An Oracle White Paper February Oracle WebLogic Portal: Portal Lifecycle Management

Transcription

1 An Oracle White Paper February 2009 Oracle WebLogic Portal: Portal Lifecycle Management

2 Executive Overview... 2 Organizational Challenges in Portal Management... 2 Portal Management from the Business Side... 3 Portal Management from the Development Side... 3 The Right Portal Desktop for Every User... 4 The Expansion of Portal Production... 5 True to the Vision... 5 Product Expansion... 5 Two Ends of the Spectrum: Approaches to Portal Production... 5 A Next Generation Approach Portal Lifecycle Management... 7 Flexibility for IT and Line of Business... 8 Adaptable Portal Delivery Benefits of Portal Lifecycle Management Flexibility Faster Time to Value Reduced Portal Costs Conclusion... 14

3 Executive Overview Portals have evolved over the last few years to become the most relevant communication medium for sharing information and conducting transactions with customers, partners, and employees. Until recently, however, the ability to deliver and manage portals has been constrained by a first generation approach that has remained substantially unchanged since portals emerged nearly a decade ago. Oracle WebLogic Portal, with portal lifecycle management functionality, provides a radical new approach to portal lifecycle management and production that accelerates the delivery of business solutions by reducing the time to build, deploy, and manage portals. Oracle WebLogic Portal, in combination with Oracle developer tools, flexibly adapts portal development to both centralized and distributed IT organizations and promotes a high level of standardization and reuse of portal resources. It provides for an unlimited portal management roles including the line of business manager role and enables portals to evolve without requiring organizations to use development resources. Oracle WebLogic Portal also provides great flexibility to address the diverse portal presentation requirements for interacting with customers, partners, and employees. As a result, Oracle WebLogic Portal enables a new, efficient division of labor in the production and management of portals. This division of labor not only improves the productivity of IT, but also empowers the business to manage their own portal applications, significantly reducing the friction between IT and the rest of the business.. Organizational Challenges in Portal Management Portal applications tend to be highly dynamic because they need to provide customized access to the information and applications important to each user. Successful portals continually deliver new content and continually give access to new applications. This ability to evolve the portal incrementally and provide a dynamic and relevant experience with new resources provides one of the greatest benefits of deploying a portal. However, this very dynamism creates a unique set of challenges for the business and development organizations. 2

4 Portal Management from the Business Side Portals deliver solutions to many parts of the business organization. Because the business has a significant stake in the success and change management of the portal application, many parts of the organization are often involved in the management of portal applications. To deliver a valuable portal and to increase user adoption, it is crucial for the business to be able to add and replace content without requiring development resources. It is important for the business line to be able to change how the portal determines which content to distribute, who receives content and, where and when they can access it. This means adjusting the parameters of how portals implement personalization and how campaigns are managed within the portal both of which are important to improving customer service and achieving business goals. Those managing the portal have the critical objectives of ensuring a positive customer experience and attaining business goals. Business opportunities are often short lived and the ability to assemble a portal quickly from existing resources is critical. This enables the internal team to manage the opportunity or to deliver a portal for the segment of your customers that make up the opportunity. For example, a competitor s merger announcement is a short-term customer conversion opportunity as customers decide whether the merged company will continue to meet their needs. An internal portal for a cross-functional team of sales, marketing, and finance is the coordination point providing collaboration, collateral, and programs to allow them to convert the competitor s customers at this critical time.. In addition, an external customer portal, as part of an integrated marketing campaign, provides the information, programs, and the incentive for these customers to switch to your company s product. Business opportunities are often short-lived, and the ability to assemble a portal quickly from existing resources is critical. This enables the internal team to manage the opportunity or to deliver a portal for the segment of your customers that make up the opportunity. The line of business that embraces custom components will depend on a simplified portal assembly process to capitalize on business opportunities when they arise. Effective portal management solutions empower the line of business to manage the particular portal functions related to their own business activity putting functionality in synch with business and increasing the likelihood of success. Portal Management from the Development Side The structure of the development organization also has an impact on the development and management process. An IT organization that is centralized enables more control over the development process but may be less responsive to the line of business. Mergers and acquisitions often result in a distributed IT organization, though it may be temporary. Business changes are inevitable, as are the IT challenges that accompany them. 3

