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http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2008/01/introduction-enterprise-portals.html
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by Peter Laird
01/30/2008
What is an Enterprise Portal? BEA and other enterprise software vendors offer products in this area, but what do they accomplish? How do you know when you need a portal?
This article covers the enterprise portal space and the problems that portals solve. I will discuss application integration, security consolidation, content aggregation, and collaboration. This content is aimed at CIOs, IT architects, and IT management.
I will begin the discussion of enterprise portals by talking about life without them. This will establish the need and appeal of portal projects as solutions to problems found with non-portal applications.
Business users and customers are usually the heaviest users of IT systems. Users like customer service representatives (CSRs), purchasing agents, and financial analysts fall into this category. They often spend the majority of their day working with enterprise IT applications. When the users of the application are employees, it is called a Business to Employee (B2E) system. When the users are customers, it is a Business to Consumer (B2C) application.
While they find utility in these IT applications, there can be major barriers to productivity that make their experience painful. Solving these problems can result in major cost savings and increased morale for B2E applications. In B2C cases, the increased productivity can result in higher revenue and higher customer satisfaction.
Here are a set of problems that these users encounter.
This is a common complaint, especially among CSRs. When enterprise applications aren't integrated, users find that they to need to bounce through many windows to accomplish a single task. Each window is the front end to a different application. First, finding the information they need is a challenge. Second, the users must copy and paste data from window to window to check on the status of an order, cancel a shipment, or process a new customer account. This is not only time consuming, but error prone as well.
This is another problem caused by having each employee touch many applications to carry out their job. Every application requires a training cycle, especially when every application has its own style and design. Some may not even be Web applications, but terminal applications or fat client applications. While computer-literate employees will have less trouble training on the different user interfaces, users without much background in computers will have a great amount of pain in learning each application.
This is a common problem not only within the enterprise, but on the consumer Web as well. When users are forced to have many distinct user accounts and passwords, they often resort to bad practices such as written passwords on sticky notes. That makes this problem not just a nuisance, but a serious security issue as well. While solving this problem does not necessarily require a portal, a portal implementation is a common solution.
While all of the above issues apply to B2C applications, a special issue affecting B2C applications is the need to correctly brand the user interface. This is a problem if the back-end applications do not carry a consistent look and feel (like colors and fonts). It can also be a problem when the enterprise markets the same products under multiple brands. The appearance of the site needs to change based on the identity of the customer.
How much of your business is managed through Excel spreadsheets and how much intellectual property is captured using a PowerPoint presentation? Business users live and thrive inside of Microsoft Office documents, and they depend on them to do their job. Unfortunately, these business-critical documents often are shared using email or simple network attached storage devices. These informal mechanisms make it difficult for users to locate the documents they need, provide poor security on these documents, and can cause issues when multiple versions of the same document are circulating within the organization.
The previous section focused on issues often faced by business users and customers who interact with enterprise applications. Now let's focus on the set of pain points that IT workers, including the CIO, must endure.
In most enterprises, Web application sprawl is a major issue. The cost of just "keeping the lights on" is extremely high, as each Web application is individually managed. Keeping track of the software licenses, Service Level Agreements, hardware, and application URLs can be a nightmare. A huge portion of a CIO's budget goes to managing all these independent systems.
With Web application sprawl comes major security issues. Provisioning a new user or removing a terminated employee is costly and time consuming because the security change must be made in many applications. Additionally, it is difficult to enforce consistent security policies across the organization.
Enterprise Web applications typically need a common set of services and features. Features include dynamic user interface capabilities, consistent look and feel, and personalization capabilities. Services include content management, search, collaboration, and a security service. When an organization does not have a consistent enterprise development platform, every Web application is likely to have different and redundant solutions for these requirements.
If IT does not provide sufficient systems for collaboration, business users are likely to take matters into their own hands and provision their own. While this satisfies an immediate need, the long-term effect can be disastrous. Outside of IT, who will manage security, backups, and uptime for those applications? Often, those aspects are neglected until a serious negative event occurs.
