ePortal Framework

ePortal is currently under development and is not yet released as a commercial product. If you wish to be involved with this development let us know.

The first version of ePortal will be simply a tiles-based UI engine for release 4.1. It will include preferences and use column layout with tiles to generate your 'up' 'down' 'minimize' 'maximize' 'edit' buttons. It will have in it's configuration for each 'tile' what controller to call. Each maximize button has in it's configuration what controller to call for a full readout.

IePortal will be a valued added, commercially package which will integrate both the Apache Struts/Tiles and the Apache Jetspeed Portlet API with Jcorporate component integration including:

Premium support for ePortal includes support for Apache Jetspeed Portlet API and Struts/Tiles.
integration "interface" with eContent, our web based content management system, to allow eContent's content management to be provided via Jetspeed's Portlet API.
integration with Expresso components, i.e. dbobjects, security, connection pooling etc.
integration "interface" between Jetspeed Portlet APIand other Jcorporate components, e.g. eSearch, eForum, etc.

ePortal enables the creation of dynamic, user sustainable web sites as well as database applications. This provides the platform for enterprise portal deployments:

Integration of enterprise information and applications through an open interface (the portlet framework).
Incorporation of value added core portal services, such as workflow, search capabilities, security, single sign-on, and an application-development environment.
Extensive customization and personalization capabilities at the enterprise, workgroup, and individual-user levels.

With release 4.0 of Expresso Framework, Struts is now integrated and this is influencing our design for ePortal. Here's how... The Struts team are in the middle of working out a design for portal-like applications using Tiles and the very cool RSS Channel bean from the Commons-Digester, and have plans to personalization to this as well. The Struts team is also very interested in integrating the Jetspeed Portlet API, and believe that it can support a good deal of the specification from within Struts, perhaps all of it, and make the portlets available to any container. The portlets themselves are very similar to Actions, and like could use a Struts Action to dispatch the portlets, and then use Tiles to render the view. It may also be possible to have that Action recognize things like the portlet.xml, and merge that with the application's runtime configuration.

The Struts team is working along the lines of transforming the XML feeds into JavaBeans (Craig is doing this already with his RSS implmentation in the Commons-Digester package), and then passing the beans to the view. The Tiles then just write the view from the bean, same as you would for a database query, or any other instance of dynamic content. The tricky part is setting up so that each Tile (fragment) can easily grab its own bean. This is where Struts may need to tap into what is provided by the API.

With the Tiles/Struts integration you can define a page layout in a XML configuration file, and then refer to that defination in an ActionForward. The controller then renders the "page" directly by including the specified tiles.

Introduction to Portal Technology

Every company is looking for new ways to empower their customers, suppliers, partners and employees with more effective and efficient interactions. Hence, the evolvement of portals, which is essentially an aggregation of content, community and commerce activities for members to interact.

One of the keys to ebusiness success is the implementation of effective tools, processes, and models across the enterprise to truly empower customers, suppliers, partners and employees in all their varied roles - enabling instant and intuitive access to all the information and applications they need to do their jobs and further the goals of the company. A Portal is a site with instantaneously enhances interactions between members and organizations and it offers personalized services and attention such as email, chats, forums, calendars, news, ecommerce, and customized information. ePortal can provide these capabilities across the organization by unifying enterprise applications and information through a standard web browser.

Web technology is driving business processes to a new speed, e-business speed. As companies around the globe strive to incorporate e-business practices, companies need a way to intelligently publish digital documents and digital resources - and improve workflow. Our ePortal and eContent solutions integrate the concept of portal capabilities and business process integation. An extensible architecture for unifying & organizing access to disparate enterprise data sources - for strategic advantage.

ePortal Framework provides organizations with comprehensive, modular, and extensible framework for integrating and leveraging applications and information. By effectively hosting information and applications assets, including legacy applications, and then customizing the end-user experience, organizations can increase efficiency, lower costs, reduce overhead, and obtain a high return on investment dollars.

The ePortal subscription license is a simplified, tested download of Jetspeed with Premium Support and integration with the other Jcorporate components. For example, one advantage is the Expresso integration directly supports scaling up to J2EE environments and supports a finite-state machine model 2 architechture designed to utilize ANY user-interface technology - e.g. JSP, XSLT, WML, Applets, applications, etc.

