Enterprise Portal: An Overview
An enterprise portal is a secure unified access point in the form of a web interface to an organization’s information, data, processes, application, and people. In other words, all employees of an organization are required to log in an internal website to access any application, information, and data pertaining to that organization. Having a single point of interface for all information assets of the enterprise is helpful for the end-users as well as the system administrators. End-users know exactly where to find the information or application they are looking for without having to worry about multiple usernames and passwords. On the hand, system administrators only need to define their security and control policy once and enforce it on the enterprise portal, securing each and every application and information element for that organization.
Enterprise portals can be classified into three categories: Business-to Employees (B2E), Business-to-Consumers (B2C), and Business-to-Business (B2B). Irrespective of the type and its intended audience, all enterprise portals support a set of fundamental features (in one form or another).
Content/Information Aggregation
This includes showcasing all information elements of the organization corporate news, announcements, policies, procedures, people directory, and organizational hierarchy.
Enterprise Application Aggregation
This includes provisioning access to every corporate application from the enterprise portal. The users do not need to know which application they are interacting with. With an integrated user interface and a single username and password, all they know is about the portal.
Document Management
This includes access and management of unstructured documents which include text documents (.txt, .pdf, .doc), Excel Worksheets, Presentations, Images, etc. Not only should the users be allowed to access corporate documents but also should be allowed to manage their personal “work-in-progress” documents. This ensures all important documents are backed up at an organizational level.
Business Intelligence
This includes the availability of business reports, analytics, and dashboards to the employees, customers, and management users based on their respective profiles. Comprehensive business intelligence is key to the success of any organization; hence, the enterprise portal framework must seamlessly integrate with the business intelligence system of the enterprise.
Process Automation and Self Service
This includes all the functionality that automates business processes and approval workflows. It also one of the pillar stones in making a successful portal environment. Rather than routing paper-based documents, this functionality will capture all organizational approvals in electronic form. Additionally, such an automated business process environment can be integrated with the document management system thereby giving the ability to reproduce the approvals and business flows at a later stage for corporate auditing.
Corporate Collaboration
This includes all the functionality to enable corporate users to synchronously and asynchronously collaborate with each other and in groups. Collaborative tools include:
- Shareable Online Calendar
- Project Workspaces (to share and distribute project specific documents in a team)
- Corporate Instant Messaging
- Online Conferencing (for sharing presentations, joint document editing, and voice)
Advanced Security
This is one of the most crucial elements of an enterprise portal framework which contributes to its success. The portal must support single sign-on so that every portal user only interacts with the portal using one username and password (although indirectly they may access multiple applications interfaced via the portal). Along with single sign-on, it is important that the portal framework support the administrator to provision group-based and role-based access to every single component of the portal. This allows the administrator to define groups and roles and based on the corporate security and access control policy provision access to applications and information elements within the portal.
It is not necessarily required nor expected for any portal development framework to support each of the above functionality. Each of the above functionality can be supported or implemented by a standalone application. However, the overall enterprise portal is certainly expected to incorporate all the above features in an integrated fashion.
Enterprise Portal Vendors
| Vendor | Product Name | Technology | License |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Planet | Intrexx Xtreme 4.5 | J2EE | Commercial |
| Sensenet | Sensenet 6.0 | ASP.NET | Open Source |
| Apache Software Foundation | Jetspeed 2.1 | J2EE | Apache License |
| ATG | ATG Portal | J2EE | Commercial |
| Broadvision | Broadvision Portal 8.0 | J2EE | Commercial |
| Epicentric (now Vignette) | Epicentric Foundation Server 5.0 | J2EE | Commercial |
| eXo Platform SAS | eXo Portal 2.0 | J2EE | Affero General Public License |
| eZ Systems | eZ Publish 4.0 | PHP | GPL and Commercial |
| IBM | WebSphere Portal Server 6.0.1 | J2EE | Commercial |
| Hippo | Hippo portal | J2EE | Open Source and Commercial Licenses |
| Interwoven | TeamPortal | J2EE | Commercial |
| JA-SIG | uPortal 2.6.0 | J2EE | BSD License |
| Jahia | Jahia 5.0.3 | J2EE | Open Source and Commercial Licenses |
| JBoss | JBoss Portal 2.6 | J2EE | LGPL |
| Joomla | Joomla 1.5 | PHP | GPL |
| Liferay | Liferay Portal 4.4 | J2EE | MIT |
| HighPortal | Aryanic HighPortal 10.1 | ASP.NET | Commercial |
| Microsoft | Office Sharepoint Server 2007 | ASP.NET | Commercial |
| Fasihi GmbH | Fasihi Enterprise Portal | J2EE | Commercial |
| Oracle (BEA Systems) | AquaLogic User Interaction 6.5 | J2EE/ASP.NET | Commercial |
| Oracle | Oracle Portal 10g | J2EE | Commercial |
| Oracle | Oracle WebCenter Suite | J2EE | Commercial |
| Oracle (BEA Systems) | WebLogic Portal 10 | J2EE | Commercial |
| PlumtreeSoftware (BEA Systems) | Plumtree Portal Server 5.0 | ASP | Commercial |
| SAP AG | SAP NetWeaver 7.0 | J2EE | Commercial |
| SORCE | SORCE V8.0 | ASP.NET | Commercial |
| Sun Microsystems | Sun Java System Portal Server | Java EE | Open Source, licensing & support plans |
| The Media Shoppe | tmsEKP 1.52 | J2EE | Commercial |
| Tibco Software | PortalBuilder 5.2 | J2EE | Commercial |
| Union Square Software | Workspace 4 | ASP.NET | Commercial |
| Vialect | Noodle | J2EE | Commercial |
| LNT | IntraNet | ASP.NET | Commercial |
| Vignette | Vignette Portal 7.3 | J2EE | Commercial |
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