Section D.2. Portals

D.2. Portals

Two industry analysts at Merrill Lynch coined the term Enterprise Information Portal in November 1998 as "an amalgamation of software applications that consolidate, manage, analyze, and distribute information across and outside of an enterprise (including business intelligence, content management, data warehouse, and data management applications)."

We define portals more generally as web sites that collect, organize, and display large amounts of dynamic information in an organized manner. Portals are so named because they are considered gateways to the wide Internet, or to internal systems and applications, or both. In the late 1990s, for a brief time portals were considered the "next big thing" and were the subject of much hype and investment. Today portals such as Yahoo! News and MSN are quietly serving millions of users and easing their daily consumption of news and other information. Portal functionality is implemented as a collection of portal components (also known as portlets). From a user interface perspective, portals are designed with two- or three-column layouts where a user can pick portlets to display and the column to display them in. In this way, portals help the user build a personalized home page.

In the enterprise context, portals are used to streamline communication between management and employees, foster collaboration among employees, and give employees personalized access to the information and applications they need to do their work. Portals are cost effective, because they allow the possibility of consolidating servers and applications. Human resources information and news feeds are typical examples of the type of information that portals integrate well.

D.2.1. Portal Capabilities

It is important to note that portals share several features with content management systems, and many good content management systems provide an effective way to implement portals. This is why the open source projects we recommend in this appendix are content management systems that happen to be good at implementing portals.

D.2.1.1 Basic feature

• Two- or three-column layout

D.2.1.2 User management features

• User profile and personalization, such as my page, my preferences, etc.

• Integration with external authentication mechanisms such as LDAP

D.2.1.3 Content management features

• Integration with utility portlets, including address book and calendar

• Integration with information feeds, news feeds, weather feeds, and stock prices

• Integration with collaboration portlets such as instant messaging, forums, and surveys/polls

D.2.2. Recommended Open Source Portal Projects

In the following sections, we cover the open source portal projects we recommend.

D.2.2.1 Tikiwiki

Tikiwiki is a popular web publishing system written in PHP. It supports major databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, and MS-SQL) and works with any web server that supports PHP, including Apache and IIS. Tikiwiki makes excellent use of external open source projects and boasts superior support for RSS. Tikiwiki supports Wiki markup and has a basic Wiki module, but you shouldn't confuse it with a Wiki.

D.2.2.2 Product strengths

• It supports all portal capabilities listed earlier.

• It includes an integrated keyword-based search facility.

• It supports numerous portal components out of the box.

• It boasts a large developer community with rapid releases.

D.2.2.3 Product weakness

• Performance of early releases was an issue.

D.2.2.4 Metadot

Metadot is a portal server written in Perl. It runs everywhere that Perl runs (all major flavors of Unix, as well as on Windows and Mac OS X systems). It also supports MySQL and Oracle databases.

D.2.2.5 Product strengths

• It supports all basic features.

• It features an integrated keyword-based search facility.

• It comes with portal components such as news and file management, a discussion forum, survey and calendar components, and many others.

• It is easy to use and is well documented.