Application Integration

Portals are much more than massive collections of static web pages with nice graphics and clean navigation. To engage users more deeply, they must support web applications, so portals need "hooks" to simplify development of those applications and their integration into the broader portal framework.

Simplified application integration is one of the benefits of choosing .NET as your application architecture. One of the goals of .NET is to embrace open software standards to improve interoperability and to simplify integration tasks (Figure 2.7).

Figure 2.7. .NET Application Integration

When properly executed, application integration is not visible to end users. Only when integration fails do users see the separate silos of information that underlie a portal. Users often need to fuse data that originates in multiple, often incompatible, sources. Intelligence analysts can pull together an interesting picture from examining bank records, phone calls, and email among suspicious subjects. A portal can integrate customer data in a similar fashion, integrating customer phone calls, transaction records, and timing of promotions and marketing campaigns .

From an architect's point of view, a portal should provide the following features to assist with application integration:

1. Authentication services. Individual applications in the portal should not require their own security schemes and authentication. Logging into the portal should be sufficient to provide authentication to all applications hosted in the portal.

2. Data standards for application data and metadata. You may choose to publish your data schemas for business partners to access.

3. Cross-platform integration using XML as the common data exchange format and enterprise application integration (EAI) tools such as Microsoft BizTalk Server.

4. Web services when compatible with consuming applications.

5. Methods for coordinating and orchestrating distributed transactions , such as distributed transaction coordinator (DTC).