5 A distributed organization that includes central IT and developers within the business units may be more responsive to business needs but adds complexity and challenges for standardization and software reuse. How do you get the most effective portal development from a distributed development organization? How do you encourage and achieve high levels of software reuse? First generation portal development and management processes do not easily address these practical issues. The Right Portal Desktop for Every User Portals for customers, partners, and employees share similar features such as portal pages with navigation tabs and portlets as the windows that display content but portal appearance and navigation are often as different as the portal constituencies. Executive dashboard portals may appear as a highly dense aggregation of information, which is required for executives monitoring the health and progress of a number of operational aspects of the business. In contrast, customer portals designed for the public may have less information density, but they may be heavier with enticing graphical elements designed to captivate a broad audience.. Portals for customers, partners, and employees share similar features such as portal pages with navigation tabs and portlets as the windows that display content but portal appearance and navigation are often as different as the portal constituencies. Internal audiences often have the simplest interface requirements because standardization across the enterprise is perfectly adequate. But what if you are a health care provider whose clients are large enterprises and yet the end users of the portal are your enterprise customer s employees? And what if each of your enterprise clients requires a look consistent with its branding? Consistent branding is often required for white label portals, which are implemented for business-to-business, and business-to-customer interactions. Clearly, flexibility at the presentation layer is required to address the unique challenges of many different types of portals and to provide a customized portal that becomes the desktop for every user. This flexibility is especially important because portals today are not just delivering personalized content and applications, but are also integrating personalized business processes across multiple applications. Portals that amalgamate the user experience across business processes are called process portals. Process portals can group content and transactional interfaces into guided business processes that update multiple systems as part of a single transaction. This enables employees of a company running a process portal to update multiple systems in a single transaction. The employees simply connect to systems across the enterprise via this portal desktop to perform the updates, simplifying tasks and improving productivity. Meanwhile, a process portal enables customers of the same company to access a single view of the supplier, where they enter orders and easily view support transactions and the status of their orders. 4

6 The Expansion of Portal Production Innovative technology solutions across industries often share evolutionary lifecycles. The first solution is applied to a new segment of the market, delivering unprecedented ease of use by addressing a specific costly problem. Over time, successful adoption leads to other opportunities where the initial approach is too constrained to be viable. The choice is either to remain true to original vision by specializing in the best solution for the original and closely-related problems, or to expand the solution to address additional problems but risk losing the simplicity that was its initial advantage and source of success. For software companies and products, the lure of product expansion is often irresistible. Examples of technology products examples that demonstrate these two strategies include the following: True to the Vision Software utilities like disk defragmenters that focus on providing the best-in-class product Image scanning and optical character recognition software that turns images of pages into digital text Product Expansion Spreadsheets that evolved into productivity suites Web browsers that expanded to offer page editing, , online discussions, and more Anti-virus software that evolved to all-encompassing security solutions Two Ends of the Spectrum: Approaches to Portal Production Portal products have taken the path of product expansion. The need for portal frameworks grew from the popularity of browser-based intranet access to company resources. However, developing the Web applications for these intranets was inefficient each application had to be written from scratch. Developers were required for integration and updates of all portal functions like personalization, content, commerce, and collaboration. Corporate portal solutions from portal pure-play vendors streamlined the publishing of content and sharing of resources within the enterprise. They were the first enterprise portal applications designed for business users to assemble, rather than for development and engineers to design from scratch.. Over time, more capabilities were added to integrate company systems. Prepackaged components provided the ability to quickly build a portal to access both content and corporate applications. This pre-packaged approach, however, relied on infrastructure with limited flexibility for changes and upgrades. This brittle infrastructure resulted in high long-term cost of ownership. 5

7 Some portal thought leaders have looked at portal development and the evolution of these portals within organizations and have found that when an enterprise portal is initially released (release 1.0), 90 percent of the capability will be delivered by the out-of-the-box features of the portal product, while only 10 percent will be delivered by custom integration components. For any additional releases of an enterprise portal (releases 2.0, 3.0, etc.), this ratio actually reverses, with 90 percent of new capability delivered by custom integration components, while only 10 percent of new functionality will be delivered by new out-of-the box features. Clearly, the initial portal deployment is the tip of the iceberg with respect to the depth of functionality that the portal will eventually provide. The pre-packaged or assemble approach provided by early first-generation portal solutions did not include the rich development environment needed for easily adding new custom capabilities which lead to higher total cost of ownership for portal solutions. At the same time, those organizations using platforms and tools to build Web applications the develop approach began to see those products incorporate portal frameworks with preintegrated common portal services that simplified the portal development task. These portal platforms provided great flexibility but still required longer development efforts and increased time to market. The strengths and weaknesses of the first-generation assemble approach are diametrically opposed to those of the develop approach. This highlights the need and the opportunity for a portal approach that provides both fast time to market and maximum flexibility for developing and incorporating custom components. Figure 1. First-generation approaches to portal development ranged from developing the portal from scratch to assembling the portal with pre-packaged components. 6

