Enterprise portals. Part 1. Definition of Web-portal, portal enterprise, CMS / WCM and their purpose. Existing standards for the Portlet API. Major manufacturers of portals
Continuing the theme of portals raised in my previous article .
The most difficult problem that I encountered while writing this article was the accuracy of the definitions given by various sources. The notorious Wikipedia did not help me either, since Some definitions caused obvious doubts (of course, I could correct them, on the other hand, who am I?). In addition, the Wikipedia versions in Russian and English contained slightly different definitions. It would be wrong to write this article based only on my own experience, therefore, as the source to which I will appeal, I chose the annual reports of the analytical agency Gartner on horizontal portals.
Let's turn to the definition of the portal, which is provided by the authoritative analytic agency Gartner: the portal is a software infrastructure for the Web that provides access (interoperable) to relevant information assets (for example, information / content, applications and business processes), intellectual and human assets by sampling by target audience provided with a high degree of personalization.
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Gartner Agency offers the following division of portals by the target audience:
Gartner Agency also offers to subdivide software products that allow you to create and maintain portals, according to their design into the following types:
On the Internet, I also met the concept of a mega-portal, but I did not find a single source that could confirm the validity of using this term.
In today's world, a portal usually means any large Web site. This is the marketing aspect of the portal concept. It so happened that at some stage it became necessary to separate simple websites from fairly complex Web systems, which were later referred to as Web portals. So there were news, shopping, tourist portals, etc.
This is all cool in theory. In practice, the word portal misleads people who are not connected with IT, because One should distinguish between the concepts of a Web portal and an Enterprise Portal in the meaning of a Web site, as well as an Enterprise Portal and a CMS / WCM in the meaning of software products.
Starting a conversation about enterprise portals, you should pay attention to the keyword enterprise (from the English enterprise - industrial / enterprise). This word implies industrial use of the portal, i.e. This is an enterprise-level Web site (meaning large and medium-sized enterprises), usually with a whole group of special business services. In addition, there are still features of the translation - the English version of the enterprise portal (industrial portal) is more adequate translation of the "corporate portal".
Often, the concept of an enterprise portal is intertwined with the concepts of an intranet portal (internal infrastructure of an enterprise) and a corporate portal. In the first case, we are talking only about the B2E portal, in the second - B2E or B2C (B2E is the corporate intranet portal, and B2C is the public / official / service site of a corporation, enterprise or company).
In programmer jargon, enterprise portals are often referred to as “portal technologies.”
Modern enterprise portal as a software product must support the following properties:
Most people do not feel the difference between customization and personalization. If customization is the ability to configure the portal by the end user, then personalization is the ability of the portal to change (adjust) the information provided depending on the role of the user, the position of the employee, the place / country of access, the results of his previous requests, etc.
Portal is often mistakenly understood as a CMS (English Content Management System - content management system), usually implying a Web content management system (short for WCM system - Web Content Management system). Content is the content of a Web site: text, images, links, videos, etc. WCM is a CMS created to simplify the publication of Web content on a Web site, usually allowing site owners and employees to manage site content (create, edit, delete) without technical knowledge of any programming languages ​​such as HTML / XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, as well as uploading files to the server (for example, using FTP). WCM can also provide standard services: access control, use of roles, site search system, etc.
CMS is usually part of the portal. Most major portal solutions providers include CMS in their product, thus creating a complete solution. Therefore, content management is usually added to the list of product properties. CMS will need to devote a separate article. Let me just say that for Java there are at least two standards governing the CMS API: JSR 170 (Content Repository for Java technology API) and JSR 283 (Content Repository for Java Technology API Version 2.0).
It is believed that the first portals appeared in the mid-90s of the last century. Web portals, such as AltaVista, AOL, Excite, and Yahoo !, became the flagships offering integration of news, email, weather, stock information and search functions by creating isolated modules that later became portlets.
