Building Enterprise Portals

Portal Building Basics: chose an application server or a content management system for your portal. Benefits and problems. Using a combined content management/application server approach.

physical architecture (Demilitarized Zone, Load-balancing, vertical and horizontal scalability, cloning etc. Can your application server work in a cluster? Is it maintainable? Does your content management system have single points of failure? How does it scale? These questions need to be answered early on in a portal project.

information architecture, fragment architecture, distribution architecture. Not rocket science but definitions you will need. The basis for effective caching later on.

Security: externalized authentication and authorization - why and how. Performance and SSL.

Performance, caching: Using edge side include technology (see www.esi.org) to assemble pages at the edges of your service. Shows why you need an asynchronous layer for speed. Explains how to build a service access layer and why you will need one - even with Web Services backends. Exteme testing and why you need it.

Personalization, Web-mining. Shows how your software can survive organisational or business change. Explains why the necessary meta-data need to be built into the system early on to be of use later.

Web Services: a new technology to build portals? Shows how a user interface can be built by assembling different web services into a seamless user experience (see www.oasis-open.org about web services for interactive applications and remote portals).