Comparison ofOracle Portal toJA-SIG uPortal

Steve Perry

05/02/02

Contact: Jameson Watkins, jwatkins@kumc.edu

Note: comparisons were made using uPortal 2.0 and Oracle Portal 3.09

Part I

What is a Portal?

Background

“Although portals are the most-desired user interface in IT, the concept of portals is one of the most misunderstood by enterprise customers and the most abused by vendors.”

– Gene Phifer, Gartner Inc. Note: IGG-01092002-02

A Simple Definition

Portals wrap an organization’s documents and applications in a single web interface that provides distributed access, cross-platform usability, personalization, management, and security features.

Larger List of Portal Features• Categorization of content (taxonomy)• Content search & indexing• Content management & aggregation• Personalization• Robust application integration• Development tools• Redundancy, failover, & load balancing• Mobile/wireless support• Single Sign-On• Security

Feature - Categorization of Content

A portal should allow you to organize content and applications in different ways in order to meet the needs of various groups within your organization.

Feature - Content Search & Indexing

A portal should provide or integrate with document index and search systems so that users can quickly navigate to the information they need.

Feature - Content Management

A portal should provide content authoring systems that allow non-technical staff to create content. It should control access to content to allow only authorized users access to document repositories.

Feature - Personalization

A portal should display different views of organizational data based upon user groups. Individual users should be able to further customize their view to only display the content they use most often.

Feature - Application Integration

A portal should provide a wrapper around existing web-based applications. Aspects of integration include support for single sign-on, inclusion of external web resources, support for web services, and portal preferences that carry over into the integrated application.

Feature - Development Tools

A portal product should provide robust, standards-based development tools that allow IT staff to integrate applications and extend portal functionality.

Feature - Enterprise IT Functionality

A portal should provide standard enterprise software functionality including redundancy, failover, load balancing, and backup.

Feature - Mobile & Wireless Support

A portal should provide cross-platform functionality that allow users of different operating systems and web browsers to access the portal. This includes support for mobile phones and wireless PDAs.

Feature - Single Sign-On

A portal should integrate with or provide a single sign-on system. In other words, a portal should pull user information from a directory server such as LDAP, NDS, or Active Directory.

Feature - Security

A portal should provide robust authentication and authorization systems. Any integration with a single sign-on system should be secure and prevent the unencrypted transmission of user credentials across application domains.

Problems with Portals• There are no portal-specific standards for

integration and data exchange• Most enterprise software vendors are also

portal vendors. Instead of creating integration tools, they market their own portal product (Oracle, PeopleSoft, Blackboard, etc.)

• No portal product works straight out of the box and most require an extremely high level of skill to customize.

• The goal of portals is unification of data and processes – until integration becomes a higher priority, this ambition will not be fully realized.

Part I - SummaryPortals …

• wrap applications in portlets or channels to integrate them into a unified web framework

• organize and manage static web content• allow a user to customize her view of the

information resources in the organization• provide a framework for web applications with

features like integrated security and single sign-on

• are not as easy to integrate and deploy as marketing material would have you believe

Part II

Deploying a Portal at KUMC

Tasks• Integrate portal authentication / single sign-on system

with NDS• Import group information into the portal• Create customized portal layouts for different groups at

KUMC (students, faculty, staff, etc.)• Create, import, or customize channels or portlets to

display KUMC static data (portions of KUMC web site)• Integrate custom KUMC web applications with the portal

(phone book, user password change, HR forms, etc.)• Integrate 3rd party applications (PeopleSoft, Data

Warehouse, GroupWise, course management system, etc.)

Challenges• Integration with NDS is essential – our policy that NDS

require SSL connections makes integration with it more challenging

• Finding a portal that can eventually support most or all of our systems (PeopleSoft, data warehouse, GroupWise, course management system) will be a real challenge due to the lack of portal standards

• A portal aggregates content and applications. In order to develop one different groups (Internet Development, Data Integration, Networking, Net Learning) will have to work together very closely.

