Portals are Made for Enterprise

Application Integration
• Collection of a variety of useful information into a
one-stop Web page
• Bridges to information silos in enterprise s including
governments
• Access points that reach across deep and surface
web content
• Online access to intranet enterprise-wide
information
• One-stop information access point
• Google with “good” content
 What is a Portal
• A Web site or service that offers a broad array of
resources and services, such as
– e-mail,
– forums,
– search engines, and
– on-line services e.g. shopping malls.
• Therefore, a portal means:
• A common place to find information
• A point and click entry place to other places
• Easy access to data
• What you want, where you need it, when you
need it.
 A portlet is…
• From a programmer’s point-of-view… a piece of code
that – when invoked by the portal server – returns
tagged (HTML, WML,…) data to be included within a
portal container;
– Thus, a portlet has to comply with certain
assumptions:
• It has to support a certain “portlet API”;
• It has to use only a restricted subset of tags
within its returned content.
• From a content provider’s point-of-view… a mean to
make content available;
• From a user’s point-of-view…content to subscribe to
 Portals According to IBM
– P = Personalization for the end user
• Personal or community desktop
– O = Organization of the user's desktop
• Consolidated access to data in a layout that suites them
– R = Resource division determines "Who Sees What"
• Membership services and layered authentication
– T = Tracking of activities
• The more the portal is used, the more it can be tailored
– A = Access to heterogeneous data stores
• RDBM, e-mail, news feeders, web servers, various file
systems
– L = Location of important people and things
• Realtime access to experts, communities, and content
 Portals versus Websites
• Portals do not replace Websites
• External users still need access to your home
page
• Portals are designed to be access points to
specific information and places
• Portals work well in intranets and extranets
• Internally facing web portal leads to enhanced
productivity
• Externally facing portal leads to higher revenue
 Example of a Portal Format
Search

A Custom Calendar Awareness

Web page –
possibly your
organization’s
website Quick Links
to
organization’s
Or a News Tasks/To- apps, intranet
Frame Do’s pages