8 A Next Generation Approach Portal Lifecycle Management Oracle WebLogic Portal provides portal production and management lifecycle that integrates fast portal assembly with the flexibility of custom portal resource development, and it takes advantage of a unified process that maximizes the benefits and interaction of each. Portal Lifecycle Management leverages a unified portal framework and provides the process for delivering portal business services as portals evolve and require additional capabilities. Oracle WebLogic Portal s unified portal framework lowers the total cost of portal ownership. The industrial strength foundation includes a flexible enterprise deployment architecture that drives maximum portal value at minimum cost. At the same time, enterprise integration capabilities extend portals to leverage current and future application investments. Oracle WebLogic Portal delivers the business services you need today and lets you incrementally deploy those you will need tomorrow. The platform s modular, pre-integrated services include content management, collaboration, search, commerce, and interaction management. These services help you minimize risk and easily meet specialized requirements. Oracle WebLogic Portal delivers the business services you need today and lets you incrementally deploy those you will need tomorrow. The platform s modular, pre-integrated services include content management, collaboration, search, commerce, and interaction management. Oracle WebLogic Portal provides flexibility for both IT and the line of business with portal resource development, portal assembly, and decentralized management. It enables standardization, reuse across development departments, and can unify the portal development effort in a distributed IT organization. It also provides unparalleled presentation flexibility enabling the delivery of portals adapted to any portal audience requirements. Figure 2. Oracle WebLogic Portal is a unified portal framework offering complete lifecycle management and enabling the range of portal business services. 7

9 Flexibility for IT and Line of Business This solution follows a four-step process to manage the portal lifecycle, from the architect phase through the manage phase, with the flexibility to deliver benefits to both centrally organized and distributed IT organizations. It can accommodate the many constituencies that have a stake in the production and management of portals. In addition, it provides portal management at many levels for the line of business. These steps often apply to four different constituencies the architects, developers, portal managers, and portal users. In practice, this process will reflect your process and how, as an organization, you currently manage these tasks. Architect Phase Within every IT organization are the architects that best understand technology. Their strength is tackling the hardest technical problems. The challenge is to leverage this investment with reuse across the organization. In the portal lifecycle, architects work with traditional J2EE tools and Oracle Workshop for WebLogic. The Oracle Workshop for WebLogic development environment provides unified development one IDE, one framework, and one service-oriented approach for building all platform applications, from Web applications and Web services to portal and integration applications. Oracle Workshop for WebLogic makes J2EE productive and accessible to all developers, including mainstream business application developers without prior experience using J2EE or in object-oriented programming. It also provides extensibility with Java Controls, which are serviceoriented components that enable IT to easily connect to, use and reuse any IT system or application in any platform project. Figure 3. Portal Lifecycle Management. 8

10 Architects bring together custom business logic, integrations with corporate systems, corporate branding, and any other resources for use across a number of portals. They then encapsulate these resources by packaging them in Oracle Workshop for WebLogic application and project templates. These templates can include application business logic; connectivity to other systems; or corporate standard colors, fonts, and logos. For example, functionality that is commonly required for internal portals such as portlets that display information from enterprise systems can be included in one template, while commerce capabilities for customers might reside in another. These templates will be used by other developers and provide the starting point for the develop phase. Application and project templates provide the foundation for standardization and reuse across the development organization. Deciding which resources to include in templates is crucial to the efficient reuse of software assets and best practices. This decision should therefore reflect how the development organization operates most effectively. An organization with centralized IT and distributed business unit development may find that providing a more complete level of portal resources integrations with enterprise systems available as portlets, for example offers the most efficiency. Other organizations may find that system integrations and business processes that are available as Oracle Workshop for WebLogic controls and from which they then build portlets is a more efficient approach. The portal platform as a whole is designed to provide maximum flexibility for the Enterprise Architects charged with making these decisions. Develop Phase Business application developers in IT or in the line of business then start with these application and project templates, and add pages, books that are collections of pages, and portlet functionality. Oracle WebLogic Portal supports both of the emerging portlet standards including Java Specification Request (JSR) 168, which defines the portlet interface to the portal framework, and the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard approved by OASIS, which defines the remote use of portlets across a portal network.. Building portlets from Web application resources is a simple point-and-click process enabling developers to spend more time on the portlet functionality, which satisfies the business need, rather than on the infrastructure of delivering the application through the portal. Building portlets from Web application resources is a simple point-and-click process enabling developers to spend more time on the portlet functionality, which satisfies the business need, rather than on the infrastructure of delivering the application through the portal. Developers can add a base set of visitor campaigns, and they can add portlets that leverage business processes and Web services. Working with user interface designers, they refine the appearance of portal resources such as pages and portlets within the best practices given by enterprise architects. At the completion of the develop phase, business application developers have produced portal templates (not to be confused with application and project templates ), 9