The common thread that ties together the problems listed above are that they are solved using an enterprise portal solution. Enterprise portals benefit end users and their IT managers and developers by providing consistent solutions for each of these problems.
Portals are first and foremost a user interface paradigm. Portal user interfaces divide the browser into the following components:
See Figure 1 for an illustration of a portal user interface:
Figure 1. A sample portal user interface
But an enterprise portal is much more than a user interface design. In fact, some enterprise portals do not use the standard portal user interface. Additional services are required to support a true enterprise portal platform that can serve as the application infrastructure for the enterprise.
Figure 2 shows the service ecosystem that is included in most enterprise portal products to make it a compelling platform for application development within the enterprise:
Figure 2. A sample enterprise portal product offering
While not all of these components are necessary in a product offering, the major components are as follows:
Enterprise portal products are therefore sizable pieces of software. They not only provide user interface capabilities, but they also provide major features in support of portal initiatives.
Vendors have long been supporting enterprise portal initiatives with portal product offerings. Most of the major vendors in the space have been delivering product for 8 to 10 years. While the enterprise portal market is not as mature as databases, Web servers, or Java application servers, it is a well-established product space. The list below contains a sampling of the major enterprise portal products:
As with any enterprise software product, a software selection process is necessary to decide which portal platform is right for your enterprise. Data sheets and white papers are available from each vendor to help with the decision process.
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With a brief overview of enterprise portals complete, this section will discuss the major types of enterprise portal implementations. Industry analysts and portal vendors have identified a set of common enterprise portal patterns that are seen in enterprises throughout the world. We will look at each pattern and discuss what each accomplishes.
Typically, the first portal to be implemented in an organization, a content portal is largely a read-only platform that aggregates enterprise content from many sources throughout the enterprise. Value-add services such as search and content authorization enhance the basic benefit of a unified content Web site.
Figure 3 shows an example of a content portal. It is a Web site that provides information via a set of portlets on the page. Each portlet surfaces a different type of content. It is laid out on the page such that the portal becomes a quick method of finding a document. Built into this portal is a search service and an authorization mechanism to make sure only the right users see sensitive information.
Figure 3. An example of a content portal
The following are characteristics and benefits of content portals:
Whichever name is used, integration or transaction, this type of portal focuses on surfacing application functionality within portlets in a portal. They move beyond content portals in that they not only display documents and textual information, but they also surface data from back-end data sources and allow users to interact with that data.
Figure 4 shows a banking portal, which allows a user to view their account balances and make wire transfers. Each portlet surfaces a back-end application.
Figure 4. An integration portal for a bank
The following are characteristics and benefits of integration portals:
A more recent trend in enterprise portal implementations is to provide portals that support ad hoc or short lived project work. These portals provide collaboration features that enable groups of users to self-organize and then share information and ideas through a dedicated project portal.
Figure 5 depicts a sample collaboration portal implementation:
Figure 5. A collaboration portal, offering forums, shared documents, and group calendar
The following are characteristics and benefits of collaboration portals:
The final enterprise portal pattern is the process portal. A process portal is an implementation that goes beyond an integration portal in its depth of functionality. Instead of making point-to-point integrations with back-end applications, a process portal will support a user interface that enables users to enlist in a business process that spans multiple back-end systems. A process portal will often seamlessly cross departmental boundaries, integrating applications from Sales, Engineering, HR, and Manufacturing into an end-to-end process with a unified user interface.
Figure 6 illustrates the logical implementation of a process portal.
Figure 6. Process portals enlist multiple back-end systems in a unified process
The following are characteristics and benefits of process portals:
The common theme across the different implementation patterns is that of aggregation. In all cases, enterprise portals aggregate functionality from many enterprise applications into a single point of access for users, and a single point of control and development for IT. This simple concept provides a solution to the problems listed at the beginning of this article.
To review, the following section lists the problems afflicting business users and customers, and how enterprise portals provide a solution:
For IT, the following problems were presented, and now solved using enterprise portal technology:
In this article I have discussed the following:
Analysts that cover the Enterprise Portal space:
BEA Resources
BEA Case Studies
Peter Laird is the Managing Architect of the WebLogic Portal product.
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