Research on the misunderstanding and success facto

Research on the misunderstandings and success factors of portal system construction

portal system (portal) is a new office application rising in recent years. Because it realizes the integration of information, application and business process of enterprises and institutions, its application is becoming more and more extensive, but at the same time, there are many wrong understandings, such as equating portal to station, insufficient understanding of integration function, etc. This paper discusses this

portal initially appeared in the form of an Internet portal, which together with search engines provides people with all kinds of information. With the popularization of Internet and the development of technology, many businesses can be realized on the Internet, and enterprise portal has risen rapidly, becoming the main tool to help customers, employees and partners of enterprises access enterprise information and services in a unified, personalized and multi-channel way

today, portal system has become a platform for many organizations to integrate applications with different functions in business processes with business processes and applications as the core. Many enterprises have incorporated portals into the overall framework of corporate image, e-commerce and internal business organization

at the same time, in order to improve work efficiency and realize scientific management, many public institutions, especially government departments, have also established their own portal systems to achieve personalized services of timely access to information, timely dissemination, timely interaction and decision support. However, due to the late development of portal system, enterprises and institutions have limited time to understand it, so there are many misunderstandings

myth 1: portal is equal to station

this misunderstanding stems from portal station. Because many information stations use portal technology as their entry and provide static information such as classification, people who often visit this kind of station confuse portal station with portal system and equate enterprises and institutions with enterprises and institutions. In fact, there is a great difference between the two

first of all, the process of enterprise portals is very strong, and most enterprise stations only display content and publish messages, without putting business processes on it

second, an important purpose for people to use enterprise portals is to integrate the original decentralized applications. However, domestic enterprises and institutions' stations are positioned for publicity. Without integrating background applications, what they can do is often just shopping or querying. The portal system provides a complete set of framework technology to build an enterprise application integration system. The bottom layer of the framework can be supported by existing business systems, including existing business databases and legacy applications, and then the portal system can integrate and unify these isolated application systems

unify data integration and application integration through the portal system, send the integrated data to the portal, and the portal system will uniformly generate and manage different applications and web displays of applications. In this portal system, users can access information resources with different permissions according to different identities and roles through a single customized login point, and can access a variety of clients

Myth 2: portal is the gate

it is the name of the portal that makes many people think that the portal is a gate, that is, the portal only realizes interface level integration. This understanding really underestimates the integration role of portals. The portal system can aggregate data from external application systems, and unlike some tools with local integration capabilities (such as Ms exchange or Lotus Notes), the portal enables developers to easily customize the integrated application system according to user requirements. In addition, the integration ability of portal system is also reflected in its easy integration with other portal systems

according to the degree of portal system integration with external applications, the integration can be divided into the following ways:

1 URL based integration. This is the most basic and simplest integration method. The portal provides a URL link to an existing web page, and clicking it will pop up a new browser window to display that page or this page in the portal window as it is. If this page is displayed in the portal, it usually takes up a whole screen rather than a piece of the screen. This method may or may not include authentication messages

although from a technical point of view, this method only provides a link to functions, data or information, which cannot be called "integrated into the portal" in the real sense, it is the simplest and easiest, and it can also improve the search efficiency of users. However, if the target URL to be integrated needs to be verified, it will be difficult to achieve seamless integration in this way

2. Screen capture based on Web. Screen capture refers to the ability of the portal to capture the entire web page or a specific area in the page into the portal window. This method is usually used in applications that can be parsed into HTML tags, which can generate web pages and know which area to grab

this method is mainly used to merge customized personalized content from web-based static content sources. Because this method needs to know the exact position of the captured data elements in the screen, it will form a very inflexible interface, especially once the corresponding station makes even minor changes or upgrades, it may lead to integration failure

3. Integration based on xml/xsl. Extensible markup language (XML) is a kind of structured information that can contain files, which is used to transmit data information. It has become a standard based on Web integration. XML type specifies that XML type forms and XML pages with predefined tags are used to express information. An XML page can also be called a tag group. The defined XML pages exchange information with each other based on HTTP, and the speed is very fast. The XML processor is responsible for reading the XML file and reading the content and structure

xml is simple, flexible and extensible. Unlike HTML, XML has infinite extensibility due to the infinity and customizability of markup symbols. In addition, XML based integration can complete data dragging or processing without writing custom integration code. With this form of integration, it is only necessary to define a simple standard for external data or content sources, thus reducing customization costs and development cycles

