Design & Architecture

Enterprise Portal Technology

Enterprise portal technology can help an institution in two key ways; by providing an administrator a detailed view of their entire organization, and by helping them organize those details. With the aid of a portal, one can view the entire nervous system of any institution, including its customers, costs, and revenues, as well as the actions of various internal components.

 

Not only does a portal make this information accessible, it organizes these facts in a clear way that allows unprecedented internal knowledge of an organization. This in turn enables clear decision-making and an enhanced ability to execute. The usefulness of Enterprise Portal Technology can be illustrated through the example of a University President, who must oversee functions in his organization ranging from students’ grades to teachers’ salaries to alumni’s donations. This information could be disparate, stored in a variety of ways and places, and yet the President must have all of it to make decisions for the University.  Enterprise Portal Technology provides a platform that allows the administrator to access all of this information in one place. This platform accesses applications, or solutions, ranging from a registrar’s spreadsheet to a bursar’s balance sheet, and presents them to the University President. With a good platform, solutions can be built which not only maximize efficiency for the President, but also for the Bursar, and the Registrar, and the Teacher, and so on.

 

Within this context, the SW Global Enterprise Portal is our own personalized platform, upon which we build software solutions for our clients. We provide a web-based single point of access to a company’s entire universe of applications, databases, services and selected external information. The open architecture of our platform means that enterprises have the ability to add to our platform, integrating their own universe of applications, databases, etc. with the solutions that our company provides.

 

Our Enterprise Portal System Capabilities
The following table provides a list of the components of the Enterprise Portal platform, as well as a brief description of their capabilities.

 

 

Features of the Enterprise Portal Server

• Robust and Reliable: Based on cutting edge technologies such as J2EE that enable organizations to offer customers, partners, and employees personalized information on all electronic channels.
  
  
• Ready-to-Start Portal Environment: Includes intranet applications, or portlets, in addition to basic portal functions like log-in, menu-navigation, and desk-management.
  
  
• User-Management Integration: Offers the integration into the existing LDAP or Microsoft Active Directory based user management, security, caching, and administration. It also offers configurable tracking and logging of user behavior.
  
  
• Content Management System: Provides a pre-configured and optimally integrated content management-system (CMS), which integrates and personalizes content delivery. The CMS integrates components from different sources within the organizational database and enterprise application pool, making the content available in a personalized and context relevant fashion. Data may also be extracted for further processing with analysis tools.
  
  
• Process Integration and Work Flow: Portrays typical intranet processes with the help of workflow components, which are adaptable and flexible for individual demands.
  
  
• Portal Exceeding Search: Provides an integrated search engine to gain information. It also makes available to all employees a reliable access to the portal contents.
  
  
• Compatibility Existing Communication Platform: Contains a standard integration into existing communication platforms (groupware) such as Microsoft Exchange. Additional platforms can be integrated optionally.
  
  
• Forums of Discussion: Allows for the exchanging of corporate knowledge through online newsgroups or forums, and supports any of the deeply structured forums of discussion holding a copyright.

Major Benefits Associated with our Enterprise Portal Applications
The SW Global Enterprise Portal product solution provides its users with the following benefits:
Integration Platform: Our Enterprise Portal provides an open architecture platform, enabling the customer to connect and integrate its universe of applications, databases etc. It offers Enterprise Integration services with the ability to include external data, event, content, and application integration. It provides functions such as content management, single sign-on, security, personalization, and workflow in a unified framework. Finally, our Enterprise Portal supports open standards including XML Web Services as defined by the World Wide Web consortium, W3C, standard protocols such as SSL, http, https, IIOP, SOAP, SMTP, and languages including Java, Java Script, Html, EJB.

Note: Our Enterprise Portal adopts the use of XML Web Services as its preferred mechanism of integration and interoperability with other applications. This allows us to leverage the World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3c.org) open standards base and certified interfaces to reduce time-to-market, cost, and development risk. Our preference for using transactions-based interfaces rather than static or batch processing is also to avoid duplication of data.

• Business Intelligence & Analytics: Our product solutions provide an operational dashboard, as well as informational modeling tools designed to monitor the overall status of key operations and management processes.
  
  
• Interoperability: SW Global delivers a component-based architecture that offers true interoperability across J2EE or .Net platforms. In this way, it minimizing the cost and difficulty inherent in IT Web services integration projects, regardless of the underlying platform. Also, offering both architectures and promoting open standards and greater interoperability for Web Services, increases our customers’ options both at the time of implementation and into the future.
  
  
• Intranet/Extranet Out-of-the-Box: The SW Global product solution provides an Internet growth platform with the Enterprise Portal server as a basis framework. This platform incorporates a whole range of Intranet/Extranet capabilities that enable the client to successfully migrate human capital management related workflow and business processes, and effectively support employees, other stakeholders, and alliance partners.

Open Standards and Open Systems: As an Internet-generation software firm, SW Global is deeply committed to the adoption and integration of open standards. As a result, all of our tools conform to the most current open standards specifications. Due to the fact that all of our solutions are open-standards based, institutions are not bound to any particular platform and are able to utilize a custom development platform with their own applications.