Portal Architect's Toolbox (Continued)
Six Big Picture Trends for Enterprise Portal Development
While the toolbox information highlights the differences among the many technology offerings, a number of commonalities are also evident. This list of six big-picture trends summarizes portal technology directions to consider as you help to develop your own organization's portal technology strategy.
The portal is the platform: Pure-play portal vendors, packaged-application providers, and other categories of portal players have given way to enterprise infrastructure vendors as the prime focus for enterprise portal development. Gartner defines the "application platform suite" as a combination of application and Web servers, integration technologies, and the enterprise portal. The fly in the ointment is that platform players would like to lock customers into their software stack, while large customers may need to support multiple platforms. There may be no one ultimate uberportal, so vendors will need to embrace standards for portal federation. Also, platforms are for building on, so look for all kinds of third-party add-ons for the mainstream frameworks.
Standards support pluggable portlets: Two important standards efforts are underway that will promote the ability for portlets to interoperate across platforms. In the J2EE world, JSR 168 aims to set a common API for portlets to access user information and support the portal windowing and event model. Near to final approval, the JSR is expected to stimulate the market for third-party portlets by assuring that they will run on any J2EE portal server. Separately, many of the major portal players are supporting a proposed OASIS standard, Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP), which would provide transport, security, and billing mechanisms to enable remote access of portlets from public and private directories. Between the two standards, the vision of interoperable portal components is close to being realized.
Person-to-person: Infrastructure is important, but so are the core portal functions for knowledge management and collaboration that are the specialty of the pure-play vendors. Every portal platform vendor needs a strong suite of such portal tools. Some like IBM and Oracle will stress their own technology assets, while others like BEA may need partners or acquisitions to bolster their portfolio, an opportunity for best-of-breed vendors who might otherwise be squeezed out. Enterprises will increasingly seek to merge their groupware and portal functions, lest they end up with conflicting frameworks.
Ease of development: Every vendor wants to extend the programmability of its portal so that more developers can more easily develop customized applications. In some cases, companies are trying to enable less skilled business developers or even end users to use declarative programming tools and portlet wizards. Development frameworks such as WebLogic Workbench from BEA help professional developers gain access to the most complex J2EE methods. And the major IDE tools vendors—surprise, most of the same companies—are all focused on helping development professionals with lightweight frameworks and development life cycle integration. Wizards may suit for simple applications, but expect the winners to be those that boost productivity for development pros.
Process servers: First portals aggregated information. Then they integrated applications. The third generation portal, said Forrester's Nate Root, is all about business process. "Portals have brought together all of a company's tools into one toolbox, but they are not integrated in a useful form. Process portals will apply the tools against real business problems and scenarios," he said. By tying information and software to the process work flows of the organization, a process portal becomes integral to operations, not an optional reference source. Enabling data exchange between portlets opens opportunities for easy process modeling, even involving unrelated backend systems. A simple example is expense reporting, but more complex processes involving multiple departments and systems are coming soon to a portal near you.
Managing identities: Emerging standards for federated identity management—Liberty Alliance, WS-Security, and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)—will provide authentication and authorization services and enforce fine-grained policy rules, giving IT organizations the ability to manage and administer users and policies, and to provision services. Authentication methods can vary for different groups of users, ensuring that the portal is secure, yet flexible enough to meet varying business requirements. Identity management is also crucial for multichannel portals, which provide alternative displays depending on the user's client device. Every portal vendor provides personalization capabilities, but a few such as Sun and Novell highlight identity management as a prime differentiator.
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