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Portal
Overview
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 Portal composite pattern assists in the design process for a portal implementation.
The Portal composite pattern leverages various mechanisms (e.g. content management, user interface formatting and display, data aggregation) to bring together the appropriate information and existing systems to serve the goals of the business.
The Portal composite pattern below has been revised based on a more detailed analysis of the key patterns required in a portal. The figure also shows the generic use cases which would indicate the need for a Portal composite pattern.
This figure differs slightly from the original redbook (SG24-6087) because the Dec 2004 re-engineering of the Information Aggregation and Data Integration patterns changed some of the Application pattern names.
The Business and Integration patterns that we have identified as the mandatory building blocks of the Portal composite pattern are as follows:
- Access Integration pattern
- Self-Service business pattern
- Collaboration business pattern
- Information Aggregation business pattern
- Application Integration pattern
Please note that, based on the specific requirements of your portal, the Business and Integration pattern building blocks may vary. For example, you may find that you have use for the Extended Enterprise business pattern in addition to the ones we defined, or you may find that you only need Access Integration, Collaboration and the Information Integration business pattern. Based on your specific requirements,this would then be defined as a Portal custom design.
What's Next
If you're not yet sure that your business problem can be solved by the functionality enabled through a Portal solution design, the Portal general guidelines page provides additional information on choosing this Business pattern. Business and IT drivers, the e-business context appropriate for this solution type, and additional solution details are discussed here.
If you've determined that the Portal composite pattern can provide an appropriate solution design for your business need, the next step is to select an Application pattern. The Portal composite pattern is composed of multiple Business and Integration patterns that can each be developed with functionality enabled through one or many specific Application patterns.
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Updated Portal composite pattern
Updated: 12-16-2004
The Portal composite pattern has been updated for WPS V5 and the revised Information Aggregation and Application Integration patterns.
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Feasibility: This material will help you determine the high-level shape of a Portal solution, and ensure your approach looks similar to other successful sites. Re-use 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 site. This pattern provides a drill-down from high-level architecture to lower-level designs and guidance.
Risk: Basing new projects on prior designs and ideas helps to lower the risk of failure. Creating or inventing designs 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 over-run.
Cost-benefit: By starting with reasonably complete architectures you save considerable development time and 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.
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