Enterprise Architecture: Portal Aggregation and Integration

Where does a portal make sense? Where does it fit? When should you use a portal? I am sure you know these answers already. In fact our marketing friends have done a pretty good job of answering these questions. Let us take a look at them from another perspective — an enterprise architecture perspective.

Let me first describe a perfect and ideal use-case for a portal. My organization has a multitude of applications to process orders, check inventory, ship products, etc. These web-applications work great! They are functional and lots of effort (requirements, design, development, test, etc., — the usual stuff) has been put into making them work well.

Ah! This is a perfect situation to introduce a portal. A portal to these different applications. A portal is a single gateway or door to these different applications. Critical information, in summarized form, from all the various applications is available in the single place within this portal. The portal is the default page that users get a snapshot of the status and tasks that are part of all these different applications. Whether these applications are themselves created using a portal framework, and the pros and cons of the approach, is a topic for another blog!

Let us look at a real-world and very familiar example: Google. Google has various applications such as search, email, maps, etc. This is a perfect situation to introduce a portal. That is exactly what Google has done! To tie these applications together coherently Google, has just released their portal: Personalized Google Homepage.

So, we would like to create a portal into various different applications. How do we aggregate and integrate information from all the different applications and their datasources? Well, it is not hard. We use the traditional mechanisms such as shared databases (tables, views, etc.), web-services, messaging, etc.

Additionally, there are few clever portal-specific ways to aggregate and integrate these different applications. I plan to elaborate on those in my up coming entries.

In the meantime, drop me a note and let me know what is driving your enterprise architecture portal strategy, specifically regarding aggregation and integration.

Tags: Aggregation, Enterprise Architecture, Integration, Portal