As the nation's economy continues to falter, IT management faces increased pressure to get more out of existing systems. Some enterprises are attempting to accomplish this by tying together the islands of information they created during the last decade, when departmental initiatives decentralized Web-based deployments.
Two technologies,enterprise application integration (EAI) servers and portal servers,have gained considerable attention in the past year as solutions that can help organizations tie their IT investments together.
EAI servers are designed to connect enterprise software systems under the mantle of business-process management (BPM). The technology is well-suited for shops that want to define system integration based on business processes, but does little to support human interactions connected with those processes or to leverage the information contained in the underlying systems.
That's where portal servers come into play. Portal-server technology is designed to aggregate services, applications, content and people through a ubiquitous and customizable user interface. For example, a portal might be configured to enable a human resources manager to view an employee benefit change request from online forms or e-mail, validate benefit policies against the provider's published terms and then make necessary modifications directly into the back-end HR system within a single interface.
Portals also can be used to aggregate vast reams of information from internal and external data sources and present it in a context that makes sense to end users. That context can be personalized and tailored to the preferences of the intended audience, allowing portal servers to play a key role in organizations' knowledge-management systems and methodologies.
With such obvious benefits to end users, portal-server deployments provide great opportunities for VARs and integrators to help organizations optimize their existing IT investments. But, to offer the maximum value to customers, VARs looking at portal servers must first understand the key capabilities these solutions can provide and the system architectures they use.
Building Blocks of a Portal Architecture
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