Page 120 - DCAP603_DATAWARE_HOUSING_AND_DATAMINING

Data Warehousing and Data Mining

notes information behind the scenes (as in data-oriented B2B application integration). Today more
B2B information flows through user interfaces (portal-oriented B2B application integration)
than automatically through back-end integration. However, the trend is moving from portals to
real-time information exchange. We will eventually remove from the equation the end user,
who is the most obvious point of latency when considering portal-oriented B2B application
integration.

The advantages of portal-oriented integration are clear:
1. It supports a true noninvasive approach, allowing other organizations to interact with a
company’s internal systems through a controlled interface accessible over the Web.
2. It is typically much faster to implement than real-time information exchange with
back-end systems, such as the data-, method-, and application interface–oriented
approaches.
3. Its enabling technology is mature, and many examples of portal-oriented B2B application
integration exist to learn from.
4. However, there are also disadvantages to portal-level B2B application integration:

5. Information does not flow in real time and thus requires human interaction. As a result,
systems do not automatically react to business events within a trading community (such as
the depletion of inventory).

6. Information must be abstracted, most typically through another application logic layer
(such as an application server). As a result, some portal-oriented solutions actually add
complexity to the solution.
7. Security is a significant concern when enterprise and trading community data is being
extended to users over the Web.

8. The notion of POAI has gone through many generations, including single system portals,
multiple-enterprise-system portals, and now, enterprise portals.

single-system portals

Single-system portals, as you might expect are single enterprise systems that have their user
interface extended to the web (Figure 6.3).

A number of approaches exist to create a portal for a single enterprise system, including
application servers, page servers, and technology for translating simple screens to HTML.

figure 6.3: single-system portal

114 LoveLy professionaL university