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November 2000
Close the Loop Between Information and Applications
By Penny Lunt
The first generation of portals in corporate use were enterprise
information portals. They aggregated and indexed content and provided an
interface that could be personalized for each user and/or group. The new
breed of portals, known as "platform portals," not only access multiple
sources of information, but they also access multiple applications and
business processes. Where before you could find information and then
open an application or send a communication to act upon it, now you can
get at the data and perform the transaction all within the portal.
"Generation-two portals take all the features the first
generation had and add to that set," says Gene Pfifer, vice president
and research director at Gartner Group, the Stamford, CT-based
consulting firm. "They have a more robust framework. They provide a Java
and visual development environment. They add the collaborative features,
mobile delivery, reliability and scalability it takes to get to an
enterprise-class environment."
Pfifer identifies Sybase, Viador, Info-Image, TopTier and Iplanet
among the vendors that have made it to the second generation. "A bevy of
others are within a release of getting to generation two - Hummingbird,
Plumtree, Epicentric, KnowledgeTrack and CoreChange," Pfifer says.
Senior analyst Larry Hawes at The Delphi Group in Boston has a
similar take on the latest generation. "Rather than a portal that sits
on top of other things, these portals provide a platform that integrates
applications," he explains. "The other big thing these vendors support
is scalability. Their solutions can be run inside a company and break
outside the firewall, across the extranet to the customer."
Hawes' list of vendors that have made it to the second generation
includes Iplanet, SilverStream, Iona Technologies and Sybase.
One advantage to a platform portal is faster integration. "The
earlier portals were 25 percent software and 75 percent integration,"
says Hawes. "That's the problem platform portals are trying to solve.
They're also trying to tame the information glut and integrate different
information sources into one interface. They provide personalization,
filtering and search [functions] that will provide more targeted
information."
What to Look For in 'Platform Portals'
Platform portals can and should include the same features found
in enterprise information portals: security, search technology, taxonomy
(content categorization), personalization, data integration and
application integration. According to Gene Pfifer at Gartner Group,
Stamford, CT, and Larry Hawes at The Delphi Group, Boston, true platform
portals will also provide the following.
Application server: "The biggest factor to scalability," Hawes
says, "is probably the inclusion of application server technology, such
as IBM's WebSphere or SilverStream's eBusiness Platform. It allows a
company to push out applications to users whether they be inside the
company or outside the company. Without that, the number of applications
that are accessible is limited."
"Whose application server does the portal use?" asks Pfifer.
"It's somewhat restrictive if it's their application server and it's
proprietary. If it's an off-the-shelf, commercially available
application server, that's acceptable."
Enterprise application integration: Some vendors with a
middleware background offer a proprietary enterprise application
integration solution. Here again, though, "It's better if the vendor
partners with another company than if it offers only its own software,"
Pfifer says.
Open standards: J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) is a
Java platform for the mainframe-scale computing typical of large
enterprises. Sun Microsystems, together with industry partners such as
IBM, designed J2EE to simplify application development in a thin-client
tier environment. J2EE simplifies application development and decreases
the need for programming and programmer training by creating
standardized, reusable modular components and by enabling the tier to
handle many aspects of programming automatically.
Another up-and-coming standard in the platform portal space is
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), which provides a way for a program
running in one operating system to communicate with programs operating
in the same or other operating system. SOAP relies on HTTP and XML as
the mechanisms for information exchange.
"SOAP is very early in its life cycle," Pfifer says. "As it
becomes more important, I'll be recommending it to clients."
Partnerships: "Corporate portals are partnering with each other
to offer a fuller breadth of functionality," Hawes says. "The more
partnerships, especially with vendors providing components you use or
need in your organization, the better."
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