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Novell Portal Services The Tools You Need To Build a Better Desktop i
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Schmanski, Tim |
| Copyright Year | 2000 |
| Abstract | f your company is in the market for a portal, you probably have an idea about the content you want that portal to deliver. You probably also have an idea about the users to whom you want to deliver that content. No matter what business your company is in or what kind of portal you envision, Novell Portal Services can help you build that portal. For example, suppose your company manufactures consumer goods. You may envision a portal through which employees can access legacy applications—such as applications that provide information about product availability, new orders, and production schedules. In addition, you may envision a portal through which your company's customers can access product information and order products online. Novell Portal Services is new portal framework software from Novell that is currently in closed beta. This portal framework is based on open standards right down to the directory it accesses: Novell Portal Services supports any directory that complies with the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol version 3 (LDAP v3) standard, including NDS eDirectory. Novell Portal Services is also Java-based, which means it can run on any operating system that supports a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) version 1.2.2 or above. (For more information about the industry standards upon which Novell Portal Services is based and how Novell Portal Services uses these standards, see “Novell Portal Services: A Better Way To Build a Desktop,” Novell Connection, Dec. 2000, pp. 22–32.) You may think Novell's focus on using industry standards makes Novell Portal Services a one-size-fits-all portal solution. In fact, it does—and it doesn't. Novell Portal Services is a onesize-fits-all portal solution only in the sense that you can use Novell Portal Services with any networking architecture that makes sense for your company. In all other senses, Novell Portal Services enables you to create a custom-made portal that meets your company's unique needs. THE BOX IS ONLY THE BEGINNING Enterprise portals are complex constructions by nature, as Tim Schmanski, a Novell Portal Services development manager, learned while attending the Delphi Group's Corporate Portals Conference in Rancho Mirage, California. (The Delphi Group specializes in e-business advisory services and analysis. For more information, visit www.delphigroup.com.) As a result of attending this conference, Schmanski observes that “there is no such thing as a portal in a box.” Instead, Schmanski says portal vendors tend to focus on specific aspects of portal development. “Some companies like doing the front-end [web server] stuff, and some companies like doing the database and backend access stuff,” Schmanski explains. With Novell Portal Services, Novell is concentrating on software that runs on the web server and controls portal access based on users' organizational roles. As mentioned earlier, Novell Portal Services is a portal framework. That is, rather than providing a ready-to-use portal right out of the box, the Novell Portal Services servlet provides a flexible, directory-enabled framework you can use to build a custom-made portal for your company. (See Figure 1 on p. 20.) In addition, Novell has developed several gadgets, or portal components, that access backend data sources and deliver that data as an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) stream. (See Figure 1 on p. 20.) Novell includes some gadgets with Novell Portal Services. For example, Novell Portal Services includes the Yahoo News gadget, which accesses the news service on the My Yahoo! web site (http://my.yahoo.com). (For a list of gadgets that Novell Portal Services includes, see “For Starters” on p. 22.) |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.novell.com/connectionmagazine/2001/01/2bhawk11i.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
