Portal Integration
From OrgChart.net
Contents |
Overview
An enterprise portal is essentially a framework for integrating information, people and processes. It makes available to users, an extensive collection of resources and services that could be relevant to one domain and its sub-domains or to multiple domains. The architecture of such enterprise portals is carefully designed so that there can be free flowing collaboration between the various departments and employees authorized to use the portal.
The enterprise portal provides a unified access point to internally as well as externally stored information, mostly as a web-based user interface. It is structured to aggregate and personalize information through application-specific portlets. The function of portal integration is to consolidate, manage, analyze, and distribute information across and outside an enterprise. The advantage of enterprise portals lies in the fact that there is de-centralized content contribution and content management, which helps in keeping the information current. If the enterprise portal architecture is flawed, it has a serious negative impact on the efficiency of the website.
Integration
Portal integration allows an organization to leverage its potential in a better manner due to the fact that knowledge resources are available in a structured and easily accessible format. It has broken the boundary with regards to information silos that previously existed within an organization. Portal integration allows for real time information access among systems, helps streamline business processes, increases organizational efficiency on the whole, maintains information integrity across multiple systems and has an inbuilt ease of development and fuss free maintenance. Integration allows for the connection of functions and data from multiple systems into new components / portlets / web parts with an integrated navigation between these elements.
Although there are a few hiccups associated with the EIP’s in the form of high initial development costs, especially where small and mid-sized businesses are concerned and visionary thinking on part of management before the investment in EIP kicks in; it is the mother of all information access and integration needs.
There are certain features that are essential within the architecture of an enterprise portal including integration, Single Sign-On (SSO), federation, customization, personalization, access control, advanced search etc. Among these, the SSO (Single Sign-On) capability is noteworthy. Single Sign-On is a method of access control of multiple related, but independent software systems. With SSO capability, the user logs in once and gains access to all systems. There would be no prompts at multiple systems for gaining access.
Main Benefits of SSO
- The ease of access, where just one username and password grants access to several applications and resources.
- The risk of phishing is minimized as users are oriented to single one time authentication
- It reduces password fatigue caused due to multiple usernames and passwords
- Time taken to access information is minimized
- It is less exasperating for the IT as calls for lost passwords and associated help are much less
- This procedure allows for authentication policies across the organization to be simpler and uniform
The big thing to understand here, however, is that there can be no flaw in the SSO design. In the case that the SSO goes down, so do all of your operations. Even if the applications are there, there can be no access to them. The only effective cure here is a well -tested fast recovery from failure/ disaster design. Also, availability of credentials to individuals other than authorized ones spells disaster, and therefore strong authentication methods like biometrics, smart cards or one-time password tokens can be used.
