Using Portals to Manage Content

Catalin MAICANUniversity TRASNILVANIA of Brasov

Agenda What is a Portal Portal types Customization and Personalization Content Management and Security Tools to build Portals Open source…but not for enterprise…

What is a Portal Collection of a variety of useful information

into a one-stop Web page Bridges to information silos Access points that reach across deep and

surface web content Online access to intranet corporate

information One-stop information access point Google with “good” content

What is a Portal During this presentation a portal means:

A common place to find information A point and click entry place to other places Easy access to data What you want, where you need it, when you need it.

According to Webopedia: A Web site or service that offers a broad array of resources and

services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, and on-line shopping malls. The first Web portals were online services, such as AOL, that provided access to the Web, but by now most of the traditional search engines have transformed themselves into Web portals to attract and keep a larger audience.

Portals According to IBM A 2001 presentation by IBM on iSeries says

Portal stands for: P = Personalization for the end user

Personal or community desktop O = Organization of the user's desktop

Consolidated access to data in a layout that suites them R = Resource division determines "Who Sees What"

Membership services and layered authentication T = Tracking of activities

The more the portal is used, the more it can be tailored A = Access to heterogeneous data stores

RDBM, e-mail, news feeders, web servers, various file systems L = Location of important people and things

Realtime access to experts, communities, and content

Portals versus Websites Portals do not replace Websites External users still need access to your home

page Portals are designed to be access points to

specific information and places Portals work well in intranets and extranets

Browser-Based Data Integration A Web-based access point

to federated content: Content from multiple data

sources applications, databases,

content systems, the Web A personalized home page

Accessible via multiple channels

Desktop, mobile devices, phone (voice interface)

Portal functionality Discover -High quality searching Capture -Harvesting and delivery tools Manipulate -Text-processing and citation

management tools Distribute -Contribution and publication tools Consult -Access to Virtual/Online Reference

and electronic scholarly communities

Portal types (according to WhatIs.com)

General portals: Yahoo! MSN Hotmail Excite

Niche portals: Fool.com (for investors) Garden.com (for gardeners) SearchNetworking.com (for network administrators)

Portal types (according to PortalsCommunity.com)

A significant portal implementation can be comprised of multiple types of portals and blended into a hybrid solution.

Types: Corporate or Enterprise (Intranet) Portals -

Business to employees (B2E) portals; eBusiness (Extranet) Portals; Personal (WAP) portals; Public or Mega (Internet) portals.

Enterprise Information Portals (EIP)

Designed for activities and communities to improve the access, processing and sharing of structured and unstructured information within and across the enterprise;

Incorporate roles, processes, workflow, collaboration, content management, data warehousing and marts, enterprise applications and business intelligence;

Provide employee access to other types of portals such as eBusiness portals, personal portals and public portals.

Federated Portal: A union of independent departmental or group portals into a cohesive portal solution;

Provide access to syndicated content which is defined as external information, from a single or multiple sources, that is maintained by a third party (e.g. news feeds).

eBusiness (Extranet) Portals Extended enterprise portals:

Examples: business to customer (B2C) which extend the enterprise to its customers for

the purpose of ordering, billing, customer service, self-service, etc.; business to business (B2B) which extends the enterprise to its suppliers and

partners. B2B portals are transforming the supplier and value chain process and relationships.

eMarketplace portals: Examples:

www.commerceone.net: focuses on the North American Maintenance, Repair and Operations (MRO) market. CommerceOne provides commerce-related services to its community of buyers, sellers and net market makers;

www.vertical.net: connects buyers and sellers online by providing industry-specific news and related product and service information;

www.globalnetxchange.com: a B2B (business to business) network for mass merchants, specialty, grocery and category retailers to buy, sell, trade or auction goods and services.

eBusiness (Extranet) Portals ASP portals – Application Service Provider (ASP)

portals are B2B (business to business) portals that allow business customers the ability to rent both products and services.

Examples of an ASP: Salesforce.com - manages the sales and reporting process

for a distributed mobile sales team; Mysap.com and oraclesmallbusiness.com are complete

enterprise systems offered through a portal framework via the Web.

Personal (WAP) portals Pervasive/omnipresent portals or mobility

portals: embedded in Web and cellular phones, wireless PDAs

(Personal Desktop Assistant), pagers, etc. Personal or mobility portals are increasingly popular and important for consumers and employees to obtain product and service information such as prices, discounts, availability, order status, payment status, shipping status, etc;

Appliance portals - These portals are embedded in TVs (WebTV), automobiles (OnStar), etc.