11 which will be used to assemble the desktops, or portal views, for a number of specific, deployed portals. Figure 4. Users can develop portal resources in Oracle Workshop for WebLogic. Assemble and Deploy Phase Portal managers who may be analysts in the business units or within IT use browser-based tools to assemble and configure portals from the resources in the portal template. Using pages and portlets, they assemble sets of pages called books. They select the look-and-feel from the options provided to them. They enable and configure personalization and campaigns. The assemble aspect of the portal lifecycle is key to reducing time-to-market as assembly of custom components can deliver a portal to address immediate business objectives. This underscores the importance of the design decision of what to include in these templates as part of the develop phase. Typically, it is most efficient to map the portal operation that has a critical time to- market to the assemble phase. For example, if an enterprise primarily sells through a network of resellers or distributors and it is important to expand the base of these partners, then it is critical to reduce the time-to- market that is, the time from signing a new partner to delivering a portal for their access to achieve business success. The production of these portals is then most efficient if it occurs with portal assembly and with minimal or no development. In fact, customized component development could occur in parallel with the assembly and configuration of the portal desktop. 10

12 Figure 5. Assembling portal pages and placing portlets. Manage Phase Oracle WebLogic Portal uses a decentralized administration model delegated administration to provide an unlimited number of portal management roles. These roles permit IT and the line of business to customize their approach to portal management based on the urgent needs of their business. Roles define the functional capabilities for managing content, campaigns, portal assembly, or any other aspect of portal management. Oracle WebLogic Portal uses a decentralized administration model delegated administration to provide an unlimited number of portal management roles. These roles permit IT and the line of business to customize their approach to portal management. These roles can include groups, users, or dynamic expressions that define membership and can include user properties originating in the organization s existing user directory. Since the evaluation of these roles is dynamic, any change in user or group attributes that qualifies the user for a new management role will automatically enable that role without administrator intervention. Roles define the functional capability of portal managers (for example, the ability to edit, delete, add, ), but that role must then be assigned to a specific content area to determine the actual managerial responsibilities. As a result, a manager s true capabilities are determined by two defined factors: which resources a given manager can modify the managerial rights defined by the role. For example, a content contributor role for managing company news might be allowed only to add, delete, and update content. That role is then assigned to the news folder within the content system, which is but a small subset of the content within the portal. Separating role 11

