Using Portals to

Manage Content
Catalin MAICAN
University TRASNILVANIA of Brasov

Agenda
What

is a Portal
Portal types
Customization and Personalization
Content Management and Security
Tools to build Portals
Open sourcebut not for enterprise

What is a Portal
Collection

of a variety of useful information

into a one-stop Web page
Bridges to information silos
Access points that reach across deep and
surface web content
Online access to intranet corporate
information
One-stop information access point
Google with good content

What is a Portal
During

this presentation a portal

means:
A

common place to find information

A point and click entry place to other
places
Easy access to data
What you want, where you need it,
when you need it.

What is a Portal
According
A

to Webopedia:

Web site or service that offers a broad

array of resources and services, such as email, forums, search engines, and on-line
shopping malls. The first Web portals were
online services, such as AOL, that provided
access to the Web, but by now most of the
traditional search engines have
transformed themselves into Web portals
to attract and keep a larger audience.

Portals According to IBM

A

2001 presentation by IBM on iSeries says

Portal stands for:

P = Personalization for the end user

O = Organization of the user's desktop

The more the portal is used, the more it can be tailored

A = Access to heterogeneous data stores

Membership services and layered authentication

T = Tracking of activities

Consolidated access to data in a layout that suites them

R = Resource division determines "Who Sees What"

Personal or community desktop

RDBM, e-mail, news feeders, web servers, various file systems

L = Location of important people and things

Realtime access to experts, communities, and content

Portals versus Websites

Portals

do not replace Websites

External users still need access to your home
page
Portals are designed to be access points to
specific information and places
Portals work well in intranets and extranets

Browser-Based Data
Integration

A Web-based access point

to federated content:

Content from multiple data

sources

A personalized home page

applications, databases,
content systems, the Web
Accessible via multiple
channels

Desktop, mobile devices,

phone (voice interface)

Portal functionality
Discover

-High quality searching

Capture -Harvesting and delivery tools
Manipulate -Text-processing and citation
management tools
Distribute -Contribution and publication tools
Consult -Access to Virtual/Online Reference
and electronic scholarly communities

Portal types (according to WhatIs.com)

General portals:

Yahoo!
MSN
Hotmail
Excite

Niche portals:

Fool.com (for investors)

Garden.com (for gardeners)
SearchNetworking.com (for network administrators)

Portal types (according to PortalsCommunity.com)

A significant portal implementation can be
comprised of multiple types of portals and
blended into a hybrid solution.
Types:

Corporate or Enterprise (Intranet) Portals Business to employees (B2E) portals;

eBusiness (Extranet) Portals;
Personal (WAP) portals;
Public or Mega (Internet) portals.

Enterprise Information Portals (EIP)

Designed for activities and communities to improve the access,

processing and sharing of structured and unstructured information
within and across the enterprise;
Incorporate roles, processes, workflow, collaboration, content
management, data warehousing and marts, enterprise applications and
business intelligence;
Provide employee access to other types of portals such as eBusiness
portals, personal portals and public portals.
Federated Portal: A union of independent departmental or group portals
into a cohesive portal solution;
Provide access to syndicated content which is defined as external
information, from a single or multiple sources, that is maintained by a
third party (e.g. news feeds).

eBusiness (Extranet) Portals

Extended enterprise portals:

Examples:

business to customer (B2C) which extend the enterprise to its customers for
the purpose of ordering, billing, customer service, self-service, etc.;
business to business (B2B) which extends the enterprise to its suppliers and
partners. B2B portals are transforming the supplier and value chain process
and relationships.

eMarketplace portals:

Examples:

www.commerceone.net: focuses on the North American Maintenance, Repair

and Operations (MRO) market. CommerceOne provides commerce-related
services to its community of buyers, sellers and net market makers;
www.vertical.net: connects buyers and sellers online by providing industryspecific news and related product and service information;
www.globalnetxchange.com: a B2B (business to business) network for mass
merchants, specialty, grocery and category retailers to buy, sell, trade or
auction goods and services.

eBusiness (Extranet) Portals

ASP portals Application Service Provider (ASP)

portals are B2B (business to business) portals that
allow business customers the ability to rent both
products and services.
Examples of an ASP:

Salesforce.com - manages the sales and reporting process

for a distributed mobile sales team;
Mysap.com and oraclesmallbusiness.com are complete
enterprise systems offered through a portal framework via
the Web.

