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February 21, 2002

Critical Window

Portal technology can be an effective answer to information overload, but be sure that you understand your business needs first

By Colin White

It's been a more than two years since I last published an article in Intelligent Enterprise about the enterprise portal marketplace ("Decision Threshold," Nov. 16, 1999), and in that time portal products have changed dramatically: They have evolved from simply providing access to Web pages and corporate databases to supporting business intelligence, application integration, and collaborative processing. The facilities provided by portals have also improved — many products now offer sophisticated searching, categorization, personalization, and content management capabilities. In addition to providing standalone portal products, vendors are also beginning to integrate portal technology into related IT software such as business intelligence tools, Web application servers, enterprise application integration products, and vertical industry application packages.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Colin White

Vendors of enterprise portal (EP) platforms universally proclaim easy answers for business value and ROI. Rather, an effective evaluation of a portal product requires careful attention to objective criteria that may in fact lead to a different conclusion. Lacking a framework for weighing the available solutions, your EP project may be at serious risk before it even begins.

The rapid growth of the portal marketplace makes the task of selecting a portal product a difficult one. To help you in the selection process, I will take a detailed look in this article at the capabilities you can expect to find in leading portal products and offer suggestions on how to choose the right product for your portal implementation.

Figure 1 shows the main components of a portal and how business content flows from source systems to portal users. I will use this figure to explain the key features you should look for in a portal product. A detailed list of these features is shown in Figure 2. Because industry consultants and analysts use a variety of terms to discuss the capabilities of a portal, I provide definitions for key portal terms in the sidebar ("Key Terms").

DOCUMENTING BUSINESS CONTENT AND SERVICES IN A PORTAL

A portal provides business users with a single personalized interface to the business content and services they need to do their jobs. Most portal products come packaged with adapters that allow the portal to access a wide variety of different types of business content and services. It is essential that a portal product has an open architecture and provides an adapter development kit (ADK) that enables portal developers to customize product-supplied adapters and develop and add organization-specific ones. In addition, the ADK must support the development environment (Java or .Net, for example) and languages used by the IT organization. A key trend is for portal products to provide adapter support for XML and Web services. This support enables a portal to have a more open and flexible enterprise integration architecture.

One of the main portal implementation and administration tasks is to maintain information (metadata) about the business content sources and services that can be accessed via the portal user's interface. This information is usually stored in the portal directory. Products vary widely in their capabilities, from simply being able to list the available adapters, to providing extensive metadata (date created, author, keywords, and so forth) about the business content. Metadata in the portal directory is usually maintained via an interactive interface that lets developers and business users publish the existence of business content, and by content-scanning tools that regularly analyze and process business source content on a schedule- or user-driven basis.

If a portal is to be used to provide access to unstructured information such as business documents or digital media objects, then it will be important that a portal product provide access to the external content managers that are used to maintain this information, or even provide its own content manager. (Corechange Inc.'s Corepoint, for example, provides interfaces to the content stores of the Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and the Stellent Content Management System.) One technique used by many products (SharePoint and Verity Inc.'s K2 Enterprise are good examples) for handling this type of information is to use a supplied search engine to create an index of the unstructured information, enabling full content or keyword searching.

Regardless of the methods used to document business content in a portal, it is essential that the content can be personalized to suit the needs of each portal user. To do this efficiently, the portal must be able to categorize the content based on a business taxonomy created and maintained by portal administrators. Product support for categorization varies from requiring developers and business users to manually categorize business content, to sophisticated categorization managers that automate this process.

ACCESSING PORTAL BUSINESS CONTENT AND SERVICES

Having reviewed how business content and services are documented in a portal, we will now move on to look at how this content is accessed by business users.

The portal user's Web interface is maintained by the portal's presentation services component. Most projects employ Web browser interfaces on a desktop computers to access portals, but the industry direction is to add support for other devices, such as mobile and wireless Web devices. A key portal feature is a user-interface development kit (UDK) for customizing the user interface to match corporate presentation standards and branding and adding support for other Web devices. Other important considerations are whether the product supports a true thin-client user interface, requires plug-ins to be installed, or downloads presentation components to the user's Web device. The architecture of the presentation services interface will be particularly important for slow network connections and when supporting external users across corporate extranets.

As I mentioned earlier, business content and services viewed through a portal are personalized to each portal user. Most portal products handle personalization by displaying a list of the business content and services that the user is authorized to access. This list is organized by business category — for example, based on the business taxonomy maintained by the portal administrator. Users then manually customize their portal interfaces by including and excluding the content and services they are interested in or by registering interest in specific categories of content.

Some vendors, such as Computer Associates with its CleverPath Portal, are beginning to employ rules-driven and collaborative filtering techniques to add application-driven personalization to their portal products. This type of personalization enables the portal to learn about the types of content that a portal user is interested in and enables the personalization process to be automated. Automation is especially important in customer-facing portals.

Ensuring that business content, services, and metadata viewed through a portal are secure and can only be accessed by authorized users is vital in any portal implementation. Users signing on to a portal need to be authenticated, and their access to content and services controlled, based on user roles and access privileges defined by the portal administrator. It is also important that the portal provides a single sign-on capability and does not require users to sign on to each content store or business service they access.

The authentication scheme used by a portal must be able to be integrated into the organization's overall security infrastructure. This infrastructure may employ technologies such as LDAP, Microsoft Active Directory, or a single sign-on product from companies such as Netegrity or Securant (recently acquired by RSA Security Inc.).

When a portal user is connected to the portal and authenticated, a session manager is required to ensure that all subsequent interactions with a specific Web browser or Web device are from the same user. The user's session should time out after an installation-defined period of inactivity. The session manager and portal security service should ensure that network traffic is secure and that any information (password, session ID, business content Web URL, and so on) that could cause a security breach is not displayed on the user's portal interface.