Soon, enterprises had a need for web-oriented frameworks that would allow building portals from the zero cycle. Epicentric, Plumtree Software and Viador became pioneers in this area. Subsequently, Epicentric was purchased by Vignette in 2002, and in turn, Vignette was purchased by Open Text in 2009. Plumtree Software was also absorbed by BEA Systems in 2005, which became part of Oracle in 2008. Viador still exists and has not been absorbed by another company.
Most of the portals began to be delivered as add-ons over already existing application servers (as BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle Corporation, Sun Microsystems and JBoss did).
Strangely enough, but the architecture of the enterprise portals has firmly taken root in the Java platform, which is not the case with .NET and PHP. In 2003, manufacturers of enterprise portals based on the Java platform merged to create the JSR-168 standard (Portlet Specification). The standard defines the API for the interaction between the portal enterprise and portlets. Later, a second enhanced and improved version appeared - JSR-286 (Portlet Specification 2.0), the final release of which was released in 2008.
From the point of view of the end user, the portal is a set of Web pages (portal pages), each of which has portlets. Portlets are independent Web applications, each of which is displayed on the portal page as a small window. The window title contains the icon, the name of the portlet and control buttons. The portlet window can be minimized, stretched to full screen and returned to the standard state by clicking on the corresponding control button in its header. A detailed description of the portal device and its design will be discussed in one of the continuations of this article.
For the Java platform, there are JSR-168 and JSR-286, but there are no such standards for .NET and PHP. Therefore, the manufacturers of .NET and PHP portals use the term widget instead of the term portlet.
Let's talk about the merits of using enterprise portals:
1. The main goal of the portal is the concentration of information within a single Web site (Internet resource). As a result, the main advantage is the ability to speed up the decision-making, based on the information provided by the portal.
2. Development is carried out by modules (portlets), which allows you to develop complex systems iteratively, with relatively small independent teams. Simplified mechanism for updating portlets, their commissioning and their decommissioning.
3. CMS allows you to simplify the content of the portal content, which usually does not require any programming knowledge.
4. There are standards for the Java platform.
Speaking about the merits, one can not but say about the disadvantages:
1. The difficulty of transferring information from one portlet to another (communication interportlet).
2. The specificity of the Portlet API and a significant difference from standard Web programming.
3. The JSR-168 and JSR-286 standards describe only the API between the portlet and the portlet-container, while not standardizing the portal architecture.
In order to present the leaders in the enterprise portals market, we use the report of the agency Gartner for September 2010 - the magic square is presented below. In the magic square are placed companies offering portal solutions, whose income in 2009 was above $ 4 million. We are interested in the right upper part of the image in which the leaders are placed.
Leads Microsoft with its MS SharePoint. Next is IBM with WebSphere Portal Server. The next position is occupied by Oracle with 6 portals: two “old” Oracle portals (WebCenter and Oracle Portal), 2 portals from BEA Systems (WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic), a portal from Sun Microsystems and a portal from PeopleSoft. Oracle's latest four portals appeared as a result of the takeover of BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems and PeopleSoft. All 6 portals are on sale, and it is unclear how Oracle will consolidate products to reduce development and maintenance costs. After Oracle comes SAP with the SAP NetWeaver Portal. Concludes Liferay Leaderboard with open source implementation of Liferay Portal.
Fig.1. The magic square of horizontal portals from the agency Gartner (September 2010)
This article describes the existing market for portal technologies, but a new generation portal solution already exists (see http://www.ajaxportal.org and http://code.google.com/p/ajaxportal/ ).
Useful articles on the topic:
to be continued
The most difficult problem that I encountered while writing this article was the accuracy of the definitions given by various sources. The notorious Wikipedia did not help me either, since Some definitions caused obvious doubts (of course, I could correct them, on the other hand, who am I?). In addition, the Wikipedia versions in Russian and English contained slightly different definitions. It would be wrong to write this article based only on my own experience, therefore, as the source to which I will appeal, I chose the annual reports of the analytical agency Gartner on horizontal portals.
