COMS 6125 –Student Presentation Series Web PORTAL Enhanced Information Management Sabyasachi Patjoshi sp2705atColumbiadotEdu

Web Portals Conglomeration of similar/different types of web content depending on the type of the Portal. A Web portal, also known as a gateway, presents itself as a starting point for Internet users when they first connect to the Web Some popular names

An attempt to classify them The presence of thousands of portals from diverse businesses and communities makes classification an arduous task. However broadly they can be classified as the following Vertical Portals The vertical portals include information about a specific industry with contents and links to other related websites. e.g-Cars.com, mp3.com Horizontal Portals Yahoo and MSN are the most common horizontal portals which cover a wide range of interests like news, finance, weather and . More Categories Personal Portals, Knowledge Portals, Sports Portals and so on..

Build your own portal iGoogle/My Yahoo Could create personalized portals using iGoogle features by adding /editing tabs the page, choosing themes etc depending on your interests/ needs. My page pulls contents from New York Times, National Geographic Channel, Google News,Dictionary.com Gmail,Gtalk,Google Travel, Calendar with a Viva Theme!

A Business Case Lets assume a business scenario Mr. Bruno, CIO of Bank of Antarctica : My bank has tens of departments-Retail banking, Investment Banking etc each having a Different website.Couldnt it be great to have a one stop for all the customer needs ?.This will decrease transaction time and improve service. Commercial Solution There are commercial solutions from many vendors like IBM,BEA, Jboss, Sun which can be used to build rich portal applications In a very short development life cycle.

What Wonders can Portal do for you? Authentication and Authorization The first and cardinal functionalities of a portal is to authenticate the users and provide appropriate access level to the portal. Directory Services The portal platform should facilitate easy integration with the various directory services like LDAP, Microsoft Active Directory in order to be able to perform the user authentication. Content Management The user should be able to modify/add web/image content and publish to the portal web site.

More of them… Search The portal should provide an internal web search across the document database for user to locate the specific information quickly and efficiently. Personalization The users can add delete various web controls through the drag and drop options and generate a personalized page for themselves. Pervasive Computing The portal should be accessible from various platforms e.g..wireless or mobile systems.

Also.. Site Usage Analytics The sensors in the portal sites would provide the site usage analytics report which would be useful in modifying the application in order to serve better. Host Integration Enterprise Application Integration is one key element of the portals frameworks. In today’s enterprise environment, integrating with other platforms like legacy systems with considerable ease. Themes Themes control the overall styling of the web pages and can be modified by the users with enough access. Themes are responsible for the fonts, colors etc for the web pages.

Elements of a Portal Page The portal page contains many portlets which is deployed in a Portal Container. The container provides the environment and manages the portlet life cycle.

Getting hands dirty Hello World Portlet 1)Create Portlet Java Class public class HelloWorldPortlet extends GenericPortlet { protected void doView( RenderRequest request, RenderResponse response) { response.setContentType("text/html"); response.getWriter().write("Hello World!"); }} 2) Create a deployment descriptor by creating the file portlet.xml and include the Portlet portlet-name>HelloWorldPortlet sample.HelloWorldPortlet VIEW</portlet-mode

Continued …Sample After doing minor configuration modifications, we can access the portlet through the browser.

Hmm but which one is the best? This is a difficult question faced by many Project Manager/CIOs while choosing between multiple software vendors. My research paper compares five most popular portal platforms holistically on basis of five weighted parameters. Ease to use Cost Support Features JSR 168 – Sun’s Portal Standards WSRP –Standard for Remote Portlets from OASIS Compatibility Documentation

Never heard of any one looking for Portal Developers?

End of Presentation Thank You