Web portal research

Now the market is saturated with portal vendors. Some vendors offer products that are nothing more than knowledge management (KM) tools. These tools enable data to be searched, categorized, and displayed. But this doesn't fulfill the need to incorporate all applications and leverage legacy applications into one coherent user interface. Our research has led us to determine the following four major features as necessary technological aspects of any portal solution for SCD's computing community.

1. Application Objects (AOs): Any portal solution should have Application Objects, or channels within the GUI, that will allow the user to access a variety of applications directly from the portal interface. Design of custom AOs must be possible, and access should be provided through a highly structured and well-documented API.

2. Customizable: Any portal solution should provide an easy-to-configure display that lets the user control which AOs are displayed and where on the interface they are displayed. In addition, the portal administrator should be able to determine which AOs are available for which set of users.

3. Authorization and authentication: The portal should provide single sign-on authentication and administrator-configurable authorization control at a group level. This authorization should determine which AOs a particular user has access to and the level of workflow each user can complete. The authentication module should be replaceable with SCD's in-house "Gatekeeper" system to provide consistency.

4. Platform independence: The ability to be integrated into the current SCD environment is crucial. Any portal server should be able to run on both the Windows platform as well as any Unix platform. Additionally, any portal software should integrate seamlessly with our current Apache web server technology and should be able to easily transfer data between applications and/or servers. Our research indicates that XML-based and Java-based portals are best suited to handle these tasks.

Open source solutions are being investigated aggressively. Open source projects have an advantage because they are free, however, documentation is notoriously poor for such projects, and there is no guarantee that the product will be reliable. Several commercial vendors appear to provide these identified major pieces, although work is still required to determine which vendor provides the most complete and flexible solution.

SCD ASR - Table of contents