Transitioning from Portal to Tempo

I'm in a very small group (3 people) responsible for building and maintaining BPM applications for my company. A few months ago, we started to build all of our new applications in Tempo, and now we want to get our users accustomed to using Tempo. However, we still have several applications that only work in the Portal environment. These applications are large and complex enough that it's not feasible to redesign them as Tempo applications all at once, so for a significant amount of time people will need to be able to use both the Tempo and Portal environments.

Does anyone have experience making this kind of transition from Portal to Tempo? Do you have any advice for how we might handle this?

OriginalPostID-167998

OriginalPostID-167998

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  • Like most things I think that it depends. Are your users switching back and forth between portal\          empo? I would try to keep each user group on one side or the other.

    I had an application back in the early days of tempo when there were only a handful of fields that were "tempo enabled". It was the type of app that had a bunch of front office workers send\\receiving requests and only a few back office workers processing them. Because portal was better (at the time) for managing lots of requests from a single view, it worked great for our back office. Meanwhile the front office liked having tempo's easy to use interface for entering\\managing their requests. My point here being that neither side new or cared about the other. They only know and care about what they are working on.

    So as long as you provide a consistent experience, you're on the right path. If that's not possible, then I would treat portal and tempo as different sites. Your average user won't care about the differences. The worst thing I think is to have tempo and portal mixed on the same application for the same user. Getting a portal popup while working on tempo is bad.
  • Currently, our most frequently used applications are in Portal, but that will change as we build newer applications in Tempo. Our company is relatively small, so the ~300 users of the applications currently in Portal are the same people who will use the newer applications in Tempo. Until we revamp our old applications to work in Tempo, it seems inevitable that many users will need to use both environments. So then I'll just present Tempo to users as a completely different site. What do you think should be the start page for these users, then? suite/apps or suite/tempo? I'm tempted to choose apps because it contains an easy link to tempo, but there is no link that goes the other way. Or is there?

    I'll certainly avoid mixing portal and tempo within applications, though. Thanks for the advice.
  • 0
    Certified Lead Developer
    Following Tips & Tricks webinar may help "Moving from Portal to Tempo: Best Practices"
    Webinar recording - forum.appian.com/.../1
    Slides - forum.appian.com/.../1
  • There used to be a link to portal on tempo(looked like 4 squares in a grid), but I'm not sure if it's just been defaulted off or removed entirely. I searched around the docs but couldn't find anything. I remember there being a configuration setting in the custom.properties file.
  • There's a line that can be included in custom.properties that is supposed to create that link.

    conf.navigation.SHOW_APPS_PORTAL=true

    However, I've implemented this and I don't see the link in our Tempo environment.
  • That's what I was looking for. You may need to restart. If you've done that then it may have been deprecated\\removed.
  • Yeah I restarted, too. I guess it's not a feature anymore. No big deal if I'm going to pitch Tempo to my users as a different site altogether.