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XML Technologies Revolutionize Portals
— STM Staff
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This Article has been sent to you from Software Technology Magazine: http://www.softechmag.com ---------------------------------------------------------- XML Technologies Revolutionize Portals Simple XML text-messaging methods steeply accelerate development and enterprise integration for new Enterprise Web portals. New products from established vendors provide snap-in components, Web services, and security for rapid construction and enhanced reliability of key omni-service portals used by both corporations and Federal Government departments. STM Staff Forward-thinking corporate and government organizations seeking ways to improve their staffs' access to critical information are now providing them with tools and technologies that vastly accelerate the timeliness and accuracy of information retrieval. The creation of Internet Web-based "enterprise information portals" has stimulated a groundswell of new discoveries, new practices, and new business processes that has increased profits and efficacy in major corporations and government offices worldwide. Workers are no longer dependent on Old Boy networks or "information potentates"; employees can now work productively, openly, and collaboratively on a far wider set of organizational needs by communicating and sharing data with peers from all areas of the company. This has revolutionized equality and productivity in the American working environment, and coupled with e-commerce, lead to the first dramatic rise in real earnings in three decades. Corporate Portals Organizations are turning to corporate portals to help workers and managements access, analyze, organize, and share data in the face of ever-increasing amounts of necessary and useful data that currently threatens to overwhelm them. Economists are estimating that the amount of information necessary to turn out consumer and technology-intensive products is increasing at the rate of 30-35% per year. The challenge is that, for a portal to be successful, it must become fully integrated with the organization's business processes, including both internal ones, such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) , EAI (enterprise applications integration), and cost accounting, and external ones interfacing with the outside world, such as CRM (customer relations management), SCM (supply chain management), purchasing and acquisition, invoicing, and forms processing. Corporate portals have come a long way from their inception two years ago, when they only consisted of hierarchical directories of internal functional documents, internal and external Web pages of interest, and repositories of broadcast emails and management messages. As portals found value with employees, managements began adding functionality such as access to information services from the "back end," e.g., ERP, forms processing management, and financial transactions systems. A second wave occurred in early 2000 when portals were linked to large repositories of internal and external "competitive and environmental assessment" data, such as market share data, econometric data, data made available by link-throughs to analytical trade magazines and research groups, etc. The one-stop approach helped to disseminate information much more quickly to key employees and managers as well as reducing the loss of valuable data that would otherwise disappear as the physical print and film mediums on which they were rendered became faded, were scattered, were forgotten, or disintegrated from oxidation, water, light, and heat damage, or other storage accidents. One serious problem arose, however. Portals became like the family garage/attic or the kitchen 'junk drawer' - full of hard-to-access, hard-to-sort-through dissimilar databases, tables, downloads, and polyglots that were difficult to use, difficult to incorporate in a worker's reports, and difficult to relate to one another. The first attempts to merge data from the different sources involved Rube-Goldberg-like hand-coded, comma-delimited, unsupportable horrors created by consultants who were "just passing through." Along came XML. This data language permitted corporations and Government organizations the ability to mix and organize text data of vastly different types and sources. More importantly, though, vendors and data-mart sources began to make their information available in this common data-handling capability. These developments greatly improved integration and usefulness to the organizations' portals. Major portal architecture firms and providers - iPlanet, IBM, Microsoft, Sybase, Broadvision, Corechange, and Oracle - now provide both complete solution templates and tools using XML interfaces that let IT departments build and fashion their own portals with the option of adding components and adding common existing systems to feed data into the portals' architectures. The traditional 'turnkey' portal vendors, e.g., Viador, SAP, SilverStream, Hummingbird, and Plumtree, provide a complete - though proprietary - solution. While this significantly reduces up-front costs and development time for the organization, it makes back-end application integration substantially more difficult. To overcome this limitation, the turnkey portal providers have in 2001 commenced providing options to connect and link into enterprise data systems, content and services using XML, HTML, and other standard interfaces. For example, iPlanet, a joint development entity of Sun and Netscape, has provided XML-ready interface facilities based on its ECXpert 3.5 B2B systems software. Plumtree's Corporate Portal 4.5 has been equipped with "Portal Gadgets 4.5" (vendor-specific, e.g., Siebel, application programming interfaces) which are described