B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

74 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
Security — The portal server should provide a comprehensive security
architecture that encompasses access control, cryptography-based privacy,
digital certificates, secure socket layer (SSL) and user authentication.
Connection layer
The portal server has to provide a connection layer through which
structured and unstructured data can be retrieved from data marts, data
warehouses, databases, e-mails, internal applications, legacy systems
and external customer feeds.
3.3.3. Portal oriented integration and B2Bi
Portal oriented integration is not as complex and expensive as other
integration patterns. Several small to medium size companies are using
this integration pattern for B2Bi to avoid the much sophisticated and
involved integration of back-end systems. Through portals, a company
can provide a Web interface to their key business systems such as ERP,
CRM and other legacy systems.
Portal oriented integration fails in most cases to achieve true B2B
integration. Most portals do not have sophisticated business process
management tools built in which the transfer of data based on business
events can automate.
We have covered all the integration challenges and their workarounds
for vertical portals in the chapter on B2B e-marketplaces and
collaborative networks.
3.4. Application Oriented Integration
Application oriented integration involves the direct application-toapplication
(A2A) integration of cross-organization and cross-platform
application over a network. This type of integration is usually
synchronous in nature. Application oriented integration can range from
custom code (COBOL, C++, Java) to application programming interfaces
(APIs) to remote procedure calls (RPCs) to distributed middleware such