Using Portals to
Manage Content
Catalin MAICAN
University TRASNILVANIA of Brasov
Agenda
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What is a Portal
Portal types
Customization and Personalization
Content Management and Security
Tools to build Portals
Open source…but not for enterprise…
What is a Portal
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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
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During this presentation a portal means:
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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.
According to Webopedia:
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A Web site or service that offers a broad array of resources and
services, such as e-mail, 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
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A 2001 presentation by IBM on iSeries says
Portal stands for:
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P = Personalization for the end user
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O = Organization of the user's desktop
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The more the portal is used, the more it can be tailored
A = Access to heterogeneous data stores
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Membership services and layered authentication
T = Tracking of activities
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Consolidated access to data in a layout that suites them
R = Resource division determines "Who Sees What"
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Personal or community desktop
RDBM, e-mail, news feeders, web servers, various file systems
L = Location of important people and things
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Realtime access to experts, communities, and content
Portals versus Websites
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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
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A Web-based access point
to federated content:
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Content from multiple data
sources
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A personalized home page
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applications, databases,
content systems, the Web
Accessible via multiple
channels
Desktop, mobile devices,
phone (voice interface)
Portal functionality
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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
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General portals:
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(according to WhatIs.com)
Yahoo!
MSN
Hotmail
Excite
Niche portals:
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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.
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Types:
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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)
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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
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Extended enterprise portals:
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Examples:
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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:
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Examples:
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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
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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:
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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
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Pervasive/omnipresent portals or mobility
portals:
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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
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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:
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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
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Industrial portals, vertical portals or
vortals:
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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:
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www.ivillage.com which focuses on families;
www.bitpipe.com that is a syndicator of information
technology content.
Portal characteristics
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 level—by user, by group, or even by
object—and 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
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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 user’s
actions, the user’s profile, and (possibly) the profiles of
others with “similar” profiles
Content Customization
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Individual customizations are stored as a Profile in an SQL
database based on the user’s 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
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Content layout
Colour scheme
Other preferences
Content Customization on
my.yahoo.com
Personalization example
A simplified scheme for
personalization
Why Personalization?
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“Know Thy Customer” and “Knowledge is Power”
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“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…”
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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
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Customer data are recordings of:
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preferences
transactions
pre-sales contacts
after-sales support
demographic information
Some of these data:
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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
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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
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Alignment of the marketing policy
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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
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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
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Data Transformation
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Data Reduction
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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
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Need for Reliable Usage Data
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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…
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From a programmer’s 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;
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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 provider’s point-of-view… a mean to
make content available;
From a user’s point-of-view…content to subscribe to
Sample page 1
Sample page 2
Tree view of a portal
Content Arrangement – Part 1
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For an intranet, personalize the content
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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
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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
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Use a consistent format – then change the data in
the mini modules
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Use lots of white space
Know your customer – even internal ones
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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
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News feeds, NNTP, are perfect vehicles to
generate current events items for a portal.
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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.
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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/ToDo’s
Use portlets on your main
portal to group common
objects and data
Awareness
Quick
Links to
company
apps,
intranet
pages
Corporate Calendar
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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
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ion
ct
e
S
l
a
Port
Feeds to
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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
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Digital Asset Management (DAM)
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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
company’s products itself -- rather than supporting other products.
Document Management (DM)
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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
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Knowledge Management (KM)
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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)
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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
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Digital Rights Management (DRM)
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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
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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:
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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)
Semi-structured
Content (XML)
Structured
Content (Db
Schemas)
ERP, CRM,
SCM, etc.
Other Content
Repositories
3rd party
aggregation
sources
Portal Content - Intranet
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Collaboration tools
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Documentation
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Manuals, engineering documents, corporate
directories
Sales and Marketing
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Email, calendaring, instant messaging, online
meetings, video conferencing
Product manuals, pricing, inventories, brochures
Procedures and Forms
Portal Content - Extranet
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Collaboration tools
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Documentation
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FAQ’s 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 person’s portal and the customer gets
personal service
Product Manuals, engineering documents
Sales and Marketing
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Brochures and Top Sellers
Push Custom Content
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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 user’s profile.
Optional content may be
removed from the user’s profile
once it has been initially
delivered.
Pull Custom Content
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Individual users manually select
the desired content from a list
of available modules.
Selected modules appear on
the user’s 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
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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
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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
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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:
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Documents flagged for review
Expired documents or HTML pages
Documents authored by specific individuals
Evolution of Content and
Portal Applications
Application Capabilities
Interaction/Presentation Focus
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
Employees
Presentation
Services
Business Partners
Supplier
Distributor
Enterprise Web Applications
Portal Infrastructure
Application
Services
Consolidating Metadata
Content Management
Content
And
Application Structured
Content (Db
Schemas)
Integration
Sources
Unstructured
Content (files)
Semi-structured
Content (XML)
ERP, CRM,
SCM, etc.
Other Content
Repositories
3rd party
aggregation
sources
Where is it Going from Here?
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Content and Portal is first stage of
consolidation
Enterprise Web Applications also require:
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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
1
4
3
1
Business
Partner
Employee
4
Customer
Enterprise Services Foundation
Interaction
Integration
ERP
1
2
3
CRM
4
Collaboration
Content
Analytics
Command
Center
Business Users
Enterprise
Legacy
Applications
(ELAs)
Process
5
1
2
3
Virtual
Repository
SCM
4
5
1
2
3
HRMS
4
5
1
2
3
Other
4
5
1
2
3
4
5
User Management and
Security
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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 user’s 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
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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 user’s active directory information
up to date.
User Identification
Portal Directory
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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 user’s customized
home page.
Secure Database Access
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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 user’s 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 site’s usability is high if users
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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:

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
stay in the site, return to the site, buy;
locate content (search),
learn, etc.
Building Portals –Servers &
Tools
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Lotus Domino and Notes
Websphere Portal Builder
Microsoft Sharepoint
BroadVision
Epicentric Foundation Center
iPlanet Server
Oracle
Plumtree Studio Server
Tibco
BEA
•
•
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•
•
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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
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eB2B (Business to Business);
CRM – Customer Relationship Management;
Click-stream processing for e-commerce applications;
Analytical applications;
Business-intelligence tool;
Data warehousing;
Knowledge management.