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2-Day Seminar

Designing and Building Enterprise Portals

Click here for an in-house quote request or for further information regarding in-house training.

Overview
Many business users today spend hours trying to find and access all necessary job specific, information while filtering out irrelevant content. They also often find that application functionality they need is not available them. What they want is role-based personalised access to information, processes, applications and collaborative tools all via a single user interface to help them be more effective in the workplace. This two-day workshop shows how to design, deploy Enterprise Portal technology for internal and external use to help companies achieve this.

Learning Objectives

  • To understand what a portal is and the difference between a portal and an intranet or extranet
  • To understand the portal product marketplace and how to select products
  • To know how to use portal technology to design and deploy role based portals across the enterprise

Seminar and Workshop Outline

An Introduction to Portals
This session introduces portals and the reasons why they are needed. It explores portal architectures and components in detail. It also looks at the types of content that can be accessed and integrated using them and developing a business case for portal technology.

  • What is a portal?
  • Portal architecture, components and services
  • Accessing unstructured content, applications, business intelligence and collaborative tools via a portal
  • The business case for portal technology
  • Best practices for portal implementation

Understanding Functional and Content Requirements
This session looks at the business objectives for using portal technology, the differing needs of internal and external user communities. It introduces the need for an information usage study to collect and prioritise community requirements.

  • Understanding strategic business objectives
  • Identifying Internal and external communities and roles
  • Collecting requirements for a portal project - the content usage study
  • Content types and locations
  • Prioritisation: mapping content usage to business objectives and selecting a pilot project

Selecting and Integrating Portal Products

  • What is involved in selecting portal technologies?
  • Portal technology selection requirements
  • The portal marketplace:
    • BEA Aqualogic Interaction, SAP Enterprise Portal, Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server, IBM WebSphere Portal Server, Vignette, Oracle 10g AS Portal, BI Portals, open source portal products, etc
    • Making sense of vendor portal packaging
  • What is involved in Portal product Integration?
  • Recovering from portal chaos - how to integrate multiple portal products
  • Portal integration using JSR168/286, WSRP and Web services

Portal Taxonomies and Categorisation
This session looks at portal taxonomy development and the techniques and technologies for categorisation of business content. It discusses approaches to developing taxonomies, and looks at taxonomy design to achieve good organisation of business content

  • What is a portal taxonomy?
  • The portal taxonomy - topics and hierarchies
  • Taxonomy design techniques - top down vs. bottom up
  • Manual vs. automatic content categorisation
  • How manual and automatic content categorisation works
  • Managing portal taxonomies over the long term
  • Product examples: Autonomy, BEA, IBM, Microsoft

Customising a Portal to Meet Your Business Needs
This section looks at how to customise a portal user interface to match an organisation's presentation standards and how to develop portlets for new content sources.

  • What is portal customisation?
  • What kinds of portal customisation can be done?
  • Customising the portal user interface
  • Adding support for mobile devices
  • Adding new content sources and portlets to the portal to access applications, content stores, RSS feeds etc.

Designing and Implementing a Portal Security Service
This section looks at the problem of portal security and single sign-on. In particular it looks at user authentication and authorisation and how to integrate with already built portal solutions

  • Approaches to implementing single sign-on
  • Portal User authentication
    • Portal communities - user groups and users
    • Portal integration with cross platform LDAP directories and HR systems
    • Plugging portals into your own security management solution
    • Integrating with SSO Products e.g. IBM Tivoli, Oracle, EMC, CA eTrust SiteMinder, Microsoft ADFS
  • Portal user authorisation - the more difficult security problem
    • Dealing with application specific authorisation vs. portal authorisation
  • Web services and security
  • Case studies - what some companies have done

Integrating applications, content and collaboration tools with Portals
This session takes a deeper look at integrating content management, applications, collaboration, and workflow into portals.

  • Approaches to integrating content into a portal e.g. Web clipping, Portal content stores, ECMS, RSS Feeds, EII
  • Integrating enterprise content management systems into portals e.g. BEA Aqualogic Collaboration Server, Vignette, DB2 Content Management System, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, Documentum, Oracle, Interwoven
  • Types of collaboration tools and services
  • Building personal and collaborative workspaces
  • Options for integrating collaboration tools into portals
  • Integrating applications, web services and business processes into portals
  • The marriage of document workflow and business process management
  • Web 2.0 - Integrating Wikis and Blogs

Deploying a Portal to User Communities: Implementing Portal Personalisation
This section looks at how to use portal personalisation to deploy role-based personalised workspaces to specific user communities while remaining within an organisation's security policies.

  • What is portal personalisation?
  • Deployment - the User Driven Personalisation process
  • Personalising portals for user communities
  • Dynamic assembly of the relevant portal components
  • Enabling access to external users

Special Features
Delegates will also be given detailed articles on portal implementation written by Mike Ferguson and other distinguished portal experts.

Audience

  • IT Manager
  • Enterprise Architect
  • IT Consultant
  • Systems Analyst
  • Systems Manager
  • IT Project Manager

and all Business Managers responsible for selecting and implementing portal technology.

In-House Training
If you require a quote for running an in-house course, please contact us with the following details:

  • Subject matter and/or speaker required
  • Estimated number of delegates
  • Location (town, country)
  • Number of days required (if different from the public course)
  • Preferred date

Please contact:
Jeanette Hall
E-mail: jeanette.hall@irmuk.co.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)20 8866 8366
Fax: +44 (0)1923 828 770

Speaker: Mike Ferguson
Intelligent Business Strategies Ltd
Mike Ferguson

Speaker Biography

Mike Ferguson is the Managing Director of Intelligent Business Strategies Ltd. He is an analyst and consultant specialising in Enterprise Business Intelligence, Enterprise Portals and Business Integration. With over 25 years of experience, Mike has consulted for dozens of companies, spoken at events all over the world and written numerous articles.