Portal general guidelines

To help you determine if the Portal composite pattern is appropriate for the design of your Web-based application, the following information details the business and IT scenario into which a Portal solution fits.

Business Drivers
Business drivers are specific goals that the business is trying to achieve. In most cases, business drivers have an ultimate goal of reducing costs, increasing revenue, or improving productivity. In fact, a business can be any type of organization (for example manufacturing, research, military, etc.) that seeks to make the best use of its available resources and determine if new resources are required. The design of a portal can help to clarify these goals, and analysis of interactions with the portal can further define and enhance these drivers. There are various paths that can be followed to achieve the desired results. They are as follows:

• Deep customer knowledge and mindshare
  This can be thought of as customer intimacy. When a business wants to provide the best customer service experience and this is their primary driver for revenue, they need to understand their customers and market as much as possible. So it is important to identify these types of customers when designing a portal and once implemented a portal can provide valuable knowledge about the habits of the targeted audience. Also, this information can be used to determine if the targeted audience is helping the business achieve its goals. Thus an organization can increase customer retention through deep knowledge of that customer, resulting in increased revenues through more efficient marketing practices.
• Product leadership
  Some organizations want to be the best in their market for the products or services they provide. These organizations want to achieve leadership from a quality and/or marketplace mindshare perspective. One of the common methods for providing product mindshare leadership is by communicating certain information about upcoming products or enhancements to existing products to the targeted audience. In addition, if the business can identify other possible audiences to expand their customer base, this can also contribute to product leadership. A portal can assist in disseminating both the technical and marketing information about the products or services provided, and this information can be tailored to specific user audiences (as defined by demographic and device type information). In addition, the usage of the portal by these targeted audiences (customers) can be analyzed to determine if the marketing efforts are successful.
• Transactional and process efficiency
  Organizations that have identified increased efficiency in their internal processes want to attain the highest possible efficiency in the transactions that take place between departments, divisions, employees, and external partners (for example, external suppliers who supply raw material for the products or services being offered). A portal brings together information and access to that information into a single, aggregated view. This aggregated portal view of data provides just the information necessary for the person or entity to gain maximum efficiency in how tasks are accomplished. For example, in car manufacturing, it is important for those on the assembly line to have focused technical information for the specific part of the car they are assembling. They may also need information on parts that are related to their focus area, because of the impact if certain changes are made to their set tasks. As this information is being accessed, management can review how often and what specific parts of the information are being accessed, and thus determine if possible changes are needed to increase the efficiency of the assembly process.

Consequently, a portal implementation requires the identification of the information desired, the audience for that information, and an analysis of the usefulness of that information to fulfill the business drivers of an organization. Organizations may have only one of these business drivers, or there may be a combination of these drivers that will help the organization meet their goals.

IT Drivers
As with all organizations, those concepts that drive the IT organization to make decisions are ultimately driven by the needs of the organization at the business or enterprise level. Business drivers can be supported through the appropriate use of technologies that help achieve company goals. Many of these IT drivers are focused on cost reduction through minimizing complexity. IT drivers can be abstracted into five core drivers as follows:

• Availability
  The IT organization needs to have the solution available as defined in the business drivers. A portal implementation is having the information that the customer wants to see in the way he wants to see it. Therefore, the application needs to be available when the customer wants to see it.
• Reuse
  Reusing existing IT assets such as programming code, existing applications, and existing data sources can reduce overall cost. A portal implementation, and specifically the Portal composite pattern, brings together various existing and new systems to construct an end-to-end solution.
• Maintainability
  Maintainability is a goal of the IT organization because shifting business goals will often require adding or deleting functionality. In addition, the sources of information available to a portal system may change. Thus, it is vital that the portal implementation be able to adapt to the changing environment by isolating different systems so that changes to one type of component will not affect other components that make up the portal system.
• Scalability
  The Portal composite pattern is a "best mix" of nodes and components. The Portal runtime pattern is a high-level representation of a portal architecture that separates the components so that each component can be chosen for maximum scalability. Scalability is also important because the system should be designed and built only once and should be able to handle increased demands. This supports the general business driver of reduced cost and operational efficiency.
• Extensibility
  Extensibility in a system design allows for easier functional enhancement as the needs of the business change and/or increase. Once again, this IT driver supports the general business driver of reduced cost by being able to reuse the same architected solution.

Benefits
Once an organization has determined that it needs to aggregate information, target that information to specific users, analyze the usage of information, and collect and manage information, they can use a portal to meet these requirements. Creating a portal architecture can produce the following benefits:

• A single aggregated view of content targeted to specific user types
• Ability to analyze usage patterns to make marketing efforts more efficient
• Ability to tailor the user interface to specific groups enabling a focus on cultural, language, or nationality based differences
• Single Sign-On, allowing the user to save time and have access to information while decreasining the requirements for direct interaction with the organization, which saves money

Limitations
The creation of a portal is a complex undertaking. It requires the linking together of various, normally non-compatible systems to provide a single view of the information in an enterprise. However, although this of value to most organizations, it causes these impacts on an organization:

• Organizational changes
• Process changes
• Restructuring of existing data sources
• Rebuilding of some existing applications to support available connectivity options
• The detailed analysis of the various user groups that need to be supported (usually in much more detail than that which currently exists)

What's Next
If you have determined that the Portal composite pattern can provide an appropriate solution design for the application you are developing, next select an Application pattern.

If the Portal composite pattern is not appropriate for your development efforts, review the Business patterns to determine which pattern best addresses your e-business needs.