Public or Mega (Internet) portals

Organizations that fit into this category are becoming “new media” companies and are focused on building large online audiences with large demographics or professional orientation.

Two major types of public portals: General public portals or mega portals:

address the entire Internet versus a specific community of interest and include: Yahoo, Google, Overture, AltaVista, AOL, MSN, Excite, etc.

General public portals or mega portals will become fewer and consolidate over time.

Public or Mega (Internet) portals

Industrial portals, vertical portals or vortals: Rapidly growing and are focused on specific

narrow audiences or communities such as consumer goods, computers, retail, banking, insurance, etc.

Examples of vertical portals include: www.ivillage.com which focuses on families; www.bitpipe.com that is a syndicator of information

technology content.

Portal characteristics Single, powerful search Fast and powerful Integration of diverse content (public web, licensed

journals, digitized materials, news feeds, etc.) Searches across formats and record syntaxes Searches may be limited by range of options

(subject, format, date) Results are deduped, sorted and may be ranked by

relevancy Content may be searched by subject

Portal characteristics Supports authentication Supports authorization Can be personalized Can be customized Integrates appropriate applications such as

course management software or citation building tools, etc.

Requirements for an enterprise portal Easy to Use. “An enterprise portal must be geared to the skills of the

broadest range of users in order to promote self service.” As a consequence the enterprise portal has a graphical interface and uses a public browser like consumer portals in the internet.

Universal Information Access. An EIP must provide broad access to structured and unstructured information from “a variety of sources—intranet, internet and extranet.” Portals require comprehensive metadata sources to describe the content in the right context so “the user can easily find and access it.”

Dynamic Resource Access. The user must be able to “search by category, publish information, subscribe to new content, query and analyse information, and plan and execute activities.”

Requirements for an enterprise portal Extensible. The enterprise portal can provide access to all sources,

only if it includes a published application programming interface (API) that “developers can use to hook in existing and future applications.”

Collaborative. Users should not only be able to publish documents, but also should be able to annotate existing documents and “create and participate threaded discussions.” When users subscribe to objects, such as reports, spreadsheets and messages, they must have the obligation to “define the format, delivery channel, and alert method.” Only publishers and administrators should be able to give access rights to objects to users or groups.

Customizable. Administrators should have the ability to “configure different permissions for different” users and groups. Nonetheless users must have the possibility to “configure settings appropriate to their own needs.”

Requirements for an enterprise portal Proactive. “The enterprise portal can be truly empowering only if it provides an

infrastructure for proactive activities.” There must be the ability to “subscribe to alert mechanisms, create key-performance-indicator monitors, and create agents for automatic searches, or queries” to keep the user informed.

Secure. As the portal is a bridge between internal and external interactions it “should provide security mechanisms to ensure the privacy and integrity of data.” In fact the organization must “control access at a very granular level—by user, by group, or even by object—and should provide security mechanisms to ensure the privacy and integrity of data.”

Scalable. Most enterprises that use the portal technology are very big and are growing every year, consequently the portal must support “thousands of concurrent requests, hundreds of information sources, and dynamic generation of web pages by thousands of users.” Therefore the architecture behind portals must be very robust and provide capabilities such as “load balancing across multiple servers, intelligent caching, pooled connections, or other performance-enhancing techniques.”

Manageable. “Simple graphical tools must enable administrators to set rapidly up the user interface, establish permissions, and integrate with other resources.” Monitoring, tuning, and content-management tools should also be part of the portal solution.

Personalization and customization Personalization: dynamically serve customized content

(pages, products, recommendations, etc.) to users based on their profiles, preferences, or expected interests;

Personalization v. Customization: In customization, user controls and customizes the site or

the product based on his/her preferences; usually manual, but sometimes semi-automatic based on a

given user profile. Personalization is done automatically based on the user’s

actions, the user’s profile, and (possibly) the profiles of others with “similar” profiles

Content Customization Individual customizations are stored as a Profile in an SQL

database based on the user’s Windows logon name. Individuals manage their Profile settings using the “Edit Your

Profile”, … web page. The Profile stores the following information about a user:

Content modules Content layout Colour scheme Other preferences

Content Customization on my.yahoo.com

Personalization example

A simplified scheme for personalization

Why Personalization? “Know Thy Customer” and “Knowledge is Power”

“Relationships based on customer insight propel an organization from simply treating customers eciently to treating them relative to their needs, preferences, and value potential. . . .”