Use portlets on your main

portal to group common
objects and data
 Evolution of Portals
• First Generation (Referential)
– Search; catalog
• Second generation (Personalized)
– Subscribe; personalize
• Third Generation (Interactive)
– Productivity and enterprise applications
• Fourth Generation (SEs)
– Web Services
 Browser-Based Data Integration
• A Web-based access point to federated content:
– Content from multiple data sources e.g.
applications, databases, content systems, the
Web
– A personalized home page
• Accessible via multiple channels e.g.
–desktop,
–mobile devices,
–phone (voice interface)
 Portal functionality
• Discover -High quality searching
• Capture -Harvesting and delivery tools
• Manipulate -Text-processing and citation
management tools
• Distribute -Contribution and publication tools
• Consult -Access to Virtual/Online Reference
and electronic scholarly communities
 Portal types
A significant portal implementation can be comprised
of multiple types of portals and blended into a
hybrid solution.
Types:
• Corporate or Enterprise (Intranet) Portals
• Business to employees (B2E) portals;
• eBusiness (Extranet) Portals;
• Personal (WAP) portals;
• Public or Mega (Internet) portals say e-Gov portals.
 Enterprise Information Portals (EIP)
• Designed for activities and communities to improve the
access, processing and sharing of structured and
unstructured information within and across enterprise;
• Incorporate roles, processes, workflow, collaboration,
content management, data warehousing and marts,
enterprise applications and business intelligence;
• Provide employee access to other types of portals such
as eBusiness portals, personal portals and public portals.
• Federated Portal: A union of independent departmental
or group portals into a cohesive portal solution;
• Provide access to syndicated content which is defined as
external information, from a single or multiple sources,
that is maintained by a third party (e.g. news feeds).
 eBusiness (Extranet) Portals
• ASP portals – Application Service Provider (ASP)
portals are B2B (business to business) portals that
allow business customers the ability to rent both
products and services.
 Personal (WAP) portals
• Pervasive/omnipresent portals or mobility portals:
– embedded in Web and cellular phones, wireless
PDAs (Personal Desktop Assistant), pagers, etc.
– Personal or mobility portals are increasingly
popular and important for consumers and
employees to obtain product and service
information
• Appliance portals - These portals are embedded in
TVs, automobiles, etc.
 Public or Mega (Internet) portals
• General public portals or mega portals:
– address the entire Internet versus a specific
community of interest and include: Yahoo, Google,
Overture, AltaVista, AOL, MSN, Excite, etc.
– General public portals or mega portals will
become fewer and consolidate over time.
• Industrial portals, vertical portals or vortals:
– Rapidly growing and are focused on specific
narrow audiences or communities such as
consumer goods, computers, retail, banking,
insurance, etc.
 Portal characteristics
• Single, powerful search
• Fast and powerful
• Integration of diverse content (public web, licensed
journals, digitized materials, news feeds, etc.)
• Searches across formats and record syntaxes
• Searches may be limited by subject, format, date etc.
• Results are deduced, sorted and may be ranked by
relevancy
• Content may be searched by subject
• Supports authentication and Supports authorization
• Can be personalized and be customized
• Integrates appropriate applications such as course
management software or citation building tools, etc
 An enterprise portal requirements
• Easy to Use. “An enterprise portal must be geared to the
skills of the broadest range of users in order to promote
self service.” It has a graphical interface and uses a public
browser like consumer portals in the internet.
• Universal Information Access. An EIP must provide
broad access to structured and unstructured information
from “a variety of sources—intranet, internet and
extranet.” Portals require comprehensive metadata
sources to describe the content in the right context so
“the user can easily find and access it.”
• Dynamic Resource Access. The user must be able to
“search by category, publish information, subscribe to
new content, query and analyse information, and plan
and execute activities.”
 An enterprise portal requirements
• Extensible. The enterprise portal can provide access to
all sources, only if it includes a published application
programming interface (API) that “developers can use
to hook in existing and future applications.”
• Collaborative:
– Users should not only be able to publish documents,
but also should be able to annotate existing
documents and “create and participate threaded
discussions.”
– When users subscribe to objects, such as reports,
spreadsheets and messages, they must have the
obligation to “define the format, delivery channel,
and alert method.”
– Only publishers and administrators should be able to
give access rights to objects to users or groups.
 An enterprise portal requirements
• Customizable. Administrators should have the ability to
“configure different permissions for different” users and
groups. Nonetheless users must have the possibility to
“configure settings appropriate to their own needs.”
• Proactive. “The enterprise portal can be truly empowering
only if it provides an infrastructure for proactive activities.”
There must be the ability to “subscribe to alert mechanisms,
create key-performance-indicator monitors, and create
agents for automatic searches, or queries” to keep the user
informed.
• Secure. As the portal is a bridge between internal and
external interactions it “should provide security mechanisms
to ensure the privacy and integrity of data.” In fact the
organization must “control access at a very granular level—by
user, by group, or even by object—and should provide security
mechanisms to ensure the privacy and integrity of data.”
 An enterprise portal requirements
• Scalable
– The portal must support “thousands of concurrent
requests, hundreds of information sources, and
dynamic generation of web pages by thousands of
users.”
– Therefore the architecture behind portals must be very
robust and provide capabilities such as “load balancing
across multiple servers, intelligent caching, pooled
connections, or other performance-enhancing
techniques.”
• Manageable. “Simple graphical tools must enable
administrators to set rapidly up the user interface,
establish permissions, and integrate with other
resources.” Monitoring, tuning, and content-management
tools should also be part of the portal solution.
 Personalization and customization
• Personalization: dynamically serve customized content
(pages, products, recommendations, etc.) to users
based on their profiles, preferences, or expected
interests;
• Personalization v. Customization:
– In customization, user controls and customizes the site or the
product based on his/her preferences;
– usually manual, but sometimes semi-automatic based on a
given user profile.
• Personalization is done automatically based on the
user’s actions, the user’s profile, and (possibly) the
profiles of others with “similar” profiles
 Content Customization
• Individual customizations are stored as a Profile in an
SQL database based on the user’s Windows logon
name.
• Individuals manage their Profile settings using the
“Edit Your Profile”, … web page.
• The Profile stores the following information about a
user:
– Content modules
– Content layout
– Colour scheme
– Other preferences
 National Panchayat Portal(NPP)
(http://panchayat.nic.in)
• 73rd Amendment Act enacted in 1992 to enhance the
democratic set up by establishing the third-tier of the
government, the Panchayati Raj Insitutions (PRIs) to
work at district-, block- and village- levels
• Ministry of Panchayati Raj (MoPR), Government of India
formed in 2004 to work for the effective implementation
of Panchayati Raj or local self governance in the country
• There are about: 31 State Panchayat Raj Departments ,
536 District Panchayats or Zilla Parishads (ZPs), 6096
Block Panchayats/Intermediate Panchayats (BPs/IPs) and
2,40,000 Gram panchayats/Village Panchayats (GPs/VPs)
 Challenges of Information Dissemination &
Management
• The absolute no. of portals to be created and
maintained is mind boggling
• Maintenance of the web site
– Lack of technical skills to manage and maintain web sites
– Lack of proper review and approval mechanism,
– Inconsistency in the information published through
different media
• Linguistic diversity
• Remoteness of the institutions
• Poor Network Connectivity
 NPP–Collaborative Portal Generation
• Dynamically generates portals for Ministry of
Panchayati Raj, all 35 State Panchayati Raj
departments, all 560 district panchayats, 6096
intermediate panchayats and 2,40,000 village
panchayats in the country
• Portal site acts as a window to information & services
provided by the respective PRI
• Portals tailored for respective PRI in terms of: Page
Layout, Content Presentation, Language, Visual Theme
• The portals can collaborate with one another to share
the resources of the framework such as content, page
layout, visual theme, etc.
 NPP – Content Presentation &
Organization
• Portal Pages- A PRI portal site may present
content in more than one web page format called
portal page to cater to different sections of the
citizen or different focus areas of the community.
For eg., Farmer’s page, Health Page, Student’s
Page
• Portlets - Each portal page is divided up into
sections called portlets, e.g. Content Portlets ,
Navigation Portlets and Opinion Portlets
 NPP – Language Support
• Each PRI portal site could use one or more languages
used by its community
• UNICODE standards-based
– Hindi, English and other regional languages (which have
been UNICODE enabled)
– Easier to mix languages, share with others
• Multiple language support on each portal site
• Easy switching to another language supported by the
site without disconnecting from the site
• User-friendly screens to add or customize a language
version as per local needs
 NPP – Powerful Search Facility

