The Benefits on a Portal/Portlet Application

The strength of Formtek content repositories centers around our management of business and engineering documents.  Metadata, business rules, security, document relationships, workflow and collaboration.  All of these are important components in any of Formtek’s business applications. 

An interesting and smart technique for creating unique and business-targeted applications is to encapsulate and inter-mix these basic Formtek content components in a Portal environment.

Traditionally business applications have existed as stand-alone entities.  Then with the introduction of browser-based thin-client applications, the line blurred so that a single tool, the browser, could be used to access company data across many applications.  But even though all applications can be accessed by a browser, application interfaces aren’t always consistent, and this still forces users to learn many different systems.

Portals change that.  Portals pull content and information  together from many sources, creating consolidated dashboard applications.  Users can further refine the relevancy of the Portal application by personalizing the display.  The Portal provides great efficiency by coordinating through a single sign-on immediate access to data across all the component portlets from which the data is aggregated. 

The benefits of using a company portal is that users can save time and see in a single snap-shot a composite view of all information and data inter-relationships.  Use of portal applications can make employees more productive and can improve customer and partner relationships.

The component portlets of a portal tend to be very specialized tools that perform well-defined tasks.  Examples of content-based portlets include:

• A Working List showing frequently or recently used items by a user
• An inbox of Workflow tasks that the user needs to take action on
• The search result list of content matching a pre-specified query
• Content group presentations, like announcements and corportate news

As mentioned in previous blog entries here, Formtek Web Services are an enabling tool for creating high-relevancy portlet components.  Use of web services as a sort of universally understood entity gives the added advantage that you can use them together with whatever tool or development technique you prefer to create a portlet.

Java developers have standardized on JSR-168 for creating portlets.  .NET users may prefer Web Parts.  Depending on the Portal platform you’ve selected too, there may be other techniques or requirements needed to create the Portlet.  But all of these methods have in common that they are able to use Web Services.

JSR-168 is the most widely accepted approach for creating Portlets.  Most Portals support proprietary methods for creating portlets, but they also understand JSR-168.  Standardizing on it will let you use your portlet with almost any Portal product platform.  So, unless you are using .NET, JSR-168 is probably a good choice.  And because rapid portlet development tools abound, there’s no need to have to come up to speed on any of the technical details.  Just start building!