“Knowing the customer is paramount in today's marketplace where the customer has more options, greater exibility and higher expectations…”

John C. Nash (Accenture)

Customer knowledge implies

1.) Acquisition of customer data2.) Analysis of customer data3.) Action in accordance with the gained insights

Acquisition of customer data Customer data are recordings of:

preferences transactions pre-sales contacts after-sales support demographic information

Some of these data: may be purchased from third parties may be held in multiple disparate databases that serve

completely different purposes are of varying quality with respect to error rates, reliability,

coverage, representativeness

Analysis of customer data Data analysis should provide feedback on questions like

Which users will become customers? Which customers will return again? Who is more likely to respond to a promotion action? Who would be interested in cross-sale/up-sale suggestions?

Closely related to questions like Is the Web-site appropriately designed to serve the

organization's goals? Are the customers satisfied? Are the customers satisfied enough to come again? Are the customers satisfied enough to become promoters of the

site?

Action in accordance with the gained insights Alignment of the marketing policy

Alignment of the supply chain, including after sales support Adjustment of the web site static site re-design Browsing/Navigation suggestions Recommendations on the page Intelligent assistance Personalized layout and content

Fact: The time lag between insight and action should be minimized.

Data Preparation for Personalization Web Usage Mining

Discovery of meaningful patterns from data generated by client-server transactions on one or more Web servers

Typical Sources of Data automatically generated data stored in server access logs,

referrer logs, agent logs, and client-side cookies e-commerce and product-oriented user events (e.g.,

shopping cart changes, ad or product click-throughs, etc.) user profiles and/or user ratings meta-data, page attributes, page content, site structure

The Web Usage Mining Process

Usage Data Preprocessing

Data Preparation for Web Usage Mining Data Transformation

user identification sessionization / episode identification pageview identification

a pageview is a set of page files and associated objects that contribute to a single display in a Web Browser

Data Reduction sampling and dimensionality reduction (ignoring

certain pageviews / items) Identifying User Transactions (i.e., sets or

sequences of pageviews possibly with associated weights)

User and Session Identification

Need for Reliable Usage Data Validity of results in Web usage mining is affected by

the ability to: distinguish among different users to a site reconstruct the activities of the users within the site

Difficult to obtaining reliable usage data due to: proxy servers and anonymizers rotating IP addresses connections through ISPs missing references due to caching inability of servers to distinguish among different visits

Portal Metamodel (UI)

A portlet is… From a programmer’s point-of-view… a piece of

code that – when invoked by the portal server – returns tagged (HTML, WML,…) data to be included within a portal container; Thus, a portlet has to comply with certain assumptions:

It has to support a certain “portlet API”; It has to use only a restricted subset of tags within its

returned content. From a content provider’s point-of-view… a mean to

make content available; From a user’s point-of-view…content to subscribe to

Sample page 1

Sample page 2

Tree view of a portal

Content Arrangement – Part 1 For an intranet, personalize the content

The portal should know who is knocking on the door, validate they have the right password, and then get access to their preferred objects

Provide access to personal mail in-baskets, calendars and task lists and to-dos

For an extranet, using passwords for your customers and clients you can do similar personalized portals

Use registration databases that allow external users to set their passwords and choose their preferences

Portals like Yahoo and MSN do this for their customers to generate return traffic. The same thing can happen at your installation for the same reasons.

Content Arrangement – Part 2 Use a consistent format – then change the data in

the mini modules Use lots of white space

Know your customer – even internal ones If you build it they will come – this really is true in a well

thought-out portal. Time is precious; making information access quick is key to

improving business interactions You probably already know frequently requested or

accessed databases and files. Use these as prime candidates for your Portals

Content Arrangement – Part 3 News feeds, NNTP, are perfect vehicles to

generate current events items for a portal. Prime the portal by putting in News Feeds with

information or issues key to your industry Use awareness tools such as NetMeeting,

SameTime, and instant messaging to find people quickly. Place the links in portlets on your portal

A Custom Web page –

possibly your Company website

Or a News Frame

Calendar

Tasks/To-Do’s

Quick Links to company

apps, intranet pages

Awareness

Example of a Portal Format

Use portlets on your main portal to group common

objects and data

Search

Corporate Calendar

Mail Inbasket

Company Intranet Human Resources Product Catalogs Company News Procedures/Policies Documentation Pricing Tables Customer Records Marketing Brochures Reports

Corporate WebSite

Task List

Company Intranet Human Resources Product Catalogs Company News Procedures/Policies Documentation Pricing Tables Customer Records Marketing Brochures Reports

DB2 Database AS/400Application

Accessdatabase

Notesdatabases

Disparate DataRepositories

Mail Inbasket

Mail database(Domino,

Exchange,iNotes, Other)

Corporate Calendar

Master CalendarDatabase

Feeds to Portal Section

Corporate WebSite

Internet

Task List

To-do and tasklist files

Content Management and related Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Also known as Asset Management (AM) or Media Asset Management (MAM) The business case for DAM argues that companies whose life blood revolves around

their digital assets – such as entertainment firms - should organize and repurpose those assets to streamline costs and enhance revenues.