as modular plug-in components for embedding applications operating on different servers. Plumtree's and other turnkey vendors' interface are not, as a rule, XML-ready, (e.g., Plumtree Web Mobile Devices Services which uses the Openwave Software Development Kit) but these vendors promise to make some selective XML options available soon. Linking Portals to the Mainframe Unfortunately, as of this writing, most portal products, and even a few turnkey systems, do not directly support legacy applications or interface to mainframes or midrange proprietary legacy 'minis'. While a survey by the Delphi Group found that 23% of Fortune 1000 companies had implemented some sort of portals, only 7% had portals directly linking legacy systems data. A few "Web to host" vendors supply proprietary portal products, strong on the legacy interface but inadequate for most every major portal function. Attempts to put browser faces on legacy or mainframe applications or batch-transferred data have proven unsatisfactory to corporate workers in many implementations. Even with some limited and proprietary 'fixed schema' XML interface ports, extensive middleware coding is required. Efforts are being organized at IBM, iPlanet, and other vendors to generate tools and solutions using XML to connect portal end users to appropriate stores of both structured and unstructured corporate information. By using W3C standard schema and these XML tools to enable access to collaborative data that may be stored in a data warehouses or data marts, Managers then can use legacy data analytical tools to extract data and monitor and measure trends and developments in the organization's costs, sales figures, customer base, and supply chain statistics. XML Capabilities Accelerate the B2B Marketplace Portal development by the leading vendors is endeavoring to push XML from a transaction level to a Web site model. Microsoft is nearly complete with an all-XML browser that is also keyed to fit into its "Digital Dashboard" modular snap-together (though relatively light-weight and primarily suitable for SOHO and small-to-medium businesses) Web portal components set. These integrate smoothly with Outlook, SQL Server, IIS, and MS Office, of course, which obviates quite a lot of the work involved in interfacing with large repositories of most corporate and government systems. B2B sites built with good technological foundations offering flexibility, an attractive interface, and customizable browsing and communications tools for users make the transactions happen smoothly, seamlessly, and reliably so that information flowing back to the customers ensure that the business transaction portions are completed satisfactorily. Using XML, IProcure (www.iprocure.com) works with Datastream's automated maintenance applications to automatically fill parts orders for industrial machinery and also offers a bidding system for spot buying and surplus auctions. XML messaging is the key to successful, comprehensive portal building within a large organization. Using XML, message-handling and interface servers draw in current data on a near-real-time basis from far-flung sources, legacy computers, and mid-range servers throughout the corporation or organization. XML Storage Systems and Portal Personalization Many large corporations or government entities maintain a distributed set of portals - some for the outside, customers and the public, some for internal support of workers, and often a central portal for 'triage' of users requests and needs and/or for "showing the corporate flag" or as a showcase for the company's products. In the same way that Web consumer portal sites such as Yahoo, Excite, and others are scrambling to present users with relevant and personalized content to keep them coming back, corporations and government entities are looking at ways to make their internal and external portal services worthy of repeat business. Vendors such as Yahoo, TIBCO, Inc., and Sequoia Software are among the swelling ranks of software producers to make it easy for IT managers to add personalization features to their portals. For example, TIBCO and Yahoo have pooled talents to create a customizable portal offering called Corporate Yahoo. It will enable portal owners to integrate their proprietary content and applications with Yahoo's more open and customizable content and services using TIBCO's TIB/PortalBuilder portal construction tool. This will enable corporate and government users to set personalization preferences and extend those setting into the distributed internal and satellite portals. Personalization is now seen to be a necessity for viable e-business. XML, with its abilities to self-describe data elements; select functions, toggle, and integrate Web services via tag-matching; and create and disband temporary, ad-hoc small databases per each portal visitor or user makes it indispensable in the construction of a fluid, dependable personalization management system for portals. Because of the vast amount of data flooding corporate portals, they no longer have the capability to filter information sufficiently for most end users. XML personalization tools provide the only low-cost, reliable personalization facilities meeting user expectations while averting time-forward obsolescence. The corporate portal built by New-York financial firm Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc. provides 40 allied investment bankers a corporate portal that incorporates a mix of internal information, financial data, and financial news feeds. The portal is based on Sequoia's XML Portal Server, allowing users to create personal profiles using HTML form check boxes for indicating data such as generic job title, work location, area of responsibility, and industry clients. Investment bankers and analysts can set preferences to indicate the types of information