6. Portals and Infrastructure
Because a portal collects information from multiple back end sources and applications, infrastructure issues are often critical for the success of a portal deployment. The infrastructure issues related to portals tend to magnify the issues that each back end application or content source may have. Infrastructure here refers less to the physical hardware, and more to the interconnection of hardware and software. Here is an introduction to some relevant infrastructure topics for portals:

Hosting Service Providers - Hosting service providers operate and maintain the portal services. These can be internal to an organization, such as an IT department, or even external to an organization, such as an Application Service Provider, (ASP,) or an off-site hosting services vendor. The typical tasks that a hosting service provider performs are Systems Management and Site Administration.
Service Level Agreement - Service Level Agreements define the proper levels of service to provide systems' customers with. It is typically a list of performance and availability specifications, given a certain workload.
Platforms - Several different types of platforms have evolved. The most pervasive platform is the Operating system. These are pervasive: the critical operating systems in the market today are the Microsoft Windows Operating Systems and the MacIntosh (for the client layer,) along with Windows NT, Windows 2000, Unix and its variants, (i.e., Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, IBM OS/390, Linux) for the servers, along with the traditional mainframe-oriented operating systems, (OS/390, OS/400, etc.) which also classify as server.
- Client Layer - This typically consists of an operating system, a web browser, and an email/Groupware client (such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook.) Client layer software is often architected with a Presentation Layer, an Application Layer, and a Data Layer. In web applications, it may also include plug-in's, or Active/X controls, depending upon your browser.
- Presentation Server - The presentation server typically supports the user interface operations of a portal. This is typically a web server, such as Apache, Microsoft IIS, or NetScape iPlanet. (Other web servers exist, but these are the top three.) Presentation servers tend to support web-based applications.
- Application Server - The Application Server is often kept separate from the presentation server. This is done to separate the presentation layer from the application layer, an often-adopted practice that minimizes the effect that the change in a look-and-feel item would have upon the actual business code. High-end application server architectures, such as Microsoft's COM architecture or Sun's J2EE architecture intentionally enforce this separation. While the presentation server "draws screens," it also invokes the application server when "real-work" needs to be done, the processing of information entered in the screens. Typical Application Servers are BEA Weblogic, Oracle 9iAS, IBM Websphere, and Microsoft MTS.
- Integration Server - An integration server is a type of application server. An examples of a server would be an IBM MQ Series server.
- Data Server - The top players in this market are Oracle, IBM (with DB2), Microsoft (with MS SQLServer) and Sybase. Not all data is saved in a relation database, however. High-End search engines, such as Autonomy store data in flat files.
Systems Management - Systems management is a continual struggle against Murphy's Law. There are generally two segments of the systems management task: the management of Operations and Engineering. Operations Management tends to focus on the day-to-day tasks required to operate and maintain the system at the desired service levels.
Network - Central to the concept of a portal is the concept of a network. A portal is a device that organizes a person's desktop within a network. It allocates appropriate screen placement for each service provided by a portal.
Interoperability - Interoperability is critical to a portal. A typical portal integrates several web applications, (which can be of multiple architectures, i.e., Microsoft and Sun architectures,) different applications, (i.e., XML Applications and Database Applications,) with traditional desktop applications, (such as word processors and spreadsheets.) Through the use of portal technologies, many of these components, and more, can be consolidated into a single, organized desktop.
Deployment Technology - Once deployment is done, an operation commences. Operations consist of the day-to-day maintenance of services inherent to an application, preferably within a singles service level agreement. Closely related, performance and availability tend to have separate tasks in an organization. (One can argue that an application that does not perform well is not available, in turn, one can argue that an application that is not available does not perform.)
- Performance - Performance is critical to any portal. A portal that does not perform will not be seen as adding value to a user community. Performance management consists of two types of tasks, those that occur at run time, and those that occur in the long-term.
- Availability - The other goal of deployment technologies is availability. A system must meet its availability expectations. To ensure availability, a QA process is used by development. To further ensure availability, the application of redundant hardware and software has long been an established process.
Unified development environment -The unified development environment simplifies portal implementation. In practice, it tends to be a combination of a Microsoft oriented environment and a Java Environment; however, they both can work in concert on a single Microsoft Operating System developer workstation.
Unity - The true utility of the portal is its ability to integrate multiple technologies within a single web screen. These screens will be able to support the integration of technologies over multiple platforms in a high-end portal. A portal implementing unity may need to interact with all layers in the typical application stack.

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