InfoImage Eases Data Integration

by Lowell Rapaport

At first glance, the most notable feature of InfoImage's Decision Portal 4.0 is its total commitment to Microsoft technology. A closer look at the product, however, reveals that its strength lies in its Pivot Portal, a tool that lets users find and use related data and content across multiple applications.

One early adopter of Decision Portal 4.0 is www.cpa2biz.com. CPA2Biz is a subsidiary of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, which provides services to CPAs and their clients on a subscription basis. The portal brings together all the applications accountants and their clients might need to access, including applications for tax accounting, estate planning, payroll, and so on.

When accountants or clients look for information, they search against the portal's Knowledge Maps, which are simple, tree-like content structures built around key topics. The Pivot Portal performs a federated search of all other Knowledge Maps looking for related information. Searches are conducted with a single click, and results can even include information kept on other Web sites.

When an accountant or client uses one of CPA2Biz's many accounting tools, the Pivot Portal automatically copies the entered data into other accounting tools that can also act upon the information. For example, when data is entered into CPA2Biz's payroll tool, relevant information is copied to the tax planning tools, retirement account tools and so on. This feature is an advance over other portals that typically require users to manually copy, drag and drop or otherwise move data from one portal application to another.

InfoImage's Pivot Portal technology blurs the distinction between enterprise application integration (EAI) and portal software. Both types of software present a single integrated computing environment to the user. However, they do so at different levels: EAI software moves structured data from one application to another on the back end, long before any data reaches the end user. Decision Portal accomplishes the same thing within the portal in front of the user.

"Sometimes you want to keep a firewall between content databases," says Bjorn Aannstad, InfoImage's director of product marketing. "Traditional EAI lets databases talk to each other and possibly modify each other's content. Because Pivot Portals work by pooling search results and related portal applications, it doesn't act to combine repositories." Pivot Portals also allow integration of data and content without requiring complex programming.

With the release of Decision Portal 4.0, InfoImage also beefed up scalability. The architecture allows multiple portal servers to be networked together even over long distances. InfoImage says this feature was originally developed to permit installation of portal servers at local branch offices while still keeping them synchronized with a central server. This approach improves scalability by making it easier to add portal servers as user demand increases.

Scalability was an important issue at CPA2Biz. "There are about half a million active CPAs, and each CPA has an average of 10 clients," says Neil Wasu, CPA2Biz's chief technology officer and chief architect. "If we get just 20 percent of CPAs to subscribe to our service, that would lead to more than one million users."

CPA2Biz installed 28 quad-processor servers to power the portal. The federated architecture lets Decision Portal mirror itself on each of these servers. "If this proves inadequate, we can just add additional servers," says Wasu.

Being Microsoft centric, Decision Portal 4.0 is tightly integrated with application environments, including SharePoint and Exchange. (SQL Server is required for the metadata repository.) Integration with other Windows-based applications is straightforward, but use with Unix and Java applications may be problematic. InfoImage has addressed scalability concerns for the portal itself, but interdependent Windows applications, such as content management, will also have to be highly scalable.

This product's biggest advantage is the Pivot Portal technology, which eases data integration and federated searching. This makes the Decision Portal more than just a window on information. It's a point of interaction for multiple applications.