The Portal Collective

Portal panels let individuality take a prime role in your business enterprise

by Stewart McKie                

Portlets, web parts, miniapps, and e-clips - whatever you call them, the building blocks of portals are fast becoming the true components of next-generation business application frameworks. These building blocks - or panels, to avoid using a proprietary marketing term - are finally making the task of assembling personalized, cellular applications easier for business users to manage themselves. Portals have evolved beyond merely acting as a front end to corporate intranets and are fast becoming the core framework for delivering loosely coupled functionality sets to users over the Internet.

The Role of Portal Panels

Just as the attraction of an advent calendar is opening all those little doors to reveal the religious icon behind them, a portal's real attraction resides in its ability to deliver a range of panels, personalized both to organizational and individual needs. These panels are effectively discrete components that have their own content source and behavior and operate within the portal framework. Each portal's view has individuality from the combination of these panels, and the panels' content and behavior give the portal its power.

The primary function of any portal panel is to deliver content from inside or outside the corporate firewall. The content can come from a Web site, a database, or a number of other data sources and can take many forms, including:

• A view on data extracted from an ERP or CRM system's database
• A self-service form for interacting with a database
• A link listing to connect viewers to press releases, full-text articles, or affiliate sites
• A static image, streaming video, or sound clip
• A fully functioning applet, such as an email inbox or interactive chat dialog.

Ideally, you should define the content source of any portal panel as a URL, with separate servlets - chunks of code that can reach out to Web sites or into databases - delivering the content to the panel and managing any user interaction with the content. This method makes updating the content source of a panel as easy as simply changing the URL it "calls" and encourages internal IT people to accelerate efforts to make all internal content, not just HTML pages, addressable via a URL.

A portal panel typically has certain default behaviors, for example:

• Portal administrators can allow or disallow users to view the panel.
• You can expand and collapse the panel to maximize and minimize the screen real estate it occupies.
• Users can elect to view or hide the panels to which they have access.

The behavioral richness of a panel is one aspect of its sophistication, as is the ability to customize and add to this range of behavior using high-level scripting languages.

Panel Libraries

Portal vendors know that if they can deliver a wide range of panels with preconfigured content sources, their portal product will be more attractive to their target customers - the people who build and administer portals. Most vendors offer a library of panels and may even provide interoperability with other vendors' offerings.

Panel libraries typically include preconfigured panels that deliver newsfeeds, portal or Web search capabilities, stock tickers, or content from the portal vendor's affiliate partners. The library may also include panels that provide views of or self-service data entry into popular business applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, SAP R/3, or Siebel's CRM system. Having this panel library makes assembling a corporate or Web portal for internal users, the general public, or a business partner's extranet significantly easier.

Portal software vendors expose their panel-building tools to let portal administrators build their own panels to add into the library. Portal users can then add their own organization-specific panels for use in their personalized version of the portal. The portal vendor's software partners can also expand the library by delivering add-ins that expose their application's data and functions to the portal via a panel.

Panel Beaters

The people who beat portal panels into shape are the portal administrators and users. Administrators specify which panels are available to user groups or user roles and configure some aspects of the individual panels' behavior and content. Corporate intranets can deliver portal views that are consistent with corporate security and "need-to-know" information access policies. Administrators of public or extranet Web sites can vary the portal view depending on the community or even other categorization tags that are associated with the Web site visitor.

Portal users can elect to see or hide a panel, reposition it on the screen to reflect their priorities, and select cosmetic preferences (such as color scheme) to suit their individual tastes. Portal panels are instrumental in delivering application and functional personalization so that a portal reflects the user's personal "workview." The increasing range of panels available to the portal decreases the need to log in to individual applications. The portal exposes the discrete applications; the underlying business logic manages the panels that users have permission to access and handles the separate application logins.

Portal Panelists

Plumtree Software Inc. and Viador Inc. have libraries of Gadgets and Portlets respectively, which supply functions specific to their portals, content from third parties (such as newsfeeds), and interaction with popular business management applications from vendors such as BusinessObjects, Lotus Development Corp., PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel Systems Inc. Both Plumtree and Viador also maintain Web sites to support their own community of panel builders. At these sites you can learn about their panel offerings and upload or download panel code to offer to portal users or for use in your portal. Table 1 lists some additional leading portal vendors, their terminology, and panel support.

Microsoft's Web Parts is a wrapper schema for extensible markup language (XML), HTML, and other scripts for rendering a panel and its content in a Microsoft Digital Dashboard (a customized version of the Microsoft Outlook Today page). Microsoft supplies its own Web Parts to support applications such as Microsoft Exchange 2000 and Microsoft Office 2000 and lets you store Web Parts in a variety of ways, such as in the Microsoft Windows file system or Microsoft SQL Server. Web Parts uses other Microsoft technology such as NetMeeting and the Windows Media Player for online chat and streaming audio or video. Other portal vendors, such as LINQ and Plumtree, claim to support Microsoft Web Parts for display in their portals.

SAP recognized the power of panels as a way to construct personalized MySAP.

com Workplaces and now offers dozens of MiniApps for assembling into these Workplace portals. In essence, these panels are what their name suggests: applets for accessing functionality and data from across the broad suite of SAP applications. These MiniApps are essentially proprietary to the MySAP.com environment but could be reusable in other portals that support the MiniApp specification. SAP's MiniApp concept argues that every single menu option in a preportal application design could be delivered as a panel in the current generation of portals.

Proprietary Panels

Unfortunately, no current standard for specifying and delivering portal panels exists, although the real differences between various implementations are probably minor. (Of course, Microsoft would undoubtedly like its Web Parts to become a commercial standard.) A standard is desirable, as is a central library that is accessible on the Web for publishing and subscribing to these standard-specified panels - perhaps along the same lines as the current universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI) initiative for discovering e-services and e-service providers.

Portals are quickly moving toward the forefront for achieving business application integration from a user perspective, and panels are the primary method for customizing and personalizing a portal. Application vendors, like SAP, are steadily converting their monolithic applications suites into more nimble collections of portal panels that can be assembled around the user's needs and complemented by other panels that deliver content from outside their application environment. Vendors of productivity applications, like Microsoft, are doing the same thing to deliver their applications as components for the new world of loosely coupled applications delivered over the Internet. The portal vendors themselves are delivering their own set of panels that drw on the vast content archives of the Web to enrich the user experience.

Portal panels are finally realizing the potential of object-oriented development techniques and application componentization. They also signal the end of the domination of monolithic "all-or-nothing" software design. And even more important, portal panels are delivering this promise in the form of customized workviews that let users become more productive on a day-to-day basis.

Stewart McKie is an independent software analyst and technology writer who can be reached via his Web site, www.cfoinfo.com.