Many-to-One user mapping to backend systems - possible?

Question

My apologies if this simple question has been asked many times earlier - I couldn't find it if it is so.
I understand I can use user-mapping in single signon to map user X in portal to user A in backend system (say SAP BI).
Can I map users X, Y, Z..... to one backend user A?
What alternative I have (to let a number of portal users run some BW reports on the backend system - for which we want to use only one BI user-id)?

Answer 1

An easier more manageble way of doing this is to create a group and assign the group to a backend user. That will establish your many to one relationship.
We perform this for our vendors currently as they would like to see a single shopping cart in SRM.
Just be cautious on the manner in which you leverage your single user as you can experience several locked objects depending on how things are accessed. Another thing to consider is making the backend user a service user as this will also allow you to change the password mapping policies on the users as in many cases you will need to remap the users every N days depending on your systems security parameters.
Hope this helps.