Systems suited to managing multimedia content and tend to offer hooks into specialized desktop media authoring systems. If multimedia content serves as your company’s products itself -- rather than supporting other products.

Document Management (DM) Function to help companies better manage the creation and flow of documents

through the help of databases and workflow engines that encapsulate metadata and business rules;

Grabbed a significant toehold in heavily regulated or document-centric industries such as insurance. They take advantage of much of the power behind SGML, and have been relatively quick to migrate to XML.

Important precursor to Web Content Management. Critical drawback: limited traditional understanding of content as files, as opposed to

discrete chunks of information. CM products that took a more granular and flexible approach to content emerged as better suited to web-based publishing.

Content Management and related Knowledge Management (KM)

The purpose of KM is to capture and distribute the knowledge held among individuals within a corporation to other co-workers and partners, according to set rules;

This class of products is suited to the internal needs of organizations in knowledge-oriented industries, such as tech-intensive manufacturing and professional services firms;

The KM marketplace evolved into “Enterprise Information Portals (EIPs),”. From the user perspective, perhaps the most important feature of an EIP is its search engine (several search-engine vendors have also recently recast themselves as EIP products).

Software Configuration Management (SCM) Also known as “Software Change Management” or "Source Code Management" SCM tools help technical teams manage the development and roll-out of software

engineering projects through a coordinated, documented system of platform builds and enhancements.

Mirrors some of the facets of content management, including workflow, versioning, and version control.

Content Management and related Digital Rights Management (DRM)

Enable content owners to regulate and control information distribution by applying granular access rights and downstream privileges to specific pieces of content;

solutions work on the server side, the desktop level, or combination of both. On the server, these technologies are sometimes labeled “privileges management”;

Although DRM vendors presently focus intently on vendors of content, as well distributors of value-added content, one can expect them to broaden their target markets;

Content Management and related Content Management (CM) Resides at the center of the digital

information management universe, at least for now;

A CM System is essentially a collection of your business rules and editorial processes around content.

Product offerings vary by vendor, but most CM packages have adopted key features from KM, DM, DAM, SCM, and DRM segments.

Content Management tools also add other critical functions including: templating, separation of content and presentation, web publishing, and syndication

The role of Content Management

Structured Content (DbSchemas)

UnstructuredContent (files)

Semi-structuredContent (XML)

Other ContentRepositories

ERP, CRM, SCM, etc.

IntegrationSources

3rd party aggregation sources

InformationandApplicationSources

ContentManagementSystems

CreateIngestPrepare

DeployManage

WebDeliveryPlatform Static Web Sites Dynamic Web Sites Personalized Web Sites

Prepare business information for efficient deployment to Web sites and applications.Enable business users directly contribute and manage content delivery.

Portal Content - Intranet Collaboration tools

Email, calendaring, instant messaging, online meetings, video conferencing

Documentation Manuals, engineering documents, corporate

directories Sales and Marketing

Product manuals, pricing, inventories, brochures Procedures and Forms

Portal Content - Extranet Collaboration tools

FAQ’s and Discussion databases The author of The Clue Train Manifesto claims in his book

that people are more inclined to search for discussion groups and lists for information than to dig down through a myriad of pages at an overloaded website

Online meetings, video conferencing, instant messaging “Can we help you?” – if yes, than an instant message pops

up on a support person’s portal and the customer gets personal service

Documentation Product Manuals, engineering documents

Sales and Marketing Brochures and Top Sellers

Push Custom Content Web Administrator assigns

content to be automatically delivered to a user or group of users.

Assigned content can be marked as mandatory or optional.

Mandatory content cannot be removed from the user’s profile.

Optional content may be removed from the user’s profile once it has been initially delivered.

Pull Custom Content Individual users manually select

the desired content from a list of available modules.

Selected modules appear on the user’s home page immediately after selection.

Content that was assigned by a Web Administrator may be removed at this web page.