Personal (WAP) portals

Pervasive/omnipresent portals or mobility

portals:

embedded in Web and cellular phones, wireless PDAs

(Personal Desktop Assistant), pagers, etc. Personal or
mobility portals are increasingly popular and important for
consumers and employees to obtain product and service
information such as prices, discounts, availability, order
status, payment status, shipping status, etc;

Appliance portals - These portals are embedded in

TVs (WebTV), automobiles (OnStar), etc.

Public or Mega (Internet) portals

Organizations that fit into this category are

becoming new media companies and are focused
on building large online audiences with large
demographics or professional orientation.
Two major types of public portals:

General public portals or mega portals:

address the entire Internet versus a specific community of
interest and include: Yahoo, Google, Overture, AltaVista,
AOL, MSN, Excite, etc.
General public portals or mega portals will become fewer
and consolidate over time.

Public or Mega (Internet) portals

Industrial

vortals:

portals, vertical portals or

Rapidly growing and are focused on specific

narrow audiences or communities such as
consumer goods, computers, retail, banking,
insurance, etc.
Examples of vertical portals include:

www.ivillage.com which focuses on families;

www.bitpipe.com that is a syndicator of information
technology content.

Portal characteristics

Single, powerful search

Fast and powerful
Integration of diverse content (public web, licensed
journals, digitized materials, news feeds, etc.)
Searches across formats and record syntaxes
Searches may be limited by range of options
(subject, format, date)
Results are deduped, sorted and may be ranked by
relevancy
Content may be searched by subject

Portal characteristics
Supports

authentication
Supports authorization
Can be personalized
Can be customized
Integrates appropriate applications such as
course management software or citation
building tools, etc.

Requirements for an enterprise

portal

Easy to Use. An enterprise portal must be geared to the skills of the

broadest range of users in order to promote self service. As a
consequence the enterprise portal has a graphical interface and uses a
public browser like consumer portals in the internet.
Universal Information Access. An EIP must provide broad access to
structured and unstructured information from a variety of sources
intranet, internet and extranet. Portals require comprehensive
metadata sources to describe the content in the right context so the
user can easily find and access it.
Dynamic Resource Access. The user must be able to search by
category, publish information, subscribe to new content, query and
analyse information, and plan and execute activities.

Requirements for an enterprise

portal

Extensible. The enterprise portal can provide access to all sources,

only if it includes a published application programming interface (API)
that developers can use to hook in existing and future applications.
Collaborative. Users should not only be able to publish documents, but
also should be able to annotate existing documents and create and
participate threaded discussions. When users subscribe to objects,
such as reports, spreadsheets and messages, they must have the
obligation to define the format, delivery channel, and alert method.
Only publishers and administrators should be able to give access rights
to objects to users or groups.
Customizable. Administrators should have the ability to configure
different permissions for different users and groups. Nonetheless users
must have the possibility to configure settings appropriate to their own
needs.