desired, quantity, timing, level of detail, and aggregation level (local-regional-national), and can even specify external information sources for 'click-through' and batch capture of information to display along the portal's native data. Beyond filtering the enormous data pools available to Lehman and affiliate employees, the XML front end provides what is termed "portal power" in enabling the drawing of different information from widely disparate sources into fast-displaying windows side-by-side with daily financial and operations data. Personalization offers further refinement in the ability to prioritize to a given analyst's specialization or primary tasks of the moment while eliminating tedious multi-step logons and printout comparisons. Similarly, portals using such features as those developed by Amazon for its retail Web portal via examination of its profile data banks can customize, prioritize, and select relevant broadcast messages, offer new or concurrent data displays or services 'guestimated' by past user patterns or server logic using XML-based profile descriptions. Portals and Networks XML messaging has uses far beyond integrating a corporation's or government entity's portal with internal servers and legacy systems. Portals can be networked globally within an organization, networked with affiliates, or networked with trading partners. While many independent B2B exchanges did not survive the financial shakeout of 2001 (where it was seen that, in many industries, neither sellers nor buyers would pay the transaction fees necessary to keep independent B2B sites open, so-called 'private' exchanges are thriving. A few remaining independent exchanges are also doing quite well, notably in the spot electric power markets and in the oil & gas industries. Pre-agreed-upon XML schema make it possible for products that are very simple in character to be traded among a set of mutually-trusted trading partners. Economists speculate that, in the future, there will be a resurgence of independent B2B sites for commodities having sufficient margin and trading among well-known industry partners. Virtually all of the current offerings of vendors supplying turnkey systems (e.g., webMethods, Inc.) and independent site tools (notably Microsoft) equip their exchange software systems with a combination of XML messaging systems for exchanges to open servers making inquiries, well-established messaging middleware for proprietary systems, and EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) for major-industry-standardized and legacy systems. The more advanced exchange architectures have a point-to-point design going through a hub. Transactions flowing from clients' the back end systems are translated on the fly to an XML-based data language using W3C generic schemas and schemas specific to the hub (when appropriate). Data models specific to the B2B portal toolmaker can be both standard or customized to trading partners, allowing them to check the supply chain for demand forecasts, scan for purchase order acknowledgements, changes, and cancellations, seek demand schedules, and tracking order and delivery progress. While standardized tags and DTDs (Document Type Definitions) for defining many specific industries and their data elements have not been fully hammered out, XML is regarded as the lingua franca of B2B portals, being far less expensive to deploy than EDI. However, since a significant number of large corporations and some government agencies have previously implemented EDI at substantial expense, most portal XML toolmakers also provide this interface. XML's characteristics relative to EDI can be illustrated as follows: * Human and machine readable * Maintainable and changeable using inexpensive script-writing or menu-selection labor * Uses existing Internet connections * Requires Web servers costing less than $4,500 * XML format easily learnable by users and employees * Optimized for easy display and use. EDI's characteristics relative to XML include: * Optimized for compressed and tokenized messaging over highly-secure, low-bandwidth, expensive communications systems * Can use value-added networks * Requires C++ programmers to develop, alter, and maintain * EDI message formats can take months to master * Machine-readable only * Requires dedicated EDI midrange systems or servers costing from $10,000 to over $100,000. An example of portal systems handling both formats well is the Mercator Integration Broker server. The server handles EDI-to-XML translation and routing. When customers transmit data that must be displayed, accessed, or statistically counted by a corporation's portals, the integration server translates them into XML, checking for errors in code, format, and sequencing. Corporate portal designers choosing to interface with industry B2B exchanges via XML see operating cost savings of up to 65% over those choosing to remain on EDI, according to a survey of KPMG Consulting Group clients. Multiple Schema Standards and Version Support XML shines where B2B processes can be identified which have not been moved online from manual or multi-step methods. These are the best suited for pure XML implementations and come out well in cost comparisons for technologies that process XML-defined content. A number of portal providers are deploying general-purpose integration servers along with a new generation of EDI-to-XML servers capable of translating standardized EDI communications in near-real-time. Representative vendors offering robust integration of EDI facilities include XMLSolutions Corp., Bluestone Software, Inc., Netfish Technologies, Inc., and Mercator Software, Inc. Because so much of the computer industry's fortunes are based on the outcome of world-recognized and subscribed-to standards, there are still powerful business groups competing for the 'final cut'. The clearest