Content Topics
	What is ePortal?
	Introduction
	Portlet Framework
	Core Services
	Customizations
	What is an Enterprise Portal?
	Key Portal Features
	Communicating at Internet Speed

Related Links
	eContent

Enhances Productivity

ePortal enhances productivity in areas such as supply chain management, finance, logistics and human resources. It optimizes computing resources, eliminates report reruns, increases productivity, improves service response and reduces cycle times.

Timely Decisions

ePortal keeps users on time by delivering time-critical information whenever and however it is needed, whether you use a laptop, desktop or remote server to view reports.

Enterprise Solution

If you work for a company having more than one office, or employing more than 100 people you've encountered the problem: how do you give everyone the information they need and not be paralyzed by endless meetings? ePortal is the answer!

Portlet Framework

Central to ePortal is an open, standarized and published application- programming interface (API) that any developer - can use to hook applications and services into the portal framework. This API, referred to as the portlet-provider interface, is a mechanism that enables an organization to register various components with the Portlet Framewok, thereby creating and customizing the enterprise portal. Once registered, the applications and information are available to users who have the correct access rights.

Anyone can develop an interface that conforms to this API and register a component with the portlet framework so that an application becomes available through the portal. For example, you could expose a customized general ledger accounting module through this API.

The portlet framework is built on a solid foundation of internet standards, including HTTP, HTML, XML for data transport, display, and labeling, respectively, and SSL for security infrastructure. It also supports integration with IMAP for messaging and LDAP for directory service. Single sign-on technology and integrated postal services simplify administration at both the individual user and group levels, which eases management of monitoring, security, session management, and user preferences and profiles. Because it is built on open, public APIs, the framework integrates easily with existing infrastructures and application profolios.

Core Services

ePortal provides several core services necessary for enabling an enterprise-class portal implementation. There core portal services include: publishing, web-application development framework, navigation, searching, status, and notification portlet components. These core services are powerful. For example, the search component allows users to find information by keyword search, theme search, folder search, or meta information;(source publications date, format, and so on.).

ePortal Framework supports access through firewalls, which means that users aren't limited to accessing internal information and applications - administrators can grant access to internal and external applications as well as to internal and external data.

Customizations

ePortal provides for a hign degree of easy customization. Administrators can configure a portal to host specific applications and information resources (including internal and external web sites) as well as different user communities with completely different configurations, including distinct look and feels. Administrators can define as many enterprise-portal views as needed by workgroup, department, line of business, or other organizational grouping. And administrators can tailor individual views to the needs of a specific user.

ePortal provides a portal framework for registration and integration of intranet-based applications and data stores, a set of feature-rich portal services, development tools, and a user interface that allows users to personalize their portal experiences. For example, a financial officer might configure his portal so that his browser includes a dynamic window into accounts receivable balances, with accounts receivables over 90 days displayed as red links. Another area of his browser might show daily operating figures and traffic light indicators on business statistics to inform the user when ok, caution or outside limits specified.

What is an Enterprise Portal?

The demands for just-in-time information will continue to grow at an accelerated pace through the next decade. Companies embracing Portal technologies to enable production of such information will find themselves possessing competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Achieving success in an ebusiness world requires an empowered workforce that has all of the tools it needs to be efficient and productive. Today those tools comprise information and applications. Enterprise portals promise to tame the proliferation of information in order to further business advantage. Enterprise portals provide a personalized window into the enterprise for individualized users and classes of users, based on job functions, roles, or other criteria - that provides transparent, tailored access to distributed digital resources.

Enterprise portals provide a personalized home base for company's employees. In most cases, they combine information from the company intranet with selected links from the Internet. Corporate portals provide simple user interfaces, using Web browsers to enable easy global access to the computing resources of a company. The browser's familiar interface makes using some of these resources less intimidating than the functional but complicated dedicated applications.

You go to a portal like Yahoo! or Excite to get the information you need to manage your personal day: news, portfolio, e-mail, and more. Seeing the popularity of portals and the value of having a single place where you can communicate with coworkers, access data, and share information, companies are turning to what are known as corporate portals to deliver a Yahoo!-like experience for managing your business day.

