As corporate portal technology continues its battle to become an
enterprise mainstay, vendors are moving to deepen business process
capabilities in core portal frameworks.
The move signals an attempt to fashion the portal as a hub for
critical processes that span multiple applications and services
across the enterprise.
IBM is developing an embedded component technology for its
WebSphere Portal that is designed to deliver specific back-end
services into a portal application or a process.
Scheduled for release next year, WebSphere Portal 5.0 will include
the first set of browser-based components that allow portal users
to call basic productivity services such as spreadsheet, word
processing and presentation views into a portal-based
process.
"If you have a process where a spreadsheet needs to be called,
wherever you are in a particular process, you can have the portal
make a call to those services," said Larry Bowden, vice-president
of IBM portals. "The portal is a great mechanism to have a bunch of
services just sitting in the back waiting to be called by
particular applications."
Plumtree Software is also readying a business process engine for
release. Its Fusion software is designed to allow portal users to
create processes that span multiple systems, including portal,
content management, identity management, search and business
process automation.
The releases point towards the evolution of portals beyond mere
platforms for application viewing and access and towards the
facilitation of true cross-application integration, according to
RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady.
"Giving someone a single interface that not only aggregates
information and lets you interact with the application but also
lets those applications talk to each other within that interface
[is] really introducing a whole new value proposition," O'Grady
said. "This is getting into offering business process management
and advanced workflowlike capabilities through the portal
framework."
Another key value of process-rich portals is the ability to hide
back-end complexity from users, said Nate Root, analyst at
Forrester Research.
"The portal helps solve the chaos of tools all over the
[organisation] by putting them in a toolbox, but it is still
confusing for users because there are thousands of tools in the
box," Root said.
"The way process portals improve is to take the toolbox method and
sift out certain tools that are common in certain tasks and
organise them, wrap instructions around them and automate around
them so it is easy for employees to digest."
Portal vendors BEA Systems, Corechange and Vignette, which recently
acquired the Epicentric portal, are also staking ground in the
fledgling process-portal market.
In the next version of its WebLogic Portal due next year, BEA plans
to provide a more tightly integrated portal, business process
management (BPM) and development environment to facilitate process
development and delivery within the portal, said Pat O'Haren,
senior director of product management at BEA.
"Process portals are not just a matter of having a number of
technologies like portal and BPM available," O'Haren said. "It is
[a matter of] how you bring them together so you can easily create
those portals and deploy them."
Corechange recently rolled out software designed to let business
users create and manage automated business processes through its
Coreport portal framework. CoreProcess uses Web services standards
such as UDDI, WSDL, and Soap to map a business process and
integrate with back-end systems.
CoreProcess puts business users in control of processes by letting
them model a business process in the portal that uses and reuses
existing application infrastructure.
Vignette, meanwhile, is looking to combine its strength in content
management (CM) with Epicentric's portal framework to exert control
over content as it moves across multiple processes and
applications.
With Vignette V7's integration, aggregation, and process management
capabilities, Vignette sees a key advantage in the ability to track
process content as it flows through the organisation, said Jeff
Montgomery, senior product marketing manager at Vignette.
"The portal gives the ability to proceed though a business process,
and having a CM and process management system behind the scenes
lets you understand how the information is used, where it is in its
life cycle and how it relates to the overall business process," he
said.
BPM technology vendors are also eyeing synergistic links between
portals and business process.
Enterprise software specialist HandySoft, which touts its BizFlow
product's ability to incorporate human users into system-to-system
process flows, views the portal as a natural interface to kick off
processes.
"BPM could be the missing link in portals," said Daryn Walters,
vice-president of worldwide marketing at HandySoft. "We think that
there's a lot of synergy there."
HandySoft recently shifted its strategy to offer not only a core
BPM platform but also pre-built solutions for particular industries
such as banking and insurance. Among the components of the BizFlow
Accelerator Suite is a portal-based UI.
Fujitsu, meanwhile, is in the process of wrapping up several
disparate products, including i-Flow BPM software and its
enterprise portal, into a unified suite.
The new InterStage platform also features an application server and
content server, according to Charlie Chang, vice-president of sales
and marketing at Fujitsu.
I-Flow's process modelling interface is browser-based, enabling it
to be accessed from within a portal, an example of the kind of
synergy Fujitsu is seeking by tying its infrastructure pieces
together.
Chang also said the growing need to manage and execute the flow of
Web services would necessitate linkages between BPM, portals and
other integration pieces.
"We feel strongly that Web services orchestration layers are going
to be integral to the next wave of integration," said Chang. "And
by that, we are talking about a convergence of BPM and application
integration and portals."