Part 1: A Best Practice Guide to Architecting Portal Solutions

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Chapter List

Chapter 1: Overview

Chapter 2: Portal Solutions

Chapter 3: A Recommended Approach to Architecting Portal Solutions

Chapter 4: Architecting on Demand Workplace Solutions

Part Overview

This redbook focuses on bringing together the various efforts in engineering complex e-business solutions used within IBM. To be able to describe these efforts effectively, we have chosen to concentrate on people integration (or portal) solutions, which allow a company to provide a personalized, integrated, interactive view of its business by giving customers, suppliers, partners, and employees anytime/anywhere access to information, transactions, and know-how. Key integration requirements include role-based, preference-based, and device-based transformation of business transactions and information.

Chapter 1, "Overview" on page 3 provides details on some of the main topics that provide the foundation for this redbook—on demand computing, portals, and patterns. The approach taken in explaining these concepts is through a set of questions and answers that focuses the discussion on the areas pertinent to the redbook.

Chapter 2, "Portal solutions" on page 39 provides a detailed look at portal solutions and sets up the class of problems that we will use to showcase the design of complex solutions using best practices.

Chapter 3, "A recommended approach to architecting portal solutions" on page 65 presents our recommended approach to architecting portal solutions by infusing the use of large assets into an industrial-strength application development methodology. The large assets that can be leveraged include IBM Patterns for e-business, reference architectures, industry solutions along with their reference implementations, and frameworks. The best practices from field experiences are incorporated as guidelines for designing and building the solution.

Chapter 4, "Architecting On Demand Workplace solutions" on page 167 applies the recommended approach to a class of portal solutions targeted at establishing an e-workplace for employees of an enterprise.

Part 2, "Extending portal solutions with IBM Business Partners" on page 199 then showcases how business partner Galaxia extended the approach to architecting portal solutions articulated in Part 1 to incorporate its solutions and offerings in conjunction with IBM. This part provides a blueprint for other business partners who want to include their solutions effectively with IBM and also to leverage the reusable assets and best practices in building these solutions.

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