Portals, Dashboards and Mashups

Portals

4 Types of Portals

(wikipedia)

1) Enterprise Portal

1. Applications
   1. Content and Document Management System
   2. Collaboration Tools
   3. Business Process Management Tools
   4. Customer Relationship Management
   5. Business Intelligence
   6. Intranet
   7. Wiki and Knowledge Management
   8. Blog
   9. RSS
   10. Employee Portal
2. Features
   1. Single Sign-on
   2. Integration
   3. Federation
   4. Customization: Look and feel of environment
   5. Personalization: Matching appropriate content to specific user based on role or job function
   6. Access Control
   7. Search

2) Intranet Portal

(wikipedia)

1. Activities
   1. Tools and Resources
   2. Associate Services
   3. Business Operations
   4. Company Calendar
   5. Access Point for Employees
   6. Wiki
   7. Workflow Management
   8. Bulletin Board
   9. Task Management
2. Features
   1. Integration
   2. Security
   3. Customization
   4. Collaboration
   5. Communication Channels
   6. Automation
   7. Applications
   8. User Friendly
   9. Remote Access
   10. Document Repository
   11. Blog
   12. People Search
   13. Enterprise Search
   14. Targeted Content

3) Web Portal

(wikipedia)

1. What is it?
   1. Specially-designed webpage at a website
   2. Brings information together
      1. Portlet: Dedicated area on the page for displaying Information
   3. From diverse sources
   4. In a uniform way
2. Variants
   1. Mashup (Web Application Hybrid)
   2. Intranet Dashboards
3. Types of Web Portals
   1. Personal
   2. Government
   3. Cultural
   4. Corporate
   5. Stock
   6. Search
   7. Tenders
   8. Hosted
   9. Domain-Specific

4) Other Portals (Group based: Personal, Client, Team)

Funda

Portal Development Guide from Oracle

Link: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E13155_01/wlp/docs103/portals/intro.html#wp1002956

Features of a Portal

• Aggregation – The user can go to a single place for all content and applications.
• Customization – The preferences for a user determine how the portal looks and feels.
• Personalization – The user can obtain content that is specific to their interests and needs.
• Organization – The user can arrange the content and applications to make better sense of the information.
• Integration – The user can work with multiple applications and content sources in a unified fashion.
• Search – Enterprise and web-based search facilities
• Content Management – Creation, management, and delivery of content
• Content Repurposing – Including content from multiple disparate data sources
• Workflow – Business process management
• Single Sign-On – Allows users to log on once for all applications within the portal

Portal life cycle

Creation and management of a portal flows through a portal life cycle that contains four phases:

1. Architecture
   1. Production Operations (Propagation and Deployment): Encompases tools, procedures, methodologies, and best practices that provide the backbone for managing the portal life cycle, from portal development to staging and testing to live production environments. Consideration of portal system configuration, how your development team is organized, how you will test and configure portals, how your server is configured, and how you plan to manage the life cycle of your portal applications
   2. Portal Development
      1. Centralised
      2. Distributed (or Remote) Portal Team: Considerations for team development include:
         1. Use of shared resources – You share common portlets, such as the login portlet.
         2. Sharing a common domain – Several techniques exist for sharing a common domain among team members with different Oracle home directories.
         3. Integrating remotely developed portlets into the portal – Settings that are common to the portal application must match across the entire development project.
   3. Security
      1. Portal visitors – You control access to portal resources using visitor entitlements. Visitor access is determined based on visitor entitlement roles.
      2. Portal administrators – You control portal resource management capabilities using delegated administration. Administrative access is determined based on delegated administration roles.
   4. Content Management: store content, track its progress, and incorporate content in your portal applications. It provides an easy integration between creating content and delivering that content to your users.
   5. Interaction Management: control and enhance portal visitor interactions with your portal application. You can set up personalized content that is targeted to specific users or audiences. You can guide users through a process (such as signing up for employee benefits or shopping online) that takes them to different locations based on their personal preferences or characteristics. You can even record the path users take through your portal to gauge the effectiveness of the portal, its design, or your process flows.
   6. Performance: Enable control tree optimization. Use entitlements judiciously; too many can impact performance. Avoid the temptation of granting a different role to every user.
2. Development
   1. Understanding Portal Development
   2. Setting up Your Portal Development Environment
   3. Integrating Applications into WebLogic Portal
   4. User Interface Development with Look And Feel Features
   5. Developing Portals Using Workshop for WebLogic
   6. Creating Portals for Multiple Device Types
   7. Enabling Visitor Tools
   8. Designing Portals for Optimal Performance
3. Staging
4. Production

Dashboards

Mashups

(wikipedia)

• What is it?
  • Webpage or web application
  • that uses content from more than one source
  • to create a single new service displayed in a single graphical interface
• Types of Mashup
  • Business or Enterprise:
    • Applications that combine
      • own resources
      • application and data
      • with external webservices
    • Focus Data into single Presentation
    • Allow for Collaborative action amongst
      • Businesses
      • Developers
    • Secure, visually rich
  • Consumer: From multiple public source in the browser and organised through a simple browser interface
  • Data: Combine similar types of media and information from multiple sources into a single new and distinct representation