Portals
17. August 2009
Why this Blogpost;
In the recent couple of years Portal technology has become increasingly popular concept discussed about in IT and many organisations. Portal technology has been significantly matured since the introduction of first generation portals. From start on introducing of portals, one of the main problems for companies was to get a clear understanding on the concept and the way how to benefit from this technology and how to fit this concept onto their business processes. The expectation is that in the near future more than half of the companies will be owner of some kind of portal implementation. A good reason to have a more closer look on what portal technology is about. Hopefully this Blog is a starting point for an active discussion about issues like, basic architecture, the major portal contenders, future trends, best practises on setting up portals in your organization, what is the impact on integrating portals with your existing application and database infrastructure, and when to decide between commercial product or open source, and so on.
What is Portal
In general, a portal is basically a web site containing a set of modules (portlets) exposing content to the user from different sources. On top of this, offering users the ability to create a site that is personalized for individual interests.
Evolution of portals
First generation portal technologies were mainly supporting internet search and navigation capabilities, providing start point for web consumers for exploring the web. Meanwhile the market for portal technology focuses increasingly on delivering better cooperative information to dedicated user groups.
The next step was offering instrumentation for allowing personalization, notification, collaboration, workflow, knowledge management, groupware and integration of business applications. The general idea is to collect information from different sources, creating a single secured point of access to this information as a library of categorized and personalized content.
When is there a need for a portal
Nowadays lots of companies depend on the information and services they provide to their users via web technologies, say internal staff members, external customers, business partners, etc… In organizational environments where users increasingly make extensive use of web applications, users might be easily get exposed to information overload and find it difficult to locate the needed information or services, in this case there is an obvious need in streamlining and grouping information. To eliminate problems described it would be desirable to set up a portal infrastructure for streamlining and organizing the large flow of information in an effective and efficient manner, so that different type of data owners can be identified by the portal, personalized information is serviced out on relevance and interests of the users according a profile that can be centrally managed by the supporting organization. In this case portal technology can fit in the needs on supplying these kind of services.
Key factors and desired functionality:
- In general portals should support the following list of features.
- Enable single secured access to one look and feel entry point, enabling the user to gain access to different information and services that are offered via different systems.
- Information integration (CMS), enabling different departments to setup and update tailored information for different user groups according a common user profile.
- Personalization, allowing individual users to select the information that are of his interest, able to customize the presentation of this information.
- Task management and workflow, business process modeling . Collaboration and groupware facilities, enabling plugin facilities for enriching the portal environment with all nowadays groupware wikis, IM, alerts, RSS, etc..
- Integration technology to other systems, and other portals via WSRP
Platform and product considerations;
Multiple commercial software vendors have been delivering portal solutions, products from IBM, Oracle (BEA), MS and other solutions all come with relatively high license fees. The costs of integration and implementing can add considerably high investments on top of these license costs. Most of these commercial products have highly advanced application integration features allowing quick linking in with ERP, back offices platforms, CMS, etc.. For many small to medium companies this is far too much than needed and not even desired for. Alternatively there is a large number of OS portal software initiatives enabling ease setup of all needed basic portal facilities, almost out of the box, which can than be customized to individual needs. Aspects to be considered when starting the OS selection process are, easiness of managing and setting up the product, the quality of documentation, the size of community (users and developers), what features come out of the box without requiring additional development, is the product based on nowadays standards, has the product any features beyond authentication and site administration, like CMS, collaboration, and much more things to be considered.
Hope this short introduction will lead to an active discussion on this complex but highly interesting topic.
