Proven Portals: Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and Developing Enterprise Portals: Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and

by Dan Sullivan and Dan Sullivan

This title enable readers to learn how to deliver scalable, secure portal applications, and develop a cost justification for a portal project. See how portal tools and components operate together,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0321125207
• ISBN13: 9780321125200
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

An explanation of portals at the level of managers

A portal is a way to electronically access the fundamental information concerning your business, most commonly over the Internet. Therefore, an enterprise portal is one that can be used to access all public business operations. Since it is designed to perform all business functions, it is much more than a set of hyperlinked web pages. To start with, there must be some overlying consistency to the display of the pages, independent of what operations they provide the user. The links between the pages must also make sense, in that while there is a sequence of pages to follow, a way to jump to key initial pages in logical sequences is available. Beyond the presentation issues, the following must also be considered: *) The order in the way the supporting database(s) is accessed and organized. *) The integrity of the data must be maintained. *) The cost of the portal must be justified using an understandable return on investment (ROI) analysis. All of these features are handled in this book, which is written at the technical level of the manager. In that vein, the most significant chapter is number five, "Measuring Portal Return on Investment: A Crash Course." The days when one could justify an Internet presence by simply stating something like, "It is the new way of business" are long gone. IT budgets are still tight and everything needs to be subjected to a thorough ROI analysis. The techniques to do that described in this book will sharpen your skills as you try to put specific dollar values on something where not all values are clearly delimited and specified. For many managers, that chapter alone justifies the purchase of the book. The rest of the book deals with general design issues, such as a three-tiered architecture. Tier 1 is the presentation layer, what the user sees on their screen. Tier 2 is the application server layer, or the functionality that serves the specific application(s) being used by the client. Tier 3 is the enterprise information services layer, where the application server layer interacts with the remainder of the organization's information infrastructure. This is a sensible approach for many reasons, and a solid overview of those reasons is given. The second half of the book covers the different types of portals and the common themes shared by those that are effective. Not a great deal of technical detail, but enough so that a manager can intelligently converse about the subject. As someone who is technically literate, I found the bulk of the material routine. However, for the manager trying to make an informed decision about their company's portal design and justification, the book is perfect.

Vendor independent portal information

This book presents practical portal design principles in a vendor independent manner, emphasizing business process, ease of use, and deep integration of applications. Deploying a portal so "users check their email from the web or read the latest company press release" is not enough! The common goal is enterprise wide integration. The chapter on Return of Investment (ROI) presents how to make the ROI calculation and more importantly emphasizes business justification of the portal. This book uses a three-tier architecture of presentation, application server, and enterprise information service. The case studies presented and associated best practices were all useful but perhaps I would have enjoyed some examples of failures.. there must be a lot out there! Data warehouse architecture is a huge topic (see for example books by Ralph Kimball), but this book introduces how portals can be delivery vehicle for "business intelligence" reporting (through ad hoc query tools, dashboards, and visualizations tools). Sullivan also discusses e-commerce portals, collaboration portals, and portals with unstructured and "tacit knowledge". He describes how metadata management can help in search for unstructured documents and applications. The final chapter on implementing your own portal is weak for planning purposes, but books like Moss and Arte "Business Intelligence Roadmap" offer more planning details.

Proven Portals - practical and balanced

Proven Portals gives a practical and balanced view of the subject matter. It should be required reading for those embarking on a Portal implementation or trying to rescue a failed one. The book provides concepts and best practices that are valid regardless of the technical infrastructure. You'll need greater detail in some areas for your implementation, and the author provides references for a more in-depth treatment of many issues. The book is an amazingly easy read for as much ground as it covers. I can't wait for Proven Data Warehouses!

Very good high level management/project management info

ReviewThis last year has seen a lot of industry focus on portal technology and how it can change the way companies operate. And while there are numerous books that cover the technical "how to" of a portal package, there are fewer books that take a higher-level view about the "whys" of portals. Management is left without a complete understanding as to why portal technology matters. This book is designed to fill that gap.Managers will appreciate the chapters on how to calculate the Return On Investment (ROI) on a portal implementation. Since portals tend not to be inexpensive, the practical knowledge in this area is beneficial. The author also mixes in a number of real-life case studies that will illustrate industry problems and how successful portal implementations solved those issues.Project managers and portal architects will find even more highly practical information. The architecture of a portal design is examined, as well as the options present for implementation (such as J2EE vs. .Net). By the time the reader finishes the book, they should have a firm understanding of how to structure a portal architecture, as well as how functions such as searching and data warehousing fit into the picture. There is also good information on what types of requirements need to be gathered in order to successfully design an effective portal.If you are a developer or administrator who is responsible for installing the actual portal software that is chosen, you might not find this book to your liking. Since much of the information is not tied to a specific brand of portal, it is not the book you will turn to for help in running the portal. But it is still advisable to understand the bigger picture, and this book can help you get there.ConclusionIf you are an IT manager or a project lead who has been assigned to a portal project, this is the book you need to understand the overall implications of your portal implementation.

Hits All the Main Issues

Excellent management level discussion of what is involved in making an enterprise portal. Sullivan focuses on the salient issues, without getting bogged down in arguments over technical choices. Like do we use IBM's dB2 or Oracle? Do we use a J2EE or .NET environment? While these are important concerns, the basic design concepts are at a higher level, and are addressed in the book.A substantial portion of which is devoted to searching. Not surprising, because a commonality across most portals in aggregating information that can be searched. Why not just use Google for this portion of the portal, you might ask? Well, Google indexes the public Web. Most corporate portals also, and hopefully more germanely, can access internal corporate documents, including email, that the outside world cannot reach.But this leads into something which you should be aware of if you find yourself designing searches for your portal. Google sells a piece of hardware that sits inside your firewall. It can index and search your internal data, and present the results in a similar fashion to what it does for the Web. Sullivan does not mention this, because he is not plugging any particular vendor. Fair enough. So let me mention it. Because it is useful to know of this option, since it offers a quick, easy implementation of internal search on your portal.