The Portal Collective
Portal panels let individuality take a prime role in your business enterprise
by Stewart McKie
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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.
