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Tech Primer
Enterprise portals
 What
does an enterprise portal do?
An enterprise portal amalgamates information from diverse information sources
including intranets, legacy applications and enterprise-wide applications and
presents it through a web-based interface. In a large organisation, such portals
are rolled out on a regional basis. Typically, enterprises roll out portals
for their specific operations region-by region. These portals can be used to
address regional problems of information access, management and application
integration. Enterprise portals move beyond the primarily inward-facing model
to include external entities such as partners, suppliers and customers.
Why do you need an enterprise portal?
The need for enterprise portals came about due to the difficulties in pulling
and representing data from a variety of legacy and modern applications. This
is where enterprise portals come into the picture by offering single screen,
single sign-on access to a wealth of legacy data.
Where can they be deployed?
Organisations can use these portals in many ways. Many portals are project or
role-focussed and these are designed and deployed as either pilot projects or
to solve a particular issue. For example, a portal might be deployed to help
members of a project track tasks, collaborate, and access required information
resources. Enterprise portals can be rolled out to internal users as well as
external users. Different technologies can be integrated into a portal solution
to access all sources of enterprise information and help end users utilise information
in the most effective manner. Furthermore, they can be designed to access legacy
and transactional systems. An enterprise portal enables information access from
any source that exists at the back-end and it can be used in a role-based scenario.
By using these solutions, users can perform analysis on sales data or delve
into monthly performance reports. They can customise information extraction
and presentation and set up alerts that are pushed to mobile phones and PDAs.
What are the challenges that are encountered while deploying
an enterprise portal?
Currently, portals are rolled out on a regional or departmental basis. It’s
not rare for a large organisation to work with three or more portal vendors
for its separate regions and departments. The concept of federated portals is
emerging. These are portals that amalgamate different portals. As portals are
used today to amalgamate legacy and modern applications in an organisation,
tomorrow there will be a need for a meta-portal to consolidate multiple portals.
Do enterprise portals address security and scalability
issues?
As with any solution, security issues are paramount. Companies have developed
a technology called Common Authentication Protocol (CAP) server that delivers
the single login model to an enterprise portal. By entering a single password
and username, users gain access to all data sources, applications and collaborative
tools they would normally have in a client-server environment. From an administrative
standpoint, user authentication is managed through existing security profiles,
doing away with the need to create and maintain additional security accounts
for users. Built-in encryption and support for standard authentication models
minimises security maintenance. The time savings attributable to an enterprise
portal’s centralised environment are significant. The ground up approach
lets organisations implement portal servers, secure in the knowledge that it
can accommodate thousands of users.
Which vendors are offering enterprise portal solutions?
Oracle, BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Sybase, Sun Microsystems, SSA Global and SAP.
For more information check out the article :
http://www.portalscommunity.com/library/fundamentals.cfm
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