Townsend provides portal development teams with a working developer's overview of the concepts, technologies, and products used in building successful corporate portals. Readers learn how to create a portal architecture based on Microsoft .NET and integrate multiple server technologies and components to create a powerful portal solution.

Not even the implosion of the dot com bubble was enough to derail the proliferation of Internet technology and the move toward "e-business" that has extended to nearly every industry in the developed world. Few organizations are content to tolerate the isolation of applications into separate "silos" of information, or poor interoperability among their software solutions. The portal has been held up as a means to achieve better application integration and provide a consistent user interface both inside and outside the enterprise.Companies and other organizations need to take a broader look at their portal strategy to make the various elements of their architecture work together. This is a pivotal time not only in the emergence of new technology but the convergence of technologies toward open standards and enhanced interoperability. Audience and Goals for this BookThe portal market is an amorphous and elusive target, with a small number of universal standards and a large population of vendors attempting to define in ways that are most beneficial for their product sales. The first generation of portal books were devoted to explaining why portals were such a good idea, and how they would benefit their users. The bulk of these were devoted to enterprise portals, and to extolling the virtues of extensible markup language (XML). Others were devoted to explaining how to use a single product with portal in the name, such as Oracle Portal or Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, but only covered a small portion of the features that an organization might reasonably want to include in a portal. While these works are helpful and necessary, the theoretical portal books don't go far enough in explaining how to implement their solutions. Some of the theories that were expounded in early portal books were not borne out by experience in the software market. The single product books can go no further than the products themselves, leaving you with half or less of the solution you had in mind.This book is a practical guide for developers and information technology managers, conveying what elements make up a portal, and how to construct these elements using the Microsoft development platform. It is a combination of introductions to key concepts, suggestions for portal planning, and limited detailed technical instruction by way of examples that relate to all the main portal elements. Most chapters consist of two parts, one describing what to build, and the second showing how to build it.The most important section for managers is the first five chapters. These first chapters address the portal from the perspective of a user and provide valuable background that can help the manager form reasonable project expectations. This section is not focused on individual products and features. Indeed, portals with the functionality described here could be implemented with a number of different technologies and products than are offered in the second part of the book.Developers will spend more time with the rest of the book to understand how to fill the gap between products and where each portal service belongs. They will want to review the early chapters to understand the vision for a .NET portal, and to ensure that the IT manager doesn't know anything that they don't. These later chapters do not attempt to restate the vast amount of information in help files and product documentation for the products used in our examples. Rather, our goal is to create a higher level overview that encompasses multiple products and puts each product and feature in its proper place. We also highlight best practices and hints that are not found in the product documentation but can save many hours of work or frustration. Expectations for this BookNo single product provides the infrastructure and tools needed to build a full featured portal. Therefore we have had to include a number of server and development pro