'Purchasing' and 'life and work events' areas from the overview page as the customer dosent want to use this sap standard impl.
Is the customiztion to be done from portal side or do we need to do it from the IMG??
Can someone pls tell us in detail how to do it?

Answer 1

It sounds like first you need to understand the Overview page and how it gets built. This all comes from the Homepage Framework configuration in the BACKEND (ECC box). Look in the IMG under "Cross Application Components" (or in the ESS section as will which actually has the same section) to find the configuration area. The Homepage Framework configuration however is also tightly coupled to the portal content (ie. objects in a portal role PCD path are tied to configuration "resources" in the Homepage Framework configuration). I won't get into all that, as there is plenty of material in these forums and documentation (help.sap.com) that describes the details of how all of this works. However, to answer your immediate question....
Ok....so the "lazy man's approach" is fairly simple....in the IMG where you assign the Areas to the Area Group, you can simply change the display order number of the ones you want hidden to 0 (zero)....this will at least keep your standard entries in place....or you can just delete them from the assignment to the Area Group in the "change" step.
Sooooo....that gets them off the Overview (Area Group) page. However, they will still be in the standard delivered portal role (for example, the worksets will still show up in the second line of the top level navigation). So you need to remove the worksets from there.
Now, I call the above the "lazy man's approach" because in actuality, you should build your own custom Homepage Framework to your needs. This way it is safer, customized and you are not touching the standard, delivered entries so you can use them as reference later. Also, you should be doing the same on the portal side....ie. build you own custom role based on delta-linked copies of the standard objects (worksets, pages, and iViews). This might seem like a lot of work, but it is way more flexible....for example, if you need several different ESS "versions" to accomodate different types of users.