Requirements for an enterprise

portal

Proactive. The enterprise portal can be truly empowering only if it provides an

infrastructure for proactive activities. There must be the ability to subscribe to alert
mechanisms, create key-performance-indicator monitors, and create agents for automatic
searches, or queries to keep the user informed.
Secure. As the portal is a bridge between internal and external interactions it should
provide security mechanisms to ensure the privacy and integrity of data. In fact the
organization must control access at a very granular levelby user, by group, or even by
objectand should provide security mechanisms to ensure the privacy and integrity of
data.
Scalable. Most enterprises that use the portal technology are very big and are growing
every year, consequently the portal must support thousands of concurrent requests,
hundreds of information sources, and dynamic generation of web pages by thousands of
users. Therefore the architecture behind portals must be very robust and provide
capabilities such as load balancing across multiple servers, intelligent caching, pooled
connections, or other performance-enhancing techniques.
Manageable. Simple graphical tools must enable administrators to set rapidly up the user
interface, establish permissions, and integrate with other resources. Monitoring, tuning,
and content-management tools should also be part of the portal solution.

Personalization and customization

Personalization: dynamically serve customized content

(pages, products, recommendations, etc.) to users based on
their profiles, preferences, or expected interests;
Personalization v. Customization:
In customization, user controls and customizes the site or
the product based on his/her preferences;
usually manual, but sometimes semi-automatic based on a
given user profile.
Personalization is done automatically based on the users
actions, the users profile, and (possibly) the profiles of
others with similar profiles

Content Customization

Individual customizations are stored as a Profile in an SQL

database based on the users Windows logon name.
Individuals manage their Profile settings using the Edit Your
Profile, web page.
The Profile stores the following information about a user:

Content modules
Content layout
Colour scheme
Other preferences

Content Customization on
my.yahoo.com

Personalization example

A simplified scheme for

personalization

Why Personalization?

Know Thy Customer and Knowledge is Power

Relationships based on customer insight propel an organization

from simply treating customers eciently to treating them relative
to their needs, preferences, and value potential. . . .
Knowing the customer is paramount in today's marketplace
where the customer has more options, greater exibility and
higher expectations

John C. Nash (Accenture)

Customer knowledge implies

1.) Acquisition of customer data
2.) Analysis of customer data
3.) Action in accordance with the gained
insights

Acquisition of customer data

Customer data are recordings of:

preferences
transactions
pre-sales contacts
after-sales support
demographic information

Some of these data:

may be purchased from third parties

may be held in multiple disparate databases that serve
completely different purposes
are of varying quality with respect to error rates, reliability,
coverage, representativeness

Analysis of customer data

Data analysis should provide feedback on questions like

Which users will become customers?
Which customers will return again?
Who is more likely to respond to a promotion action?
Who would be interested in cross-sale/up-sale suggestions?
Closely related to questions like
Is the Web-site appropriately designed to serve the
organization's goals?
Are the customers satisfied?
Are the customers satisfied enough to come again?
Are the customers satisfied enough to become promoters of the
site?

Action in accordance with the

gained insights

Alignment of the marketing policy

Alignment of the supply chain, including after sales support

Adjustment of the web site
static site re-design
Browsing/Navigation suggestions
Recommendations on the page
Intelligent assistance
Personalized layout and content

Fact: The time lag between insight and action

should be minimized.

Data Preparation for Personalization

Web Usage Mining

Discovery of meaningful patterns from data generated by
client-server transactions on one or more Web servers
Typical Sources of Data
automatically generated data stored in server access logs,
referrer logs, agent logs, and client-side cookies
e-commerce and product-oriented user events (e.g.,
shopping cart changes, ad or product click-throughs, etc.)
user profiles and/or user ratings
meta-data, page attributes, page content, site structure

The Web Usage Mining Process

Usage Data Preprocessing

Data Preparation for Web Usage

Mining

Data Transformation

Data Reduction

user identification
sessionization / episode identification
pageview identification
a pageview is a set of page files and associated objects
that contribute to a single display in a Web Browser
sampling and dimensionality reduction (ignoring
certain pageviews / items)

Identifying User Transactions (i.e., sets or

sequences of pageviews possibly with
associated weights)

User and Session Identification

Need for Reliable Usage Data

Validity of results in Web usage mining is affected by

the ability to:
distinguish among different users to a site
reconstruct the activities of the users within the site
Difficult to obtaining reliable usage data due to:
proxy servers and anonymizers
rotating IP addresses connections through ISPs
missing references due to caching
inability of servers to distinguish among different visits

Portal Metamodel (UI)

A portlet is

From a programmers point-of-view a piece of

code that when invoked by the portal server
returns tagged (HTML, WML,) data to be included
within a portal container;

Thus, a portlet has to comply with certain assumptions:

It has to support a certain portlet API;
It has to use only a restricted subset of tags within its
returned content.

