Powered By: Web Services

Enterprise Information Portals are deployed across organizations as tools for centralizing corporate information.  A portal is an application framework that functions as a hub for accessing both structured and unstructured data, holding together content and information drawn from very many sources both inside and outside the enterprise. 

Each information source used in a portal is ‘component-ized’ and shrunk into a tiny UI called a portlet that occupies only a small amount of the total screen real estate.  Portlets are then mixed and matched together building-block-style to create high-relevancy dashboard-like portal applications. 

What sorts of information can a portlet expose?  Almost anything.  Corporate Policies and company directories.  Data Warehousing, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, and  Business Intelligence tools.  Any kind of information or IT system can be molded into a portlet and then later merged into the composite portal application.

Portals are powerful.  They are time-savers because information is consolidated into a central location.  Portals reduce the screen clutter of multiple applications running side-by-side.  They also offer convenience by letting users log into the composite Portal application just once, and then via single sign-on, gain access to all component portlet applications.

In many ways, the mix-and-match construction of Portal applications parallels the mix-and-match philosophy used in constucting mashup applications.  Because of that, it may not be that surprising to find that Web Services is the technology that is fueling both of these approaches to building applications today.

Given a Web Service data source, designing and creating a new portlet is easy.  Portlets are often built by mapping data retrieved from a Web Service call into an HTML results-page presentation.  The UI for a portlet tends to be simple and easy to build, and the combination of HTML with Web Services provides a clean and natural separation of data from presentation.

Once built, standards allow portlets can be easily migrated to different environments.  For example, portlets that have been created using standards like those of Web Services and JSR-168 (or JSR-286) can be ported to most Portal vendor products.

Because content and documents have relevance within every domain, it is only natural that portlet integrations with Enterprise Content (ECM) and Document Management systems are frequent ingredients of successful Portals.  Portlets can provide very personalized windows into enterprise content.

Almost any kind of ECM and DM functionality can be exposed in portlets.  That includes support for the life cycle of content and document creation and capabilities like authoring, approval, version control and scheduled publishing.

Formtek offers the Web Services module as part of the Formtek | Orion SDK.  Formtek Web Services can act as the data source when building a portlet with almost any kind of ECM requirement.