- Aggregation friendly
- Enterprise mashup
- Social functions
- Extend the lifecycle of legacy web application
- Part of the global user experience
The portal is the swiss army knife of enterprise software. It encompasses functions aggregation, personnalization, application integration, creation & delivery of content, delivery to multiple devices, search engine… The Gartner definition is " an infrastructure that provide access and interaction to assets, in a highly personalized manner."
The web evolves from indexing content to encompassing social objects: social graph, online interaction… Digital natives have different online facets (identities). Within the enterprise, That implies moving to "work streams", with profiles, activity stream, contacts list, social search…
Social objects aggregation will be required from portals: people and their relationships, internal and external content/services (consumer sites)…
Requirements are coming up with fundamental pattern elements (familiar to the social network paradigm): people, reputation, identity, relationships, interactions, shared objects, messages, access privileges, tagging, voting, rating.
On another register, portals will integrate with BPM, for facilitation and automation and to provide the user experience (through the business process platform).
Four different visions of composite application development and assembly: tactical (it is more important to do quick than well), strategic, portal (was seen as combining advantages of tactical and strategic but did not deliver), mashup (even quicker than tactical solutions and accessible to more users).
Enterprise mashup and portals can enhance each other. Mashups, inside a portal infrastructure, target the need for quick and easy assembly (tactical), while taking into account the constraints of the enterprise (security, management…).
Tomorrow, the "myPortal" will provide users with the aggregation mechanism for the portal fabric, with user-controlled UI (client-side or hybrid). New technologies complement the portlet approach (open social, REST/POX, RSS, open AJAX…).
New user interfaces (haptic, touch screen, 3D graphics…) will have to be dealt with in the portal. But it's not happening yet.
5 dimensions of change: mashed data, gadgets (interaction), widgets (logic pushed to portals and other containers), agile methods (process, more P2P-enabled), social media (content).
Open-source packages: they historically address different kind of needs (compared to the enterprise portals), they would be better labelled as "community centered publishing system", often mixing portal and CMS. Anyway, the OSS portals are now getting closer to the enterprise needs (Liferay is an example). The advantage of licensing cost for open-source portals is not significant because the cost is on integration (75 to 80% of a portal project).
Future of the external-facing portal: syndicating content and logic to broad communities, folding in AJAX & RIA, injecting social networks…
Recommendations: check on the digital native needs (now), learn about REST (soon), understand the myPortal fabric concept (later).
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