From a content providers point-of-view a mean to

make content available;
From a users point-of-viewcontent to subscribe to

Sample page 1

Sample page 2

Tree view of a portal

Content Arrangement Part 1

For an intranet, personalize the content

The portal should know who is knocking on the door,

validate they have the right password, and then get access
to their preferred objects
Provide access to personal mail in-baskets, calendars and
task lists and to-dos

For an extranet, using passwords for your customers

and clients you can do similar personalized portals

Use registration databases that allow external users to set

their passwords and choose their preferences
Portals like Yahoo and MSN do this for their customers to
generate return traffic. The same thing can happen at your
installation for the same reasons.

Content Arrangement Part 2

Use a consistent format then change the data in

the mini modules

Use lots of white space

Know your customer even internal ones

If you build it they will come this really is true in a well

thought-out portal.
Time is precious; making information access quick is key to
improving business interactions
You probably already know frequently requested or
accessed databases and files.
Use these as prime candidates for your Portals

Content Arrangement Part 3

News

feeds, NNTP, are perfect vehicles to

generate current events items for a portal.

Prime the portal by putting in News Feeds with

information or issues key to your industry

Use

awareness tools such as NetMeeting,

SameTime, and instant messaging to find
people quickly.

Place the links in portlets on your portal

Example of a Portal Format

Search
A Custom
Web page
possibly your
Company
website

Or a News
Frame

Calendar

Tasks/ToDos

Use portlets on your main

portal to group common
objects and data

Awareness

Quick
Links to
company
apps,
intranet
pages

Corporate Calendar

Task List

Corporate WebSite
Mail Inbasket

Company Intranet
Human Resources
Product Catalogs
Company News
Procedures/Policies
Documentation
Pricing Tables
Customer Records
Marketing Brochures
Reports

Task List
Corporate Calendar

Mail Inbasket

Master Calendar
Database
To-do and task
list files

Disparate Data
Repositories

Notes
databases

AS/400
Application

DB2 Database

Company Intranet
Human Resources
Product Catalogs
Company News
Procedures/Policies
Documentation
Pricing Tables
Customer Records
Marketing Brochures
Reports

Mail database
(Domino,
Exchange,
iNotes, Other)

Access
database

Corporate WebSite

Internet

Content Management and related

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Also known as Asset Management (AM) or Media Asset Management (MAM)

The business case for DAM argues that companies whose life blood revolves around
their digital assets such as entertainment firms - should organize and repurpose
those assets to streamline costs and enhance revenues.
Systems suited to managing multimedia content and tend to offer hooks into
specialized desktop media authoring systems. If multimedia content serves as your
companys products itself -- rather than supporting other products.

Document Management (DM)

Function to help companies better manage the creation and flow of documents
through the help of databases and workflow engines that encapsulate metadata and
business rules;
Grabbed a significant toehold in heavily regulated or document-centric industries such
as insurance. They take advantage of much of the power behind SGML, and have
been relatively quick to migrate to XML.
Important precursor to Web Content Management.
Critical drawback: limited traditional understanding of content as files, as opposed to
discrete chunks of information. CM products that took a more granular and flexible
approach to content emerged as better suited to web-based publishing.

