A Complete Guide to Portals and User Experience Platforms

Shailesh Kumar Shivakumar

• Publisher: Chapman and Hall/CRC
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781498725491
• eBook ISBN: 9781498777513
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Build a Next-Generation Enterprise Digital Platform with Portals and UXPA Complete Guide to Portals and User Experience Platforms provides in-depth coverage of portal technologies and user experience platforms (UXPs), which form the key pillars of a modern digital platform. Drawing on his experience in various roles in numerous portal engagements,

Section I

The Art of Developing Portals

1

Thinking in Portals: Introduction to Portals

The term “portal” means different things to different people. The legacy definition of portal refers to a portal as a web page with multiple “sections or fragments” whereas modern enterprise architects use formal Java Specification Requests (JSR) such as JSR 168 and JSR 286 to explain portal terminologies. Marketing folks refer to a portal as a tool to provide a holistic user experience and normal web users would perceive a portal as a gateway to all personalized services and functionality. So, obviously, there exist multiple view points for the term “portal”.

In this chapter, we will try to understand the key concepts, standards, and motivations for using portal technology. This chapter serves as an introduction to portal concepts such as personalization and content management. We will elaborate on each of the core concepts and scenarios in coming chapters. Portal architects, students, developers, and business analysts would find this chapter useful.

What Are Portals?

Portals are web platforms that provide personalized and secured aggregation platform. Their main strength lies in providing optimal integrations and exceptional user experience to drive business outcomes and cost savings. They enable the business models through various means such as self-service, collaboration, analytics, search, content management, etc. In this section we will look at the various roles of a portal and its features and types.

Brief History of Portals

Portals have a close relationship with the history of web browsers. Early portals emerged in the late 1990s and they provided a link-based gateway for the Internet. Most of the browser vendors were interested in developing a single entry point for the Internet and developed portals for that. First-generation portals mainly were utility based, which contained links to the most popular web sites or functionalities such as stocks, weather sites, search sites, news links, etc. Companies such as AOL and Yahoo! provided early portal-like features. These were mainly static link and functionality aggregation.

Soon, many large software vendors realized the importance of portal functionality and started building fully featured portal products. Those enterprise portal products provided in-built functionality to deploy a full-fledged enterprise portal. Some of the major players in this area built the portal on top of their existing application server infrastructure. These portals mainly provided information aggregation, prebuilt UI components such as themes and skins, personalization, out-of-the-box portlets, site administration features, and user management features. Later, portal standards begin to emerge. JSR 168 standard was created in 2003 and JSR 286 in 2008. Standards helped the developers to develop portable and standards-based portal applications. The portal products leveraged the standards and became the platform-of-choice for delivering personalized content aggregation for enterprises.

Since then, portals have evolved on multiple fronts. The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX and widgets have influenced the front-end technologies in portals; on the integration side, web services and Representational State Transfer (REST) services have gained popularity; cloud hosting is gaining traction on the deployment side of things. We will look at the emerging trends in Chapter 21.

Today, we have mature enterprise portal products that are available in the market such as Liferay Portal, IBM WebSphere Portal, BackBase, Oracle WebCenter portal, Microsoft Sharepoint Portal, etc.

Portals are a unique combination of multiple technologies that have wide potential in multiple business scenarios. Let us try to look at some of the perspectives and viewpoints about portal.

Portal as a Concept

The term “portal” literally means a gateway or an entry point. Historically, portals were used as a unified gateway for other web pages and applications through links. Even today, any reference to portal will include a scenario to provide “unified” or “single-stop shop” or “single point of access” kind of experiences. Portals provide a convergence of various technologies, platforms, and disparate applications and services.

So portal essentially serves as a starting point for any functionality and user journey. In the digital world, portal usually serves as a front-end application that weaves a lot of underlying enterprise applications and functionality.

Portal as a Technology

A portal is a web application that provides a unified and personalized view of applications and functionality through single sign-on (SSO) and content aggregation from multiple sources. Essentially, portal is a “specialized” web application that provides value-added services such as:

• Personalization to provide relevant content, functionality, and user preferences– based experience, content, data, and functionality
• SSO to provide seamless login to all links and applications provided by the portal
• Content management to author, manage, and publish various content formats
• Data aggregation from various sources such as ERP systems, database, web services, legacy systems, third party external applications, etc.
• Secure search facilities to provide a unified and secured search covering all enterprise data source
• Localization of content to provide the content and web pages in various languages
• Multichannel access to provide the functionality on multitude of devices such as PDAs, tables, and smartphones in addition to desktop browsers
• Social and collaboration features such as blogs, wikis, communities, forums, chat, etc.

In addition, a few portals also cater to specialized scenarios such as workflow management, process orchestration, dashboards, analytics, reporting, and business rules management wherever necessary.

Portals as a Business Enabler

Portals are key components of digital journey of an enterprise. Portals are the primary technology enablers for realizing the digital vision for an enterprise. Portals are uniquely positioned to address both business and technical challenges and realize the goals of online strategy.

Portals allow aggregation of heterogeneous applications and data and help in streamlining functionality related to people, process, and technology. Many of the business goals such as providing consistent brand experience, providing consolidated and holistic view of services, productivity enhancements, collaboration, optimizing total cost of ownership (TCO), and self-service can be realized through the effective application of portal technologies.

Core Features of Portals

We have seen the main portal utilities in the earlier section. Following are the main features of the portal technology framework:

• Single-sign-on (SSO): Portal will be able to provide SSO with secured applications and services.
• Enterprise integration: This is one of the main strengths of portal by which it provides various...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface A: Gateway to Portals and UXPs
• Acknowledgments
• Author
• Section I The Art of Developing Portals
• Section II User Experience Platforms and Advanced Portal Topics
• Section III Case Studies
• Appendix: Detailed Steps for Development of JSR Portlets
• Further Reading
• Index