Sue Vickers

As demonstrated by the emergence of multiple portal initiatives within organizations today, the benefits of enterprise portals are clearly understood. It's common to see several enterprise portal platforms deployed throughout an organization. However, many companies are attempting to standardize on one portal framework but are challenged with integrating disparate portal instances. Each portal instance requires developers, partners, system integrators, and independent software vendors (ISVs) to develop portlets using proprietary application program interfaces (APIs) that support only a single portal platform (see Figure 1). Thus, portlets built for one portal platform will not interoperate with another portal platform. Developers find themselves building the same portlet many times to support the APIs of multiple portal vendors. More important, developers are not the... (more)

Easy XML Publishing into Your Enterprise Portal

Enterprise portals provide a single interface to aggregated and componentized information. They significantly reduce the navigational issues inherent with Web sites and make it easier to publish information from disparate sources. The basic building blocks of enterprise portals are portlets, which are reusable, personalized Web components displaying content from various data sources. One data source, XML, has become a widely used tool in enterprise portals. The work needed to integrate XML with a portal is often considered a highly technical and time-consuming task. For example,... (more)