Thinking about integrating applications into a portal (like, conveniently, WebCenter Interaction)? I have, and am (Blogs and Wikis, anyone?).
If so, whether you’re looking at a third-party application, open-source code base, or are planning to develop your own custom application, there are Four Tenets of Portal Integration you should consider. Check them out!
- User Interface. Ideally, you’d run the application behind the portal gateway as a portlet, and have the portal add the necessary styles, headers, and footers to provide your users with a seamless experience. But that isn’t always feasible (more on this another time). Sometimes you have to fake the funk, and simply get your 3rd-party application to LOOK LIKE the portal, so that even though the URL changes as users navigate from the portal to the application, it’s still a seamless experience. This blog is an example of that; you’re looking at a WordPress blog, but the other couple of pages on this site are running WebCenter Interaction - did you notice the font changes?
- Authentication. Again, gatewaying is the best way to ensure this happens seamlessly; when I log into the portal and navigate to another application like this blog (whether through the gateway or directly to the application’s URL), I don’t want to have to log in again. Authentication refers to verifying that I am who I confirm I am – and I only want to confirm this once without having to maintain two accounts in two different systems.
- Authorization. This one’s even harder than Authentication; any out-of-the-box application will have its own authorization system, which defines who can see or do what they have privileges for once they’re authenticated. In the portal world, this means that I as an adminstrator of the portal should be able to configure the security of the application the same way – and with the same groups – as I do the portal itself.
- Search. Back to user experience: one of the biggest benfits of the portal is a consistent user experience. And one of the biggest unifying services (aside from those mentioned above) is Search. When I’m in the portal and do a search, I want to search not only the objects within the portal – including communities, pages, portlets, and the Knowledge Directory – I want those results to be integrated with the results from my external application.
So there you have it; if you get all four of these integration points knocked, you can officially consider your application “fully integrated” with the portal. Notice there’s a huge amount of leeway here (such as “gatewaying is not necessarily mandatory”); following on the promise of the portal itself, “Integration” is all about a consistent user experience, regardless of back-end technology being used. Your users shouldn’t have to know what back-end applications they’re actually using; it should all be completely seamless.
Tags: 3rd Party, best practices, Integration