• Simple Search: by word or phrase (exact or any

word)
• Metadata-based search: based on Dublin-Core
metadata tags used to define the content such as
subject, author, date published or status etc.
• Search in title, abstract, typed text or attached
files (doc, pdf,ppt etc.) of the content item
• Search across multiple languages supported by
the site
 NPP – Visual Themes
• A visual theme defines the colour scheme, header
images, logos etc.
• Each PRI can define its own theme
• The theme for a PRI portal site can be set simply
by selecting a theme for the site
• PRIs can exchange themes amongst themselves
 User Management
• Role-based Privileges
– Viewer
– Contributor
– Editor
– Content Manager
– Site Designer
– User Manager
– System Administrator
• NPP provides two user groups by default: citizen,
operator and manager
• Each PRI could use the default user groups or
create their own user groups as per their need
 NPP - Authentication
• General public need not login to browse the
information provided by the portal site
• General public can, however, self-register as
citizens to take advantage of facilities provided by
portal site for authenticated users such as
messaging facility
• PRI officials must login if they want to do more
than just browse the site.
 NPP – Content Management
• Content Creation
• Content Editing & Versioning
• Content Publishing
• Content Indexing
• Garbage Management
• Content Flow Management
NPP – Collaborative Content Management
• Each site could be configured to allow content
flow across various users to ensurePublish
that the
content is appropriately edited, approved and
then published.
• Currently, each site has two types of users:
Content

operator and manager

Manager
– Operator can create and edit content
– Manager can edit content created by
operators as well as self Edit/ Approve

– Only managers can publish content

Operator
 NPP - Messaging
• Provides message facility to send 'mails' between
users of different PRI sites.
• This could be used by citizens to send messages
to one another as well as to PRI officials and vice
versa, without a need to access an e-mail server
and Internet
• Users may belong to different PRI portal sites
which may be distributed across systems
• Similar to e.g. Yahoo mail, but works without
Internet.
 NPP – Future Directions
• NPP – A semantic Web Portal
– Already, NPP captures metadata related to content.
– Further, some basic common classification has been achieved
by standardizing on subject areas and types of content (which
are same for all government agencies). This gives capability to
search across languages in a given subject area or type of
content
– It is proposed to semantically enhance the current search
capability of NPP by linking it to domain ontology
– This would enable users to query for information or services
across portal sites and across languages using any domain-
specific concept
– Further, it is proposed to enhance the portal framework as an
ontology-building tool