Enterprise portal

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
For other uses, see Portal.

An enterprise portal, also known as an enterprise information portal (EIP) or corporate portal, is a framework for integrating information, people and processes across organizational boundaries. It provides a secure unified access point,[1] often in the form of a web-based user interface, and is designed to aggregate and personalize information through application-specific portlets. One hallmark of enterprise portals is the de-centralized content contribution and content management, which keeps the information always updated.

Contents

[edit] History

The mid-1990s saw the advent of public Web portals like AltaVista, AOL, Excite, and Yahoo!. These sites provided a key set of features (e.g., news, e-mail, weather, stock quotes, and search) that were often presented in self-contained boxes or portlets. Before long, enterprises of all sizes began to see a need for a similar starting place for their variety of internal repositories and applications, many of which were migrating to Web-based technologies.[2]

By the late 1990s, software vendors began to produce prepackaged enterprise portals. These software packages would be toolkits for enterprises to quickly develop and deploy their own customized enterprise portal. The first commercial portal software vendor began to appear in 1998. Pioneers in this marketing included "pure play" vendors like Epicentric, Plumtree Software and Viador. The space, however, quickly became crowded by 2002 as both application server vendors (such as BEA, IBM, Passageways, Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems) who saw portals as a opportunity to stave off the commoditization of application server technology as well as Business Intelligence vendors began to enter the market with competing product offerings.

Enterprises may choose to develop multiple enterprise portals based on business structure and strategic focus while reusing architectural frameworks, component libraries, or standardized project methodologies (e.g. B2E, B2C, B2B, B2G, etc.).

In 2003, vendors of Java-based enterprise portals produced a standard known as JSR-168. It was to specify an API for interoperability between enterprise portals and portlets. Software vendors began producing JSR-168 compliant portlets that can be deployed onto any JSR-168 compliant enterprise portal. The second iteration of the standard, JSR-286, is final-released on 12 Jun, 2008.

[edit] Fundamental Features

  • Single Point of Entry — enterprise portals can provide single sign-on capabilities between their users and various other systems. This requires a user to authenticate only once. Access control lists manage the mapping between portal content and services over the portal user base.
  • Integration — the connection of functions and data from multiple systems into new components/portlets/web parts.
  • Federation — the integration of content provided by other portals, typically through the use of WSRP or similar technologies.
  • Personalization — Users can customize the look and feel of their environment.Customers who are using EIPs can edit and design their own web sites which are full of their own personality and own style; they can also choose the specific content and services they prefer. Also refers to the ability to prioritize most appropriate content based on attributes of the user and metadata of the available content.
  • Permissioning — the ability for portal administrators to limit specific types of content and services users have access to. For example, a company's proprietary information can be entitled for only company employee access.

[edit] Common Applications

[edit] Enterprise portal vendors

Vendor Product Name Technology License Portlet API
Apache Software Foundation Jetspeed 2.1.3 J2EE Apache License v2.0 JSR-168
ATG ATG Portal J2EE Commercial JSR-168
Broadvision Broadvision Portal 8.0 J2EE Commercial unknown
Epicentric (now Vignette Corporation) Epicentric Foundation Server 5.0 J2EE Commercial unknown
eXo Platform SAS eXo Portal 2.5 J2EE Affero General Public License JSR-286
Fasihi Fasihi Enterprise Portal 2.0 J2EE Commercial JSR-286
IBM WebSphere Portal Server 6.1 J2EE Commercial JSR-286
Hippo Hippo portal J2EE Open Source and Commercial Licenses unknown
Interwoven TeamPortal J2EE Commercial unknown
JBoss JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 2.7 J2EE LGPL JSR-286
Liferay Liferay Portal 5.2.2 J2EE MIT JSR-286
Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 ASP.NET Commercial unknown
Oracle (BEA Systems) AquaLogic User Interaction 6.5 J2EE/ASP.NET Commercial unknown
Oracle Oracle IAS Portal 10g J2EE Commercial JSR-168
Oracle Oracle WebCenter Suite J2EE Commercial JSR-168
Oracle (BEA Systems) WebLogic Portal 10 J2EE Commercial JSR-168
Plumtree Software (BEA Systems) Plumtree Portal Server 5.0 ASP Commercial unknown
SAP AG SAP NetWeaver 7.0 J2EE Commercial JSR-168
SORCE SORCE V8.0 ASP.NET Commercial unknown
Sun Microsystems Sun Java System Portal Server 7.2 Java EE Open Source, licensing & support plans JSR-286
The Media Shoppe tmsEKP 1.52 J2EE Commercial unknown
Tibco Software PortalBuilder 5.2 J2EE Commercial JSR-168
TmaxSoft ProPortal 4.0 J2EE Commercial JSR-168
Larsen & Toubro IntraNet ASP.NET Commercial unknown
Vignette Corporation Vignette Portal 7.4 J2EE Commercial JSR-286

[edit] References

  1. ^ Boye, Janus (2005-01-18). "Portal Software: Passing Fad or Real Value?". CMS Watch. http://www.cmswatch.com/Feature/120-Case-Against-Portals. 
  2. ^ Knorr, Eric (2004-01-09). "The new enterprise portal". InfoWorld. http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/01/09/02FEportal_1.html. 

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_portal"
Personal tools