4. Legacy screen scraping. Legacy screen capture refers to the process of copying the screen of legacy application system based on Web environment

legacy screen capture usually means that users clearly need such design and are willing to be responsible for high cost and long development cycle. The premise of this form of integration is that the tools for transforming from c/s screen to b/s form and information have been in place. Although this form of integration has inherent defects and lacks flexibility and measurability, it can protect users' investment in developing application systems before, which also shows the flexibility and adaptability of portal integration from another perspective

5. API based integration. Application program interface (API) integration requires developers to write code to integrate the required information or functions from other systems. API can be used for portal tools or other application systems. A comprehensive API can allow other external application systems to read or write

api is that it provides users with a form of directly connecting the portal with external applications, which increases the integration depth and function of the portal. If the application systems to be integrated are limited, it is meaningful to formulate an integration scheme suitable for users, but there are many systems that need to be integrated, so the solution of problems such as single sign on will become very difficult and difficult to manage and maintain

6. Through the integration of EAI. EAI refers to the use of industry standard Middleware Tools to integrate applications, such as the use of enterprise workflow engine, data element storage, etc. to organize various information from different operation support systems. EAI tools use the same message carrier to bind background applications, so as to ensure a loose coupling structure

eai products include Tibco, MQ system, Vitria, etc. EAI technology includes data interpretation and transformation, rule-based and content-based routing strategies, as well as providing connectors and adapters for packaged applications, such as e-commerce applications of sap, PeopleSoft and other companies

because the EAI method provides a platform for different applications through a common a (generally 300KN hydraulic universal testing machine and 600kN hydraulic universal testing machine should be selected according to different materials) PI, and abstracts the creation, management, change and other affairs, which greatly reduces the complexity of the integration scheme. The integration scheme using EAI is faster and easier to change than the point-to-point integration scheme. This way makes it possible to integrate multiple enterprise applications with portal on one platform, which greatly increases the functionality of the portal and the development efficiency of users

myth 3: pay insufficient attention to portlets

portlets are the characteristic technology of portal system software, which brings unlimited use space and scalability of portals through portlets. The portal system is formed by embedding portlets in the portal server. A portlet is an application embedded in the portal, a terminal for accessing activities, and a visual component of the web pages in the portal system. Similar to the windows of PC desktop, each portlet occupies a part of the browser screen

from the perspective of users, a portlet is a content channel or a portal page output by an application to individuals according to the user's predetermined requirements, and displays content through personalized configuration. From the perspective of portlet itself, a portlet is a component running on the portal server side, which can embed the provided content into the pages of the portal station

portlets run in the portlet container of the portal server, similar to servlets running in the application server

portlets rely on APIs to access a variety of information, such as user profiles. With the introduction of JSR 168 of the Java portlet API and the web services remote access specification (wsrp) standard being developed by oasis, the API will also form a standard, which will be able to provide interoperability between portals and portlets, and between portals and user oriented web services. Because the Java portlet API can establish the interoperability between portlets and portals

all portlets written according to JSR 168 can run on all compatible portal servers, which can clearly separate portlets from the portal server infrastructure they depend on, so that portlets can run on different portal servers, just as servlets can run on different application server platforms

similarly, wsrp will allow interoperability between portals and wsrp compliant web services for portals. Wsrp is a web service for presentation layer and users, which can realize plug and play with portal or other application software. With wsrp, portals can easily integrate content and applications from internal or external providers. The portal administrator simply selects the required services from the list and integrates them. The wsrp standard will define a web service interface using web service description language (WSDL)

this standard allows wsrp services to be implemented in different ways, which can be J2EE based web services or Net platform or portlets published as wsrp services. This standard allows wsrp services to be inserted into intermediate applications using generic adapter code instead of using specialized proxy code. This will allow wsrp services to be implemented on any platform that supports web services, whether it is J2EE or Net。

java portlet API and wsrp can work together. Wsrp service