Portals- PART 1

I found some interesting materials about web portals, so i will take some basic concepts important for BA 's.
It's important to realize that SOA requires a holistic strategy and approach.
It can start from the back end through integration and business process modeling and optmization. But a holistic approach extends to, or can start from the front end.
This is where people experience an SOA in a very practical way.
The front-end represents a key integration point. So it's imperative to have a vendor that provides a comprehensive end-to-end, back-to-front end, front-to-back end solution.
A portal is a composite application – one assembled at the front end. It is an aggregation point for services – delivered through portlets.
The other side to this is that implementing an SOA is not a single product or single initiative  thought. It is a multi-step initiative. One requiring a number of phases and requiring success at each step of the way. That’s why it’s imperative to start with a project that has a high likelihood of success and visibility. That’s where a portal comes in – it’s visible, experiential, a clear example of the benefits of SOA – providing a high likelihood of success with potentially high ROI.

Portal Principle

1. Combines portlets (application user interfaces and/or content) together into one unified presentation
2. Delivers a highly personalized experience, considering role, personal settings, and device settings
3. Separates site design, site/page assembly/administration, from application design
4. Provides application integration, collaboration, single sign-on services

What is portlet? The term portlet refers to a small reusable program that can be placed on the portal page to perform a specific function, such as retrieve and display information. Portlets are often thought of as small windows or content areas on a Web page. Portlets provide access to applications, Web-based content, and other resources. You can create your own portlets or select ones created by others. Portlets can be web applications, independently developed, placed and deployed.
A key point here is that any particular portlet is developed, deployed, managed, and displayed independent  of other portlets. Administrators and end users create customized portal pages by choosing and arranging portlets.  These portlets are accessible by any authorized user coming into the portal environment. 
Conceptual flow of a typical portlet developed with IBM WebSphere Portal technology is shown below:

In the next part i will talk about IBM specific page aggregation process and some other imortant things.