Content Management and related

Knowledge Management (KM)

The purpose of KM is to capture and distribute the knowledge held among individuals
within a corporation to other co-workers and partners, according to set rules;
This class of products is suited to the internal needs of organizations in knowledgeoriented industries, such as tech-intensive manufacturing and professional services
firms;
The KM marketplace evolved into Enterprise Information Portals (EIPs),. From the
user perspective, perhaps the most important feature of an EIP is its search engine
(several search-engine vendors have also recently recast themselves as EIP
products).

Software Configuration Management (SCM)

Also known as Software Change Management or "Source Code Management"

SCM tools help technical teams manage the development and roll-out of software
engineering projects through a coordinated, documented system of platform builds
and enhancements.
Mirrors some of the facets of content management, including workflow, versioning, and
version control.

Content Management and related

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

Enable content owners to regulate and control information

distribution by applying granular access rights and
downstream privileges to specific pieces of content;
solutions work on the server side, the desktop level, or
combination of both. On the server, these technologies are
sometimes labeled privileges management;
Although DRM vendors presently focus intently on vendors
of content, as well distributors of value-added content, one
can expect them to broaden their target markets;

Content Management and related

Content Management (CM)

Resides at the center of the digital
information management universe, at
least for now;
A CM System is essentially a collection
of your business rules and editorial
processes around content.
Product offerings vary by vendor, but
most CM packages have adopted key
features from KM, DM, DAM, SCM, and
DRM segments.
Content Management tools also add
other critical functions including:

templating,
separation of content and presentation,
web publishing, and
syndication

The role of Content Management

Prepare business information for efficient deployment to Web sites and applications.
Enable business users directly contribute and manage content delivery.
Web
Delivery
Platform

Content
Management
Systems

Information
and
Application
Sources

Static Web Sites

Create
Ingest
Prepare

Dynamic Web Sites

Manage

Personalized Web Sites

Deploy

Integration
Sources
Unstructured
Content (files)

Structured
Semi-structured Content (Db
Content (XML) Schemas)

ERP, CRM,
SCM, etc.

Other
Content
Repositories

3rd party
aggregation
sources

Portal Content - Intranet

Collaboration

tools

Email, calendaring, instant messaging, online

meetings, video conferencing

Documentation

Manuals, engineering documents, corporate

directories

Sales

and Marketing

Product manuals, pricing, inventories, brochures

Procedures

and Forms

Portal Content - Extranet

Collaboration tools

Documentation

FAQs and Discussion databases

The author of The Clue Train Manifesto claims in his book
that people are more inclined to search for discussion
groups and lists for information than to dig down through a
myriad of pages at an overloaded website
Online meetings, video conferencing, instant messaging
Can we help you? if yes, than an instant message pops
up on a support persons portal and the customer gets
personal service
Product Manuals, engineering documents

Sales and Marketing

Brochures and Top Sellers

Push Custom Content

Web Administrator assigns

content to be automatically
delivered to a user or group of
users.
Assigned content can be marked
as mandatory or optional.
Mandatory content cannot be
removed from the users profile.
Optional content may be
removed from the users profile
once it has been initially
delivered.

Pull Custom Content

Individual users manually select

the desired content from a list of
available modules.
Selected modules appear on
the users home page
immediately after selection.
Content that was assigned by a
Web Administrator may be
removed at this web page.
Some modules can be further
customized, such as the
custom links listing.

Content Management
Techniques

Document lists are managed using an Upload functionality.

Authorized users can upload documents to the web page,
which are in turn automatically added to the page as a
hyperlink.
Administrators are notified of uploaded documents as they
occur. This enables usage monitoring.

Content Management
Techniques

Based on metadata, authors can be notified of content flagged for

review or expiration.
Additionally, expired content can automatically be removed from the
web site.

Searching Techniques
Metadata

is stored with each file on the web

server. This data is used when searching
files.
The Advanced Search enables custom
searches such as:

Documents flagged for review

Expired documents or HTML pages
Documents authored by specific individuals

Evolution of Content and

Portal Applications
Interaction/Presentation Focus

Application Capabilities

My Yahoo!

