Experiences With Portal Infrastructure

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Experiences With Portal Infrastructure
Alan Cook acook_at_ufl.edu
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Major Focus of the Presentation

• The primary focus will be on the interoperability
  of the portal with your backend systems
• There are many pieces to this puzzle. The most
  critical of these will be covered. Some of these
  issues have been discussed before in the other
  presentations. Those addressed here will all come
  together to make your portal a very nice tool for
  your users or just another application for which
  they will need to remember a userid and password.

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The Pieces

• Establishing both, short term and long term
  target users
• Determine authentication mechanism
• Using centralized roles/rules to access data in
  disparate places

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The Pieces

• Establishing trusted, secure connections to
  external processes and data
• Enabling access to external applications
• Resources for the actual implementation of the
  portal
• Other issues relating to presenting these data on
  a portal

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Target Users for the Portal

• Who do you need use a portal?
• This is for others to discuss but it is important
  to know because it will/should influence the
  infrastructure needs
• Students/patients
• Hard to limit browser type
• Somewhat limited application set
• Staff/care providers
• Not quite as hard to limit browser type
• Very diverse application set

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Target Users for the Portal

• Other issues as well
• Scalability needs
• Password Management
• Change frequently or change infrequently
• Ability to change password
• Ability to restore password
• Create new userids
• Multiple authentication mechanisms
• Multiple authorization mechanisms

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Establishing Trusted and Secure Authentication
Methodologies

• How do you know who the user is?
• Single signon - crosswalk database
• Lots of variability on this issue

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Establishing Trusted and Secure Authentication
Methodologies

• Preferably the portal will work with already
  established authentication methodologies
• Authenticating the user using RACF
• Authenticating the user to an externally supplied
  application running in another CICS region
• Using NDS/Active Directory authentication
• Using LDAP and Kerberos
• Using user an externally supplied application
  like a PIN routine
• Authenticating the user at their home institution
  in the state Florida - FACTS

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Establishing Trusted and Secure Authentication
Methodologies

• Very important to position yourself to be able to
  use the new technologies when they are matured
  and/or agreed upon

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What Is the User Allowed to Do?

• Combining roles into fewest possible number of
  databases
• Trusted relationships for role passing
• Rules that apply to information retrieval
• Common directory across the enterprise

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Using Centralized Roles to Access Data in
Disparate Places

• Using data from disparate sources
• Mainframe
• RDS report generation
• Proprietary CICS generated data
• Network drives
• Java i.E..XAC
• Java dynamic PDF creation
• Report access

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Using Centralized Roles to Access Data in
Disparate Places

• External proprietary data bases
• Visual info imaging index queries
• Visual info images
• Other sites
• FACTS - retrieving real-time data from all over
  the state of Florida

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Enabling the Existence of Portal Friendly
Applications

• Participating in authentication
• Cross walk database to store multiple userids
• Proprietary
• Kerberos
• Browser cookies
• Sharing state management
• Enabling external state management
• Coordinating logoffs

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Enabling the Existence of Portal Friendly
Applications

• Sharing context (mainly for staff and care
  providers)
• Notification of when the student/patient being
  viewed has changed

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Resources Required to Produce and Retrieve Needed
Data

• Current skill sets
• Of those who produce the data
• Of those who need the data
• Current availability
• Of those who produce the data
• Of those who need the data

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Resources Required to Produce and Retrieve Needed
Data

• Current hardware capabilities
• Must allow for heavy peak loads
• Must allow for large number of users
• Reliable platform (always available)
• Of those who produce the data
• Of those who need the data
• Current software capabilities
• Of those who produce the data
• Of those who need the data

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Other Issues Relating to Presenting These Data

• EDI systems vs. XML based communications
• Speed vs. standards based processing
• Development speed or delivery speed

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Guidelines When Evaluating a Portal Infrastructure

• What do you need on the portal?
• Need to decide on your business needs
• Form vs. Function
• Some infrastructure goals should be
• SPA - single point of access
• CARR - condensing authorization roles and rules
• Simplified content management

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EAGLE is a product of
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Wrap-up

• Questions?