example, of course, is the divergence of the W3C industry-specific and generic business-commerce sets and the UN-backed international set known as ebXML. Since it may be some years before these data schema standards merge, portal vendors offering XML interfaces should be evaluated in part by how well they implement the multiple standards which are in practical use by their industry. Use of, and Access to, Portal Web Services XML-based portals offer organizations a far wider set of options for portal service cost reduction, fee-for-service revenue generation, and end user data access capability than those relying entirely on internal data and service sources. In the Web services model, organizations constructing portals need not buy a lot of expensive servers and software; they can rent a good deal of portal functionality from service providers on the Web. Several critical standards are just coming together to make this possible: XML, Microsoft's SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), IBM and Microsoft's UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language). SOAP is a standard for making remote-procedure-call inquiries for information and data format, as well as requests for the startup for, and handshaking-communications link to, a sought web service. It has been developed primarily by Microsoft, but has attained almost universal subscription by software vendors so far. UDDI, jointly developed by IBM and Microsoft (www.uddi.org), is essentially a specification for Web-based directories - a yellow pages of Web services, to draw an analogy. Web services can execute directly at the external source server using data supplied by the portal, or the software or execution code of the service can download and execute on a secure server at the portal's location. The approach selected can have a substantial impact on processing performance and security. Since downloaded code will likely be up-translated in to printable character sets and may be wrapped in XML, downloading of services for local execution might induce a long up-front delay, but be quite fast in performance and execution if allowed to remain on the portal 'guest' server in encrypted form. Under this scenario, the portal engaging the service would trigger a quantity-of-use message back to the service source, which would accumulate charges a-la-cart or per time period (or using whatever charging format was agreed), and the Web service provider would bill on a regular basis. The negative to that, of course, is the risk and vulnerability of an organization's portal system to any virus traveling with, or embedded in, hosted code - which is why setting aside a special server for code-hosting of (or 'scratch-pad' work by) Web services as a secure, isolated environment is a good idea. Web services intuitively seem like a good idea, but because of the same sorts of specifics that have dogged Mankind's eternal search for the perfect system of re-usable code, Web services face an uphill fight - not just on the economic/business front, but on the technology front as well. These include transaction completion algorithms (both portal and Web service provider must have an effective and efficient start-to-finish handshaking protocol to agree when a transaction-based service is executing, particularly if the Web service involves the exchange of financial or supply chain data), the cost of internal organizational programming support for maintaining interfaces, the needs of security and authentication, the guarantee of availability and reliability to perform when needed, and most difficult to overcome of all, increased interdependencies of multiple Web service providers whose code must interface and interact; dependencies on linking Web service functionality and code with the commissioning portal's software and communications suites; and (as all of us who upgrade our operating systems on a regular basis know), the bedevilment of version incompatibilities and version upgrade. XML Presentation and Distribution Options for Corporate Portals XML is not only unsurpassed in data management capabilities, but offers a wide variety of display and presentation options as well. Web portal architectures built using XML facilities can offer XHTML Web server and browser output for more desktop-publishing-like print and imaging control, easier tagging access to video, audio, 3D, and other multimedia services, Adobe Postscript and PDF printed output, and others as well. For future browsers, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6.x+, fellow traveler formatting options such as XSLT and DSSSL (see other XML articles in this issue) make display and print control easy and tight. Wireless Access to Corporate and Government Portals Lastly, connecting workers with the information they need to get the job done is what XML-messaging-based Portals are all about. For the salesman on the road, executive in a meeting at a far-flung office across the country (or the world!), or the Government administration official at the disaster site, nothing is more important that direct access to the information that's needed. Security-enhanced wireless access to corporate and internal Government portals is the next hot development phase of omni-service portals to emerge using XML as a common data transport language and standard. This opens up to use with VoiceXML for cell phones, mobile phones, and regular telephone services, as well as extended text pagers such as the Blackberry. Only XML messaging systems are widely-enough accepted and sufficiently powerful in interface implementation and connection to great numbers of computer systems and software systems to enable telephonic, pager, and wireless access to portals and electronic information sources that are online today. Copyright (c) 2003 Software Technology Magazine. All rights reserved.