13 definition from specific content responsibilities generates great flexibility for administering portal content. Visitor entitlements, which determine which content and portal resources are viewable by users, are also defined by a similar set of roles. The system uses visitor attributes to determine role membership and the roles can be applied to portal resources like desktops, books, pages, and portlets. Since these roles are also dynamic, changes in visitor attributes automatically enable new portal functionality. For example, a new customer might visit the site and register for a loyalty program. A new portal page for loyalty program members becomes immediately available upon approval for the program. If the business process that supports loyalty registration provides automatic registration, then the visitor immediately receives access to the new page without manual intervention. This combination of entitlements and business processes can simplify and automate the delivery of new online services. Portal management also provides for visitor customization within the limits defined by the application and project templates (defined in the architect phase) and by the portal templates (defined in the develop phase). If enabled, visitors can add and manage portal pages, assigning portlets to the page layouts they choose. Alternative look and feel choices give the visitor the ability to change the appearance of their portal view. Adaptable Portal Delivery These four steps, from architect through manage phase, address the process of producing and managing portals. In addition to process flexibility, portal lifecycle management also addresses diverse portal presentation requirements by providing the flexibility to adapt portal delivery to each portal audience. Each portal constituency views the resources that make up the portal through a portal desktop. The desktop look-and-feel is defined by sets of skeletons and skins. Skeletons indicate the shape of portal components and skins determine color and style. For example, to change the shape of the title bar in every portlet in the desktop a change in the skeleton that creates the title bar is all that is needed. If only one or two title bars need to have a different shape then a theme with a similar skeleton is used as themes only change the appearance of the desktop element to which they are applied and they can be applied to portlets, pages, or books. The shell determines the placement of the desktop header, footer, and navigational elements. Books are sets of pages of content and applications, and they provide organization for the main part of the desktop. A page layout, with rows and columns that contain placeholders for portal content, defines how the page is organized. To add page content you drop portlets, which are mini-windows, into the placeholders on a page. Portal developers using Oracle Workshop for WebLogic can customize these portal components and only need to modify the ones responsible for the desired change. Portal managers using the browser-based Oracle WebLogic Administration Portal can also configure components to use 12

14 these customizations. This presentation flexibility enables delivery of customized portals to a high level of detail for each portal audience. Figure 6. Portal lifecycle management offers a range of tools to adjust the many facets of the user portal experience. Benefits of Portal Lifecycle Management Flexibility Portal lifecycle management provides a great deal of flexibility. The development tasks can be accomplished by a single centralized IT organization or by using templates across a distributed development organization. The portal management tasks are browser-based and can be performed by IT or various parts of the line of business. Delegated administration provides the ability to create an unlimited number of management roles to manage users and portal business functionality. Dynamic visitor entitlements automatically adjust to changing visitor characteristics, providing access to resources as soon as they are available. Development tasks can be accomplished by a single centralized IT organization or by using templates across a distributed development organization. The challenge associated with this flexibility, of course, is that customers deploying Oracle WebLogic Portal need to be very clear on which degrees of freedom provided by the portal they plan to exploit and who in the organization will be allowed to exploit them. The flexibility of Oracle WebLogic Portal thus puts a premium on planning, regarding governance models. Faster Time to Value The portal lifecycle not only combines portal development and assembly but provides synergistic benefits that provide faster time to value. Oracle Workshop for WebLogic is one of the most productive general development environments available, and no doubt is the most powerful portal development environment available today. This power enables architects and developers 13

15 to create many custom portal resources, providing an ever-increasing inventory of custom resources to combine, using portal assembly tools. A greater selection of portal resources for assembly code reuse, in a word lets portal managers meet new business requirements quickly, reducing the time to portal availability. Visitor entitlements working in conjunction with business processes automate the delivery of new services to portal visitors. In addition, since Oracle Workshop for WebLogic is used by both architects and developers it unifies the development process saving both time and development resources. Oracle Workshop for WebLogic is one of the most productive general development environments available, and no doubt is the most powerful portal development environment available today. Reduced Portal Costs The software reuse enabled by Oracle Workshop for WebLogic also lowers the cost of enterprise portal development. Assembling portal resources to produce multiple portals also lowers portal production cost because development is not needed. Delegated administration empowers organizations that have business responsibility to manage the portal and reduces IT backlog and maintenance costs. These benefits add up to lower long-term cost for portal applications, enabling the enterprise to focus more resources on adding core business value. Conclusion Oracle WebLogic Portal, in combination with Oracle developer tools such as Oracle Workshop for WebLogic, delivers a next-generation approach to portal production and management: portal lifecycle management. This approach balances the best features of first-generation portal development processes and adds unparalleled flexibility to address organizational, process, and portal appearance requirements for custom portals meeting the needs of both portal users and portal managers. Portal lifecycle management delivers more flexibility and is suited to the evolving portal needs of business today. It reduces the time it takes to achieve business value with portals by simplifying the production and management process. Oracle WebLogic Portal reduces long-term portal costs, while providing the utmost flexibility to adapt to meet changing business needs. As one deploys increasing numbers of portals, portal lifecycle management offers a more efficient division of labor and better code reuse. This allows each incremental portal project to be delivered and managed more easily and rapidly, and at lower cost. 14

16 Portal Lifecycle Management: A Radically Different Approach to Portal Production and Management February 2009 Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: Fax: oracle.com Copyright 2009, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. 0109