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 TEST CENTER Built on a firm foundation By James R. Borck December 21, 2001 FACILITATING B-TO-B relationships across a web of supply chains and partners isn't easy, and many organizations have turned to e-business portals in search of a solution. A myriad of issues, including system integration, security, real-time messaging, and application accessibility, confront early adopters looking to align their business strategy with a portal implementation.
Portals have come a long way since bursting on to the scene just four years ago, and one of the latest to offer noteworthy advances is the WebLogic Portal 4.0 from BEA Systems. The Java-based WebLogic portal framework is an enterpriseworthy implementation replete with capabilities for Web services and portlet integration, content management, and personalization, as well as security and permissions-based accessibility. Most importantly, WebLogic Portal includes solid administration capabilities that reduce the complexity and cost of managing larger, multichannel portals. And it supplies superb tools for mapping business logic and process flows that don't require programming expertise, so they can be used by line-of-business personnel and not merely the technically savvy. BEA WebLogic Portal 4.0 is worthy of serious consideration by larger companies in need of a broad array of portal features aimed toward improving employee productivity and reducing the cost of partner integration, while streamlining management of large portal farms. Although WebLogic Portal 4.0 is decidedly focused on b-to-c relationship building, with numerous tools for catalog development and campaign management, its solid application integration capabilities make this package readily extendible to b-to-b integrations as well. Sturdy stock WebLogic Portal is built on BEA's J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) 1.3-compliant WebLogic Server 6.1, offering solid performance and reliability along with provisions for scalability and fault tolerance. We were able to install the WebLogic Server, WebLogic Portal, and E-business Control Center without incident, and we had the portal's administrative GUI active and tuning run-time parameters in no time. The E-business Control Center provides even nontechnical administrators with the ability to modify the functionality and design of portal components. Line-of-business employees gain direct control over defining access privileges, building conditional branches for custom content delivery, and even designing the look and feel of the site. We were able to make use of the Webflow and Pipeline components for defining the flow of Web page logic and mapping business logic, respectively, through a graphical interface. Topping the list of niceties, however, is the ability to establish unified views over systems and users, which greatly reduces administrative overhead, and the ability to delegate management responsibility and access across the organization. Other improvements to crow about include hot deployment of EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) and features such as the easy integration of a staging server are beneficial to testing the wings on new content and application functionality before kicking them out of the nest. The majority of features in WebLogic Portal 4.0 are geared toward streamlining b-to-c customer interactions. Facilities for building and managing product catalogs, customer registration and self-service opportunities, and strong order management and processing capabilities are sure to improve efficiency in managing b-to-c customer relationships. However, LDAP integration and rules-based personalization and authorization capabilities help to secure access and lend efficiency when adding new online partners in b-to-b channels as well. Furthermore, the extensibility of the BEA platform through additional packages such as WebLogic Integration 2.1, also recently released, makes it easy to fortify b-to-b integration with EDI (electronic data integration) and messaging functionality. As portals increasingly rely on the underlying application, their effectiveness will require solid application server underpinnings. Starting at $57,000 per CPU, BEA WebLogic Portal 4.0 doesn't come cheap. But although the high cost should give you pause, WebLogic Portal provides a solid e-business platform. It not only gives employees and partners the tools they need to work efficiently and productively in today's distributed environment but also supplies companies with a means of capturing and retaining value in ongoing corporate-customer relationships. Test Center Managing Analyst James R. Borck covers e-business solutions for enterprise computing. Reach him at james_borck@infoworld.com.
 RELATED SUBJECTS  Enterprise ApplicationsSPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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