Let's turn to the definition of the portal, which is provided by the authoritative analytic agency Gartner: the portal is a software infrastructure for the Web that provides access (interoperable) to relevant information assets (for example, information / content, applications and business processes), intellectual and human assets by sampling by target audience provided with a high degree of personalization.
')
Gartner Agency offers the following division of portals by the target audience:
- B2E (business-to-employee) - portals for interaction with employees,
- B2C (business-to-customer) - portals for interaction with customers,
- B2B (business partners) - portals for interaction with business partners.
Gartner Agency also offers to subdivide software products that allow you to create and maintain portals, according to their design into the following types:
- Vertical portals - focus on specific applications and business functions;
- Horizontal portals - collect integrated information from a variety of inter-industry applications, as well as specific business services and applications for a specific industry.
On the Internet, I also met the concept of a mega-portal, but I did not find a single source that could confirm the validity of using this term.
In today's world, a portal usually means any large Web site. This is the marketing aspect of the portal concept. It so happened that at some stage it became necessary to separate simple websites from fairly complex Web systems, which were later referred to as Web portals. So there were news, shopping, tourist portals, etc.
This is all cool in theory. In practice, the word portal misleads people who are not connected with IT, because One should distinguish between the concepts of a Web portal and an Enterprise Portal in the meaning of a Web site, as well as an Enterprise Portal and a CMS / WCM in the meaning of software products.
Starting a conversation about enterprise portals, you should pay attention to the keyword enterprise (from the English enterprise - industrial / enterprise). This word implies industrial use of the portal, i.e. This is an enterprise-level Web site (meaning large and medium-sized enterprises), usually with a whole group of special business services. In addition, there are still features of the translation - the English version of the enterprise portal (industrial portal) is more adequate translation of the "corporate portal".
Often, the concept of an enterprise portal is intertwined with the concepts of an intranet portal (internal infrastructure of an enterprise) and a corporate portal. In the first case, we are talking only about the B2E portal, in the second - B2E or B2C (B2E is the corporate intranet portal, and B2C is the public / official / service site of a corporation, enterprise or company).
In programmer jargon, enterprise portals are often referred to as “portal technologies.”
Modern enterprise portal as a software product must support the following properties:
- SSO (Single Sign On) - user authentication for various systems and business services entering the portal is carried out only once (at the entrance to the portal),
- integration (integration) - the connection of functions and data from different sources into new components / portlets / web modules with integrated navigation between these components (in this case, content aggregation is implied),
- federation - integration of content provided by other portals, usually through WSRP technology,
- customization - the user can customize the appearance and properties of his environment (change the design of the site, select the necessary content and services),
- personalization - personalization of the content provided to the user depending on the profile and its settings, personalization is often based on the user's role, his work and the functions performed,
- access control (access control) - the ability of the portal to limit access to content and services, depending on the role of the user, his work and functions performed. Usually configured by the portal administrator,
- enterprise search (enterprise search).
Most people do not feel the difference between customization and personalization. If customization is the ability to configure the portal by the end user, then personalization is the ability of the portal to change (adjust) the information provided depending on the role of the user, the position of the employee, the place / country of access, the results of his previous requests, etc.
Portal is often mistakenly understood as a CMS (English Content Management System - content management system), usually implying a Web content management system (short for WCM system - Web Content Management system). Content is the content of a Web site: text, images, links, videos, etc. WCM is a CMS created to simplify the publication of Web content on a Web site, usually allowing site owners and employees to manage site content (create, edit, delete) without technical knowledge of any programming languages ​​such as HTML / XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, as well as uploading files to the server (for example, using FTP). WCM can also provide standard services: access control, use of roles, site search system, etc.
CMS is usually part of the portal. Most major portal solutions providers include CMS in their product, thus creating a complete solution. Therefore, content management is usually added to the list of product properties. CMS will need to devote a separate article. Let me just say that for Java there are at least two standards governing the CMS API: JSR 170 (Content Repository for Java technology API) and JSR 283 (Content Repository for Java Technology API Version 2.0).