Part III

Introduction to uPortal

What is uPortal

• Developed under JA-SIG (Java in Administration Special Interest Group) by institutions of higher-education including Princeton, Yale, and University of Delaware

• An open source, open standards effort built upon Java, XML, XSL, JSP, J2EE, and JDBC

• More of a framework for building custom portals than a proper portal

uPortal Design Philosophy

Enable universities to rapidly incorporate their web-based content into a single point-of-presence. Provide the ability for universities to integrate web-based applications through an open Java framework built on accepted web standards.

uPortal Architecture

DB

ExternalWeb

Resources

Web Browser

ApacheJava Servlet

Engine

ServletConnector uPortal

Framework

JavaChannels

uPortal InterfaceFor an average user, uPortal has two types

of screens:

Portal view: Shows a user’s customized view of the portal including layout regions, banner, tabs, channels and channel controls

Maximized channel view: Shows the currently selected channel maximized so it occupies the entire browser

uPortal Interface

Tab

ChannelControls

Channel

Adding Content to uPortalIn uPortal all content must be encapsulated

in a channel. Out of the box, uPortal supports:

• Image• Inline Frame• RSS (Rich Site Summary)• Simple XML Transformation• WebProxy

Adding Applications to uPortalIf you need to add more than content to

uPortal you can:

• Create a Custom Java channel that is loaded into the uPortal framework on the application server

• Create a Java Servlet that outputs XML and install it as an XML channel

uPortal Integration OptionsTo integrate an existing web-based

application into uPortal:

• If the application outputs XHTML, integrate it as a Web-Proxy channel

• If the application outputs XML, integrate it as an XML channel

• For custom/complete integration, write a Java wrapper around the application that calls methods on the uPortal framework

3rd Party ChannelsThere are at least 30 3rd party channels

available for uPortal.

• Free channels can be acquired from JA-SIG

• Commercial channels can be purchased from Interactive Business Solutions (IBS)

Authentication & Authorization in uPortal

Authentication is performed against an LDAP server or database

Channels can benefit from single sign-on if designed to use uPortal’s security framework

Basic permissions include:• Subscribe to/Execute channel• Modify layout• Administer channels

uPortal Strengths• Free• Default user interface is very intuitive• Strong support for industry standard web and

distributed application technologies (J2EE, XML, XSL)

• Built-in support for RDS/RSS channels• Open source code allows more options for

customization and integration• Support for multiple databases, application

servers, and web servers• User interface is very easy to customize

More uPortal Strengths• Expert developer community (you can talk

directly to the original developers)• Vendor independent single sign-on• Quick personalization by user or group• Can be wrapped in SSL (with a web-proxy)• Can be made to support mobile and wireless

browsers as well as new desktop browsers• Is already in use at many universities

uPortal Weaknesses• Open source products don’t have the same

support options as commercial software (though one consulting firm close to uPortal offers support plan)

• Differences in deployment platforms make it hard to evaluate uPortal’s scalability

• Developers require a very high level of expertise in Java, XML, XSL, SQL, and HTML

• Redundancy, failover and backup capabilities are not integrated with uPortal (but can be configured by a DBA and sysadmin)

Part III - SummaryuPortal …

• is open standards and open source. This makes it maximally flexible in terms of customization and integration but also requires a high level of developer expertise

• limited options for vendor support• can be very inexpensive depending upon

deployment specifics• is already in use by a many universities with

more in planning stages

Part IV

Introduction to Oracle Portal

What is Oracle Portal

• Developed by Oracle to offer a portal product that leverages their 9i Application Server and 9i Database products

• Offers both traditional portal and portal framework features

Oracle Portal Design Philosophy

Enable owners of the Oracle database product to efficiently leverage their knowledge of Oracle technologies into a single portal that provides customizable access to resources in the Oracle database as well as traditional web-based applications

Oracle Portal Architecture

Portal NodeOracle DB

ExternalWeb

Resources

Web Browser

ApacheJava Servlet

Engine

ServletConnector

modPL/SQL

ParallelPage

Engine

JavaPortlets

Oracle Portal InterfaceFor an average user, Oracle Portal has two

types of screens:

Page view: Shows a user’s customized view of the portal including layout regions, banner, tabs, and portlets. Might also include links to sub-pages.

