Portal applications
Portal applications run on a Portal Server and consist of portal pages that are composed of portlets. Portlets can share and exchange resources and information to provide a seamless Web interface.
Portal applications have several important features:
| They can collect content from a variety of sources and present them to the user in a single unified format. |
|
| The presentation can be personalized so that each user sees a view based on their own characteristics or role. |
|
| The presentation can be customized by the user to fulfill their specific needs. |
|
| They can provide collaboration tools, which allow teams to work in a virtual office. |
|
| They can provide content to a range of devices, formatting and selecting the content appropriately according to the capabilities of the device. |
In the context of our sample scenario, we can use a portal application to enhance the user experience. The RedBank Web application can be integrated with the static Web content providing information about branches and bank services. If the customer has credit cards, mortgages, personal loans, savings accounts, shares, insurance, or other products provided by the bank or business partners, these could also be seamlessly integrated into the same user interface, providing the customer with a convenient single point of entry to all these services.
The content of these applications can be provided from a variety of sources, with the portal server application collecting the content and presenting it to the user. The user can customize the interface to display only the required components, and the content can be varied to allow the customer to connect using a Web browser, a personal digital assistant (PDA), or mobile phone.
Within the bank, the portal can also be used to provide convenient intranet facilities for employees. Sales staff can use a portal to receive information about the latest products and special offers, information from human resources, leads from colleagues, and so on.
|
ibm.com/redbooks |