B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Integration Patterns 73
ability for the end user to explicitly state preferences and create a
personalized 'My HomePage' is an important element of the portal
concept. However, an enterprise portal will only be as good as the
structure and organization of the underlying data. Personalization services
are made possible by behavior tracking feature of portal software.
Behavior tracking records page impressions, 'click-throughs,' 'add-tos'
and removals from shopping carts and purchase and order histories, for
use in analysis of customer shopping and buying patterns.
Collaboration — Today, e-mail alerts of new content relevant to the
end user are common. Many portals integrate with existing collaboration
environments, allowing e-mail and group calendaring features from
Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange to be accessed via the portal
interface. Also common is the incorporation of collaborative features,
such as threaded discussions or chat, into the portal application itself.
Some portals focus on project management or communications between
enterprises. In these instances companies should look for portal products
that provide for group work spaces, white boarding and team document
sharing.
Directory — The portal server should provide a cross-platform, scalable
and robust common directory service such as Lightweight Directory
Access Protocol (LDAP) to address the proliferation of applicationspecific
directories.
Subscription and Notification — The portal server should offer rich
subscription and notification services. The users of the portal should be
able to subscribe for events, discussions, documents and chats.
Notifications are triggered when any underlying data for which the user
has subscribed changes and can be sent through e-mails, over PDA
devices or placed in the personal portal of the user. A very simple
example of subscription is that of an investor subscribing to news and
quotes for a particular stock on a financial portal. The investor should be
notified of news and quotes of that stock through the investor's preferred
mode, such as e-mail or message over a handheld wireless device.
Search — The portal server should offer a very powerful search facility
through which users can locate relevant information based on content,
metadata, author, date or type of information.