One key advantage of corporate portals is that they provide many hooks into existing data stores and can create customized Web views for different departments or project teams in the organization. Most IT departments could build something similar from scratch using Web application development tools. But buying a corporate portal solution jump-starts the process, providing better returns. Portals can provide intersections among calendars, projects, workspaces, and people allow for organizing a company.

Based on a simple, easy-to-use and easy-to-customize web browser interface, enterprise portals can provide numerous benefits to users allowing them to:

Interact with relevant information and applications both internal and external to the company. For example, a company's intranet may include news feeds; plus content management; and access to legacy financial-accounting systems.
Define business processes, including workflow enabled processes that move information automatically among various components. For example, using XML a process designer might configure an accounting application to receive invoices automatically so that users don't have to enter them manually.
Collaborate with other both inside and outside the organization through the browser interface and share information as appropriate with customers, suppliers and partners. For example via a discussion forum or via self published content.
Interface with business-intelligence functions. Users can set thresholds for key business events that affect them or which they want to be appraised. For example, a manager wants to be advised if a key operating statistic falls below a certain %.

What A Corporate Portal Can Offer

Organizing functions such as calendars, contact management, to-do lists and group scheduling
Access to group documents and discussion groups based on the projects you're currently working on
Access to Publishing and subscription capabilities
Database access to customer records
Customized reports from authorized data stores
Company-relevant news and information from Web resources
Access to common business applications such as vacation/sick-leave reporting, a corporate travel database and automated expense reporting
Remote secure access

Enterprise Portal Key Features

Easy to Use: An enterprise portal is web enabled so as to be geared to the skills of the broadest range of users.
Universal: At the same time the new universal transport via web technologies provides the tools needed to create ePortal, an Enterprise Information System, to achieve instant access to resources and a global network for instant transmissions. Provides broad access to both structured and unstructured information from a variety of sources - legacy systems, intranets (webs), applications.
Dynamic Search: Users must be able to search by category, query and analyze information.
Extensible: Provides a published application-programming interface (API) so that developers can easily integrate additional applications and data sources.
Collaboration: Users should be able to email, participate in threaded discussions, collaborate on calendars and group scheduling, to-do lists, and annotate documents.
Personalization: based on preferences and job roles
Security: In order that information be protected the organization can control access at a granular level - by user, group or object - and should provide security mechanisms to ensure data privacy and integrity.
Scaleable: As a focus point of integration across the enterprise, the portal must be able to support possibly thousands of concurrent requests, hundreds of information sources, and dynamic generation of Web pages for thousands of users. The architecture behind the portals by necessity robust and provides capabilities such as load balancing across multiple servers, intelligent caching, pooled connections, and other performance- enhancing techniques.
Notification and Scheduling: The portal can notify users via email, pages, phone or other media when new information to which they're subscribed is available. In addition, the portal might provide automatic scheduling for searches or tasks.
Business intelligence Integration: Since a portal might provide real time monitors of key performance indicators it needs to be able to integrate with Business Intelligence solutions of choice.
Web Content Management Integration: Offers a rich metadata source to describe the content so that users can easily find and understand the information they're looking for. From the portal users must be able to publish information, and subscribe to new content. Users should be able to create new table of contents (channels) and be able to specify which users, groups, or channels may access the objects.
Customizable and Manageable: Administrators are able to to preconfigure the portal's look and feel, table of contents/channels, available resources, and individual and group permissions. Graphical web based forms enable administrators to rapidly set up the user interface, establish permissions, and integrate other resources.

ePortal makes it possible to present different operational functions of an enterprise to specific audiences and set up the appropriate level of security for each group. For example, your supplier portal may allow a detailed view of your current inventory for the products that they supply, while your customer portal may show the customer only whether the product is in stock or not.

Communicating at Light Speed

ePortal integrated with eContent, offers the enterprise the advantage of instant information to the corporate environment by providing access to everything from HR documents and forms to financials and operations data. Moreover, ePortal can be also be used for improving customer and vendor information designed specifically for their particular needs.

Web-based enterprise information portal solution, integrated with Jcorporate's solutions, including eContent management. A key strategic solution for doing business at digital speed and for reducing costs!

What A Corporate Portal Can Offer