Portal Integration
Why a Portal?
 A
portal aggregates and manages information and data from multiple
sources, providing a personalized web interface for users, resulting
in numerous benefits:
- By driving a single, strategic web-based platform it helps
control quality and reduce costs
- It places resources within easy reach of all users, and so increases
productivity and enhances reliability and speed of service
- It provides a single, global platform on which to manage and
share information and data, and improves the way people and companies
work
- Provides data center consolidation and client simplification
- Administrators can focus limited resources onto managing the
users and community, ensuring the accuracy and quality of information
within a fast and secure infrastructure
"IDC predicts that the enterprise portal
software market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth
rate of 41.2% from a base of $550.4 million in 2001 to $3.1 billion
in 2006."
IDC
What About Applications?
Portals by their nature are pure web-based technologies, and focus
on providing a "future proof" IT architecture that encompasses
a wide range of internal and external information and data sources.
Naturally this can include new web-based applications.
But web applications only account for a small fraction of applications
used in industry today and migrating all applications to be web-based
is not a quick or cheap option. The backbone of business today centers
on the vast range of existing applications, running everything from
finance systems to resource planning, patients medical records to
government databases. All reliably hosted on UNIX (or Linux) application
servers or on Microsoft Windows Terminal Servers (including Windows
NT Terminal Services and Windows 2000 Server), Mainframes, Midrange
servers (5250) or VMS systems. It is integration of these "legacy"
applications that often complicates or stalls a portal strategy.
"On average a company has more than 200
applications."
IDC
"The biggest gating factor to portal
deployment is legacy application integration."
Giga
 Read
about the Tarantella Portal Solution
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