Portal logical architecture
How to structure architectural elements needed to support an online community
An exciting compelling content experience is about enabling your producers to be able to quickly add, remove and re-gig content, design, navigation, and to be able to do with it with the complete confidence that they are not going to break the portal.
Common features are
- Bespoke hand crafted applications that provide features such as “Pay My Bill” or a view on some data that is specific to your portal.
- Feeds from other sites, systems or legacy equipment
- Identity systems, sometimes called SSO
- Forums allowing visitors to contribute to the site .. and become members
Importantly you also need a knowledge management system.
The knowledge management system could as simple as an SVN instance or file share. It could also be as complex as a sharepoint installation.
What brings the whole site together and unlocks your producers creative ability is the CMS. Back in the late 90′s every company had its own CMS. Alot of them are still with us, quite a few have been productised. Whatever happens, dont make your own till you tried the free ones on the market.
As we saw with the environments success is all about the flow of contents and features. This is why it is essential that your knowledge systems are abstracted from your publication systems.
The collection, storage and efficient retrieval of your companies knowledge is very different when compared to presenting a shop front or community portal to the public. Just because you have similar technical requirements it does not mean that both needs should be for filled by the same system.
Remember what websites were like 6 years ago, what do you think they are going to be like in 6 years time? You need to abstract knowledge management from publication so that you can change the publication part as you market changes.