Folder view: Shows a shared piece of content called a folder. Folders are mainly for displaying static content but can also include portlets

Oracle Portal Interface

Web Browser

Tab

Portlet

Banner

Adding Content to Oracle PortalExcept for when working with Folders, all

Oracle Portal content must be encapsulated in a portlet.

Oracle Portal contains several example portlets that can be extended to incorporate basic HTML and XML content.

Adding Application to Oracle PortalIf you need to add more than content to

Oracle Portal you can:

• Pull simple data from the Oracle Database by creating PL/SQL portlets

• Create custom Java portlets as JSP, Servlets or classes using the PDK

3rd Party PortletsThere are hundreds of commercial 3rd party

portlets available for Oracle Portal

• The Content section of the Portal Catalog on the Oracle Portal Studio site includes many portlet service and content providers

• These portlets are 3rd party commercial software products with their own pricing and licensing terms.

Authentication & Authorization in Oracle PortalAuthentication is handled by the Login Server and is

part of the single sign-on capabilities of Oracle Portal

The Login Server can be configured to use LDAP as a user data repository (originally only Oracle Internet Directory was supported, but there is a new module on the OTN site)

Documentation does not mention SSL LDAP connections

Oracle Portal Strengths• Many technical support options exist• The OTN and Portal Studio websites provide

developers with a great deal of documentation and access to developer message boards

• It’s easy to share distributed applications across instances of the Oracle Portal

• Strong support for industry standard web and distributed application technologies through the Portlet Development Kit (PDK-Java)

• Some Oracle database management tasks can be performed through the portal

More Oracle Portal Strengths• Oracle Reports can easily be displayed as

portlets• Support for 3rd party enterprise content

management systems including Interwoven and FatWire’s Update Engine

• If Oracle Portal continues to gain in market share, more 3rd party integration options could be developed (for instance WebCT’s Vista product could be expanded to support Portal)

Oracle Portal Weaknesses• Authentication system may not be able to

connect to an LDAP server via SSL• The difference between pages and folders is

very confusing to developers and end-users. • The customization interface used by users to

change their layout is very confusing …• Content management and page design/layout

features are very limited. For any real deployment, page designs will have to be created from scratch in PL/SQL

More Oracle Portal Weaknesses• It may be difficult to modify the standard

login/logout/session timeout screens • Initial setup of the default layout, default

portlet set, and authentication systems will require extensive modification to the out-of-the-box system

• Simple PL/SQL cannot really be used by most end users to generate reports because even the simple web interface requires a deep understanding of the database schema and a familiarity with Oracle

Suggestions for a KUMC Oracle Portal deployment

• KUMC should consider creating simple reports as standard JSPs that could be used outside of the portal

• Custom KUMC portlets should be served from a single provider to avoid overhead

• IDU staff will need training in Oracle database administration as well as PL/SQL development

• Avoid the use of folders when designing portal layouts

• Restrict end-users from accessing page design features (not page layout)

Part IV - SummaryOracle Portal…

• is exceptionally powerful• is less flexible than uPortal but has many more

features and can make some Oracle related tasks easier

• presents the promise of easy integration with some 3rd party software systems (for a price)

• is difficult to customize and configure and suffers from some usability issues

• may have problems integrating with NDS

Part V

Comparison of uPortal and Oracle Portal Features

(See spreadsheet)

More Information

uPortal:• http://www.ja-sig.org/portal• http://my.kumc.edu

Oracle Portal:• http://www.oracle.com/ip/deploy/ias/portal/index.html?consider

ation.html• http://portalstudio.oracle.com