Commercial
Yahoo!

Yahoo! @
Stanford

Enterprise
Web
Applications

Corporate
Portals
Personalized
Commerce
Applications

Content Managed
Brochureware

IT Maintained
Brochureware

Content Focus

Academic Site

Time

Metadata Driven Enterprise Web

Applications

Constituents

Customers

Presentation
Services

Employees

Business Partners

Supplier

Distributor

Enterprise Web Applications

Portal Infrastructure

Application
Services

Consolidating Metadata
Content Management

Content
And
ApplicationStructured

Content (Db
Schemas)

Integration
Sources
Unstructured
Content (files)

Semi-structured ERP, CRM,

Content (XML) SCM, etc.

Other
Content
Repositories

3rd party
aggregation
sources

Where is it Going from Here?

Content and Portal is first stage of
consolidation
Enterprise Web Applications also require:

Collaborative tools to enable teams

Business process to manage application process
Integration to provide access to applications and
content
Analytics to measure results, improve applications and
process

Enterprise Web Applications

3
2

5
2

Business
Partner

Employee

Customer

Enterprise Services Foundation

Interaction

Integration

ERP
1

CRM
4

Collaboration

Content

Analytics
Analytics

Command
Center

Business Users

Enterprise
Legacy
Applications
(ELAs)

Process

Virtual
Repository

SCM
4

HRMS
4

Other
4

User Management and

Security
Single

sign-on and authentication.

Automatically identifying users and their
roles.
Secure database access.
Connecting to other systems.

Single Sign-On and

Authentication
To logon to a computer users must be authenticated
by the Portal Directory.

The users credentials are then passed

transparently to the portal and through to
other back office systems.

User Identification
When a user enters the portal the only information
known about them is their username

Portal database

Portal Directory

A linked data source was created between the

SQL Server and the Active Directory.
This link facilitates retrieving information about
the user the first time they access the portal, and
also keeps the users active directory information
up to date.

User Identification
Portal Directory

User Information

The user information in the Portal Directory is

maintained according to corporate standards.
The information retrieved from the Portal
Directory is analyzed and then used to deliver the
appropriate content to the users customized
home page.

Secure Database Access

The web server communicates with the portal

database through a set of stored procedures.
This strategy allows for a separation between
database access and the user interface.
Users are granted access to certain stored
procedures, but are not granted any access to the
underlying data in the database except through the
stored procedures.

Secure Database Access

Users can only access data through stored procedures.
The stored procedure enforces which data is returned
to the user.

Users cannot directly access the database or the

Underlying tables directly.

Connecting to other systems

The web server can either create a secure
connection to obtain resources from another
system;

Or, the users credentials can be passed

through to the remote database or system if the
system supports this type of authentication.

Evaluating a portal usability

A Web sites usability is high if users

experience high subjective satisfaction;

achieve their goals / perform their tasks in little time;
do so with a low error rate.

Depending on the site, relevant goals / tasks

may be to:

stay in the site, return to the site, buy;

locate content (search),
learn, etc.

Building Portals Servers &

Tools

Lotus Domino and Notes

Websphere Portal Builder
Microsoft Sharepoint
BroadVision
Epicentric Foundation Center
iPlanet Server
Oracle
Plumtree Studio Server
Tibco
BEA

DataChannel Rio
Viador E-Portal Suite
XML
JAVA
DHTML
Cascading portals
Portlets
Security modules

Portals that provide everything the

users need

Open source portals

PHP:

PhpNuke hundreds of free and

commercial modules
ASP.NET: DotNetNuke - hundreds of free and
commercial modules

Useful terms

The following terms are often used when discussing

portals

eB2B (Business to Business);

CRM Customer Relationship Management;
Click-stream processing for e-commerce applications;
Analytical applications;
Business-intelligence tool;
Data warehousing;
Knowledge management.