Effective Content Management and the use of Portals have today become extremely crucial in maintaining a uniform flow of relevant information. Today, portals are an integral component of most organizations as it serves as a means of communication and collaboration with their customers, partners and employees. For organizations vying for e-business, portals are undoubtedly the most effective delivery mechanism. As organizations around the world begin using more and more portals, new challenges and opportunities for organizations emerge.

Effective portals present a myriad of challenges. First is the integration of various applications and data types under one common interface and the second is the difficulty in dealing with the issues of application serving, security, connectivity, content management, and performance. The key, therefore, lies in successfully harnessing portals across the enterprise and productively consolidating the infrastructure, content and the interactions by using a comprehensive approach. This would ensure that users have access to the right information and processes to make informed decisions across all lines of business. Today the technology of portals is rapidly evolving. Technologies like Web Services and XML partly address these issues and hence find increased usage and acceptance in portals across global organizations.

At one end of the spectrum, the challenges of the enterprise portal with stringent applications integration requirements are perhaps best served by a portal solution that emphasizes application integration, most likely leveraging the power of XML for exchange of information between the repositories. At the other end, the content-centric or content-heavy site likely needs a content management solution that emphasizes highly developed functionality for content creation, management, and delivery.

 We have understood the definition, need and key requirements of enterprise portals. It is important to understand the typical architecture of portals so that we understand how certain technologies fit in the architecture to meet the requirements of portals. There are several software components that run in the background in portal implementation. Each component plays an important role in the portal architecture. The various components that are usually part of enterprise portals and the roles that they play are depicted in the following diagram.

Following are the components that form a typical portal:

Database Server: Refers to the database server that stores all the data related to the portal. This data storage is in the form of tables.

Application Server: This refers to the server that acts like a container for EJBs and servlets. The EJB container contains beans while the Web container contains servlets and JSPs.

Portal Engine: This engine provides the framework for building the portal. It contains inbuilt styles, themes, grids etc. that are used for building sites. Styles and other attributes can also be inherited from parent sites.

Web Server: This is the server that receives the request from the client and sends back the response to the client using HTTP.

Load balancer: Load-balancing refers to distribution of incoming network traffic across a cluster of Web server machines. Load balancers are essential for heavily used portals, wherein the incoming request is directed to the most suitable Web server based on certain parameters like network traffic or response time of the Web servers.

 We at FCS understand this and much more. We understand that an effective portal can go a long way in positioning a company’s image and brand in the global atmosphere and make them productive and profitable ventures. We feel that the core requirements for an Enterprise Portals solution would include the following:

• Application integration that includes the ability to seamlessly integrate back office systems (through Web services and XML)
• User interface tools that facilitate a highly customized and integrated view of all the applications
• Content management that includes the ability to create, manage, and deliver a variety of structured and unstructured data types (through a content management system)
• Security and personalization across all of these areas