Some modules can be further customized, such as the custom links listing.

Content Management Techniques Document lists are managed using an Upload functionality. Authorized users can upload documents to the web page,

which are in turn automatically added to the page as a hyperlink.

Administrators are notified of uploaded documents as they occur. This enables usage monitoring.

Content Management Techniques Based on metadata, authors can be notified of content flagged for

review or expiration. Additionally, expired content can automatically be removed from the

web site.

Searching Techniques Metadata is stored with each file on the web

server. This data is used when searching files.

The Advanced Search enables custom searches such as: Documents flagged for review Expired documents or HTML pages Documents authored by specific individuals

Evolution of Content and Portal Applications

Academic Site

App

licat

ion

Cap

abili

ties

IT Maintained Brochureware

Content ManagedBrochureware

PersonalizedCommerceApplications

EnterpriseWebApplications

Yahoo! @Stanford

CommercialYahoo!

My Yahoo!

CorporatePortals

Time

Interaction/Presentation Focus

Content Focus

Metadata Driven Enterprise Web Applications

Structured Content (DbSchemas)

UnstructuredContent (files)

Semi-structuredContent (XML)

Other ContentRepositories

ERP, CRM, SCM, etc.

IntegrationSources

3rd party aggregation sources

ContentAndApplication

Customers Employees Supplier DistributorBusiness Partners

Constituents

Enterprise Web ApplicationsPresentationServices

Content Management

Portal InfrastructureConsolidating MetadataApplication

Services

Where is it Going from Here? Content and Portal is first stage of

consolidation Enterprise Web Applications also require:

Collaborative tools to enable teams Business process to manage application process Integration to provide access to applications and content Analytics to measure results, improve applications and

process

Enterprise Services Foundation

Interaction Process Integration Collaboration Content

Analytics VirtualRepository

CRM

1 2 3 4 5

SCM

1 2 3 4 5

Other

1 2 3 4 5

EnterpriseLegacy

Applications(ELAs)

HRMS

1 2 3 4 5

ERP

1 2 3 4 5

CommandCenter

Business Users

EmployeeBusinessPartner Customer

23

14 32

1

5

4

Enterprise Web Applications

User Management and Security Single sign-on and authentication. Automatically identifying users and their

roles. Secure database access. Connecting to other systems.

Single Sign-On and Authentication

To logon to a computer users must be authenticatedby the Portal Directory.

The user’s credentials are then passedtransparently to the portal and through to other back office systems.

User IdentificationWhen a user enters the portal the only informationknown about them is their username

Portal database Portal Directory

A linked data source was created between the SQL Server and the Active Directory.

This link facilitates retrieving information about the user the first time they access the portal, and also keeps the user’s active directory information up to date.

User Identification

Portal Directory

The user information in the Portal Directory is maintained according to corporate standards.

The information retrieved from the Portal Directory is analyzed and then used to deliver the appropriate content to the user’s customized home page.

User Information

Secure Database Access The web server communicates with the portal

database through a set of stored procedures. This strategy allows for a separation between

database access and the user interface. Users are granted access to certain stored

procedures, but are not granted any access to the underlying data in the database except through the stored procedures.

Secure Database Access

Users can only access data through stored procedures.The stored procedure enforces which data is returnedto the user.

Users cannot directly access the database or theUnderlying tables directly.

Connecting to other systemsThe web server can either create a secure connection to obtain resources from another system;

Or, the user’s credentials can be passed through to the remote database or system if the system supports this type of authentication.

Evaluating a portal usability A Web site’s usability is high if users

experience high subjective satisfaction; achieve their goals / perform their tasks in little time; do so with a low error rate.

Depending on the site, relevant goals / tasks may be to: stay in the site, return to the site, buy; locate content (search), learn, etc.

Building Portals –Servers & Tools

Lotus Domino and Notes Websphere Portal Builder Microsoft Sharepoint BroadVision Epicentric Foundation Center iPlanet Server Oracle Plumtree Studio Server Tibco BEA

• DataChannel Rio• Viador E-Portal Suite• XML• JAVA• DHTML• Cascading portals• Portlets• Security modules

Portals that provide everything the users need

Open source portals PHP: PhpNuke – hundreds of free and

commercial modules ASP.NET: DotNetNuke - hundreds of free

and commercial modules

Useful terms The following terms are often used when discussing

portals eB2B (Business to Business); CRM – Customer Relationship Management; Click-stream processing for e-commerce applications; Analytical applications; Business-intelligence tool; Data warehousing; Knowledge management.