Pervasive Commerce Portal

Organizations strive to achieve the best combination of deep customer knowledge and mindshare, product leadership, and transactional efficiency as best suits their business goals. In order to obtain these goals, organizations leverage IT systems to provide various types of information to specific audiences.

The Pervasive Commerce Portal composite pattern described in this chapter includes elements of the Electronic Commerce composite pattern, Portal composite pattern and the Access Integration pattern.

A Composite pattern can be comprised of various combinations of Business, Integration, Application and Runtime patterns. Composite patterns combine Business patterns and Integration patterns to create complex, advanced e-business applications.

The Business and Integration patterns that can be included in the Pervasive Commerce Portal composite pattern are as follows:

• Access Integration
• Self-Service
• Collaboration
• Information Aggregation
• Extended Enterprise (optional)
• Application Integration

Depending on the type of commerce enabled portal solution being deployed, different combinations are implemented based on the required functionality. Some of these Business and Integration patterns are required and some are optional when applied to a Pervasive Commerce Portal composite pattern.

As shown in the figure above, the Composite pattern for a Pervasive Commerce Portal solution will consist of the following mandatory patterns:

• A Self-Service business pattern which provides customers access to Web site functions such as browsing the catalog, placing an order, making a payment and so on
• An Information Aggregation pattern which is used to present information from multiple sources using a unified catalog of items
• An Application Integration pattern that is used to combine the Self-Service pattern and the Information Aggregation pattern to provide a unified solution to the customer and provides a Population application pattern to populate the catalog.
• An Access Integration pattern that provides for more sophisticated functions aimed at increasing the user-friendliness of the site such as personalization and pervasive device access
• A Collaboration business pattern that provides functions such as automatic order confirmation through e-mail or online chat capabilities with customer service representatives

Additionally, Pervasive Commerce Portal solutions can have several variants that optionally include the following patterns:

• An Extended Enterprise pattern that can be used to implement a direct connection with a shipping company that is used to ship the order to the customer

Pervasive Commerce Portal Examples:

Online retail industry:

• Consumers purchasing goods using pervasive devices from a Sales portal

If you've determined that the Pervasive Commerce Portal composite pattern can provide an appropriate solution design for your business need, the next step is to select a Pervasive Commerce Portal application pattern.

If the Pervasive Commerce Portal composite application pattern is not relevant, go back to explore the Electronic Commerce pattern.

If neither the e-commerce nor the Pervasive Commerce Portal composite pattern is appropriate for your development efforts, review the Business patterns to determine which pattern best addresses your e-business needs.

• Created Pervasive Commerce Portal composite pattern

  Updated: 12-17-2004
  The Pervasive Commerce Portal composite pattern has been documented as a variation of the Electronic Commerce composite pattern.

• Feasibility:
  This material will help you determine the high-level shape of an Extended Enterprise solution, and can ensure your approach looks similar to other successful implementations. Reuse of prior approaches can be an effective way to begin most major projects. Obviously, modifications will be needed for any unique requirements of a given set of partners. This pattern provides a drill-down from high-level architecture to low-level designs and guidance.

• Risk:
  Basing new projects on prior designs and ideas helps to lower the risk of failure. Creating or inventing approaches for each project tends to result in a lower success rate. Frequently, projects begun "from scratch" simply do not work and have major exposures in such areas as security, performance, availability, undefined requirements, and cost overrun.

• Cost-benefit:
  By starting with reasonably complete architecture you can save considerable development time and can obtain assurance that the end solution will have a much higher chance of success. Actual savings will vary, but project teams have realized a 10% to 50% reduction of work effort in their design and architecture phases alone.