It is believed that the first portals appeared in the mid-90s of the last century. Web portals, such as AltaVista, AOL, Excite, and Yahoo !, became the flagships offering integration of news, email, weather, stock information and search functions by creating isolated modules that later became portlets.
Soon, enterprises had a need for web-oriented frameworks that would allow building portals from the zero cycle. Epicentric, Plumtree Software and Viador became pioneers in this area. Subsequently, Epicentric was purchased by Vignette in 2002, and in turn, Vignette was purchased by Open Text in 2009. Plumtree Software was also absorbed by BEA Systems in 2005, which became part of Oracle in 2008. Viador still exists and has not been absorbed by another company.
Most of the portals began to be delivered as add-ons over already existing application servers (as BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle Corporation, Sun Microsystems and JBoss did).
Strangely enough, but the architecture of the enterprise portals has firmly taken root in the Java platform, which is not the case with .NET and PHP. In 2003, manufacturers of enterprise portals based on the Java platform merged to create the JSR-168 standard (Portlet Specification). The standard defines the API for the interaction between the portal enterprise and portlets. Later, a second enhanced and improved version appeared - JSR-286 (Portlet Specification 2.0), the final release of which was released in 2008.
From the point of view of the end user, the portal is a set of Web pages (portal pages), each of which has portlets. Portlets are independent Web applications, each of which is displayed on the portal page as a small window. The window title contains the icon, the name of the portlet and control buttons. The portlet window can be minimized, stretched to full screen and returned to the standard state by clicking on the corresponding control button in its header. A detailed description of the portal device and its design will be discussed in one of the continuations of this article.
For the Java platform, there are JSR-168 and JSR-286, but there are no such standards for .NET and PHP. Therefore, the manufacturers of .NET and PHP portals use the term widget instead of the term portlet.
Let's talk about the merits of using enterprise portals:
1. The main goal of the portal is the concentration of information within a single Web site (Internet resource). As a result, the main advantage is the ability to speed up the decision-making, based on the information provided by the portal.
2. Development is carried out by modules (portlets), which allows you to develop complex systems iteratively, with relatively small independent teams. Simplified mechanism for updating portlets, their commissioning and their decommissioning.
3. CMS allows you to simplify the content of the portal content, which usually does not require any programming knowledge.
4. There are standards for the Java platform.
Speaking about the merits, one can not but say about the disadvantages:
1. The difficulty of transferring information from one portlet to another (communication interportlet).
2. The specificity of the Portlet API and a significant difference from standard Web programming.
3. The JSR-168 and JSR-286 standards describe only the API between the portlet and the portlet-container, while not standardizing the portal architecture.
In order to present the leaders in the enterprise portals market, we use the report of the agency Gartner for September 2010 - the magic square is presented below. In the magic square are placed companies offering portal solutions, whose income in 2009 was above $ 4 million. We are interested in the right upper part of the image in which the leaders are placed.
Leads Microsoft with its MS SharePoint. Next is IBM with WebSphere Portal Server. The next position is occupied by Oracle with 6 portals: two “old” Oracle portals (WebCenter and Oracle Portal), 2 portals from BEA Systems (WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic), a portal from Sun Microsystems and a portal from PeopleSoft. Oracle's latest four portals appeared as a result of the takeover of BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems and PeopleSoft. All 6 portals are on sale, and it is unclear how Oracle will consolidate products to reduce development and maintenance costs. After Oracle comes SAP with the SAP NetWeaver Portal. Concludes Liferay Leaderboard with open source implementation of Liferay Portal.
Fig.1. The magic square of horizontal portals from the agency Gartner (September 2010)
This article describes the existing market for portal technologies, but a new generation portal solution already exists (see http://www.ajaxportal.org and http://code.google.com/p/ajaxportal/ ).
Useful articles on the topic:
- http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/microsoft/vol13/article10/article10.html
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_portal
- http://www.conteq.ru/blogs/sales_marketing_microsoft/gartner_otvodit_microsoft_sharepoint_2010_lidiruyuwuyu_rol/
to be continued
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/125568/
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