The Portal Collective
Portal panels let individuality take a prime role in your business enterprise
by Stewart McKie
Portlets, web parts, miniapps, and e-clips - whatever you call them, the building blocks of portals are fast becoming the true components of next-generation business application frameworks. These building blocks - or panels, to avoid using a proprietary marketing term - are finally making the task of assembling personalized, cellular applications easier for business users to manage themselves. Portals have evolved beyond merely acting as a front end to corporate intranets and are fast becoming the core framework for delivering loosely coupled functionality sets to users over the Internet.
The Role of Portal Panels
Just as the attraction of an advent calendar is opening all those little doors to reveal the religious icon behind them, a portal's real attraction resides in its ability to deliver a range of panels, personalized both to organizational and individual needs. These panels are effectively discrete components that have their own content source and behavior and operate within the portal framework. Each portal's view has individuality from the combination of these panels, and the panels' content and behavior give the portal its power.
The primary function of any portal panel is to deliver content from inside or outside the corporate firewall. The content can come from a Web site, a database, or a number of other data sources and can take many forms, including:
- A view on data extracted from an ERP or CRM system's database
- A self-service form for interacting with a database
- A link listing to connect viewers to press releases, full-text articles, or affiliate sites
- A static image, streaming video, or sound clip
- A fully functioning applet, such as an email inbox or interactive chat dialog.
Ideally, you should define the content source of any portal panel as a URL, with separate servlets - chunks of code that can reach out to Web sites or into databases - delivering the content to the panel and managing any user interaction with the content. This method makes updating the content source of a panel as easy as simply changing the URL it "calls" and encourages internal IT people to accelerate efforts to make all internal content, not just HTML pages, addressable via a URL.
A portal panel typically has certain default behaviors, for example:
- Portal administrators can allow or disallow users to view the panel.
- You can expand and collapse the panel to maximize and minimize the screen real estate it occupies.
- Users can elect to view or hide the panels to which they have access.
The behavioral richness of a panel is one aspect of its sophistication, as is the ability to customize and add to this range of behavior using high-level scripting languages.
Panel Libraries
Portal vendors know that if they can deliver a wide range of panels with preconfigured content sources, their portal product will be more attractive to their target customers - the people who build and administer portals. Most vendors offer a library of panels and may even provide interoperability with other vendors' offerings.
Panel libraries typically include preconfigured panels that deliver newsfeeds, portal or Web search capabilities, stock tickers, or content from the portal vendor's affiliate partners. The library may also include panels that provide views of or self-service data entry into popular business applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, SAP R/3, or Siebel's CRM system. Having this panel library makes assembling a corporate or Web portal for internal users, the general public, or a business partner's extranet significantly easier.
Portal software vendors expose their panel-building tools to let portal administrators build their own panels to add into the library. Portal users can then add their own organization-specific panels for use in their personalized version of the portal. The portal vendor's software partners can also expand the library by delivering add-ins that expose their application's data and functions to the portal via a panel.
