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Posted to jetspeed-dev@portals.apache.org by Rb...@worldbank.org on 2001/03/09 17:45:45 UTC
Question - Portal Features...
I am curious to see if there are plans to support additional features like:
Types of portals
- personal
- group
- entity
The entity portal is similar to a group portal except the focus is on the object
being displayed.
An example of that might a portal to display a mutual fund. The benefit of using
the portal approach is that some of the portlets become reusable.
Additionally, if an admin can be setup for each instance of the portal, the
admin can customize the view.
Layout
- 2 or 3 column ordered layout (is this already available?)
- non-movable portlets (Defined by admins)
Security
I have seen the discussion around this and it seems like we are moving in this
direction - being able to assign roles to users (handled outside the portal or
using role to group mapping) and secondly, to be able to define access
permissions to portlet based on roles. These should be hierarchical such that
they can be managed very granularly or at a high level. This implies roles
containing other roles as well as portlet groups which can further contain
portlets or portlet groups.
Other Features
- support for multiple portal instances
- support for multiple pages within a portal
- support for a flexible caching - ability to cache data, expire it and refresh
it programatically.
The type of data that could be cached could be serialized objects, XML etc. in
addition to web pages.
This should be configurable on a per data source level - i.e. expiry time, serve
stale content while refreshing etc.
The mechanim should also support delayed 'request/reply' mechanism i.e.
scheduling requests for data
that take a long time to be fulfilled. It should also support throttling -
ability to define max instances of pending
data retrieval requests and queuing of the remaining ones.
There is an open source portal implementation from ArsDigita
(http://www.arsdigita.com/doc/design/portals.html).
I think there are some useful features there. They have an interesting feature
comparison. Anyone know how JetSpeed stacks up?
IV. Competitive Analysis
Take from ArsDigita)
The word portal is used for many different things. Numerous companies in
the web market offer and define their own portal solutions. Oracle's portal
solution is basically a site-building tool that allows a site administrator
to create a site using an existing data model. Yahoo's portals are entirely
different. They are a mechanism for providing Yahoo subscribers access to
Yahoo's features, module and partners.
ACS portals integrate features of both Yahoo portals and Oracle portals and
are a very good example of ArsDigita's B2B2C model. ACS portals provide
both group portals aggregating business-oriented information and user
portals aggregating information relevant to the user.
Comparison with Yahoo portals (my.yahoo.com)
ACS portals are like Yahoo portals in that they offer predefined portlets
to view into existing data models. ACS portals also support user level
customization and are intended as a tool for managing individual
information flow. The current implementations of ACS portals solve similar
problems to Yahoo portals.
It is important to note, however, that ACS and Yahoo portals are not
actually competitors, as Yahoo supplies portals only for its subscribers.
In contrast, ACS is an open source solution that allows anyone to build a
portal system. Therefore, our comparison will be limited only to the tool
used to create yahoo portals - not the yahoo service.
ACS Advantages
Main advantage of ACS over Yahoo portals is that ACS portals support user
groups. As ACS has a complete view of the user, it is able to gather the
data from all the groups the user belongs to and serve it in user's
personal portal. ACS portals also make creation of groups easy providing
groups with their "home" displaying data relevant to group members.
Yahoo Advantages
Yahoo portals have a significantly more flexible UI for user customization
and better graphic design.
Comparison with Oracle portals
Like Oracle portals, ACS portals are a tool for site administrators to
quickly and flexibly build a site. However, Oracle portals are a more
general tool designed to work on any existing data model inside an oracle
database, and ACS portals are tied directly to the ACS data model. Oracle
also includes a powerful graphing capability as a part of portals package.
This functionality is not a part of ACS portals but is handled by another
ACS package instead.
ACS advantages
Because ACS portals are tied to the ACS data model, they offer several
advantages:
· Portals follow the Arsdigita philosophy of distributed administration. They
allow the site administrator to collaborate with group administrators to create
the site. The site administrator creates portlets and default portal
configurations, providing group administrators with components to design their
own sections of the site.
· The ACS user group concept provides advantages in customization both at the
user and group levels.
Oracle advantages
Oracle portals have powerful administrative UI for arranging portlets and
tools for creating portlets from tables in the data model without
programming. Layout and graphics are sophisticated and powerful. Here is a
high level feature overview comparing Arsdigita Portals, Oracle Portals,
and my.yahoo.com.
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
| Feature | Arsdigita | Oracle | my.yahoo.co|
| | Portals | Portals | m |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
| Open source | Yes | | |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
|Aggregating data from | Yes | Yes | Yes |
|multiple data sources | | | |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
|Aggregating data from | Yes | | Yes |
|external data sources | | | |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
|Interface for writing | Yes | Yes | |
|portlets | | | |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
|User portals | Yes | Yes | Yes |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
|Group portals | Yes | | |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
|Serving dynamic content | Yes | Yes | Yes |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
|Default user portals | Yes | | Yes |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
|Default group portals | Yes | | |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
|Automatic creation of | Yes | | Yes |
|user portals | | | |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
|Automatic creation of | Yes | | |
|group portals | | | |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
|Portlet level access | | Yes | |
|control | | | |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
|Required portlets | Yes | | |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
|Remove portlet button | | | Yes |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
|2-column portal pages | Yes | Yes | Yes |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
|3-column portal pages* | | Yes | Yes |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
|Changing display | | Yes | Yes |
|settings of individual | | | |
|portals | | | |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
| Changing display | Yes | | |
| settings on the domain | | | |
| level | | | |
|------------------------+------------+----------+------------|
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