By Rob Helm [Bio]
Posted: Oct. 08, 2001

• Illustration: A Simple Corporate Portal Page
• Illustration: How Dashboards Work
• Sidebar: Outlook Control Enables Remote Takeover
• Illustration: Office XP Developer Dashboard Project

Corporate portals—modular, customizable Web sites that provide a single point of entry to information and applications—can pay off for companies by reducing the amount of time users spend searching for the documents and application data they need. The "digital dashboard" technology that ships in SharePoint Portal Server and Office XP can provide a quick, cost-effective way to build corporate portals. However, Microsoft's recent acquisition of a content management product and impending changes in its Web development and database software have clouded the future of its digital dashboard technology. Companies should limit the amount of resources they devote to that technology until its future becomes clearer.

Corporate Portal Background

While the term corporate portal is broad, it frequently means a intranet or extranet Web site that provides a single, well-organized starting point for the corporate information needed by a particular user or group. A corporate portal ideally provides quick access to any resource a particular user needs to get work done, whether it's a document on a file server, a "self-service" front end to the human resources system, a report generated from a company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) system, or traffic information from a public Web site. (For an example, see the illustration "A Simple Corporate Portal Page".)

Products Provide Customization, Modularity, Indexing

Many vendors other than Microsoft offer products for creating and hosting corporate portals, including Hummingbird, InfoImage, Plumtree, and Viador. While each portal product offers a different feature set, Microsoft sees several capabilities as essential:

Customization. A corporate portal offers custom home pages that provide quick access to the most important documents and applications for particular classes of users, such as employees in a specific region or salespeople. Some portal products enable end users to further personalize their view of the portal by adding or removing content, similar to the personalization features of public Web portals like Yahoo or MSN.

Modular content and application access. To support customization, corporate portal products provide a way to package content and applications in components that can easily added to or removed from a portal. Whether known as "gadgets" (Plumtree), "portlets" (Viador), or "Web Parts" (Microsoft), portal components can provide access to specific application data (such as a customer directory from a CRM system), or to specific external content sources (such as MSN news). Corporate portal vendors offer predefined components, but also give developers APIs and tools for building custom components.

Indexing and search. Corporate portals make it easy for users to find content on particular topics, using some combination of hierarchical topic indexes and keyword searches on full-text indexes. Indexed content need not reside on the portal, or be in a standard Web format like HTML; some form of "crawling" utility aggregates content by periodically visiting and indexing selected intranet sites, databases, file servers, and external Web sites.

Because corporate portals provide access to sensitive company documents and applications, most users will sign in to a corporate portal rather than use it anonymously. Corporate portal products all provide security features for authenticating users and for controlling their access to content on the portal. For example, keyword searches on a portal will only return hits on documents that the user has permission to read.

Why Build Corporate Portals?

Major companies, such as Ford, Motorola, and Procter & Gamble, have invested in corporate portals because they reduce the time employees spend looking for information. By pulling together documents from the company's file shares and data from applications and arranging it for particular users or groups, a corporate portal can help new employees get up to speed quickly and help experienced employees get tasks done more quickly. "People use them to give staff very fast access to information that was hard to get to before," says Ralph Burleson, enterprise collaboration practice director at systems integrator Avanade. A frequent focus of corporate portals are salespeople, who benefit from quick access to CRM systems, sales data, product information, and competitive analysis.

Microsoft also views corporate portals as a way to help users—especially Office users—locate and work together on shared documents. That view comes from experience: numerous organizations within Microsoft use portals to prepare specifications, disseminate announcements, and deliver product information to other groups and partners.

Microsoft's Corporate Portal Architecture

Microsoft's corporate portal efforts have revolved around its digital dashboard architecture, first introduced in 1999. The digital dashboard architecture specifies the basic services and protocols that drive a portal and defines a modular format called Web Parts for portal content. A browser add-in called the Digital Dashboard Service Component (DDSC) enables developers to create ensembles of Web Parts that mimic the features of a desktop graphical user interface, such as persistent settings and immediate response to mouse clicks.

Three-Tier Architecture

Microsoft's digital dashboard architecture defines three major elements for operating a portal:

• The client is a browser such as Internet Explorer (IE) or a browser-enabled application (frequently Outlook).
• The factory is a server-side component that runs on an Internet Information Server (IIS) Web server and generates portal pages (called dashboards) for the client to display.
• The store is a database that holds the settings and content for each dashboard.

The client retrieves dashboards from the factory via the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the standard Web protocol. The factory accesses the store through a standard protocol called WebDAV (also known as HTTP-DAV), an extension of HTTP that provides the ability to write to files and folders on a Web site and store application-specific properties with each file or folder.

Dashboards are represented in the store as folders; each folder has properties that determine how the factory displays the corresponding dashboard (e.g., what font it uses). Users view a dashboard by navigating to the URL of its corresponding folder. Dashboards can have a single page or link to a hierarchy of "subdashboards" stored as subfolders of the parent dashboard.

Web Parts for Modular Content

Dashboard content is packaged in Web Parts, which are XML files that conform to a Web Part schema published by Microsoft. Web Parts can contain static content (HTML or XML) or scripts that execute under control of the Active Server Pages engine on the Web server and generate content. Web Parts can also pull content from external content servers, such as other Web servers or applications (e.g., ERP systems) that the Web Part accesses through an API.

When the user views a dashboard, the factory on the Web server extracts the content from all Web Parts on that dashboard, pastes the content together into a single Web page, and sends that page to the client. (See the illustration "How Digital Dashboards Work".) Web Parts, like the dashboards that contain them, are kept in the digital dashboard store, with each Web Part represented as a file in a dashboard folder. Like the folders, each file has properties; Web Part properties contain its content along with settings that tell the factory how to display the Web Part (e.g., whether it is currently visible or hidden on the dashboard, whether its content is static or script).

Web Parts can come from Microsoft and ISVs or be custom-built. (For examples, see "A Simple Corporate Portal Page".) ISVs such as Avanade, Business Objects, Crystal Decisions, FileNet, and SAS have created Web Parts. Some third-party portal products support Microsoft's Web Parts standard; for example, Plumtree portals can incorporate Web Parts. Support from third-party portal vendors has given ISVs additional incentives to produce Web Parts. "We don't have to worry as much about the portal vendor with Web Parts," says Peder Ekstrand, CEO of Decision Support Panel, which has developed Web Parts for viewing and charting data from data warehouses.

Browser Component Ties Web Parts Together

Most Web Parts generate content that includes components such as scripts or ActiveX controls that execute on the client. The DDSC enables dashboards with client-side components to behave somewhat like traditional desktop applications.

Among other things, the DDSC enables client-side components to communicate with one another. For example, a map component produced by one Web Part could communicate with a chart component produced by a second Web Part, allowing a user to chart data for a region by clicking the region on the map. The DDSC also enables client-side components to save and retrieve information in the store, enabling, for example, a chart component of a Web Part to save the last chart viewed and then call up that chart when the user returns.

Digital Dashboard Products

Microsoft offers three products for corporate portals on digital dashboard technology: SharePoint Portal Server for hosting the portals, Office 2000/XP (particularly Outlook) for interacting with them, and Office XP Developer for building them. These products are supplemented by the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit, which enables developers to construct corporate portals with digital dashboard technology on other types of servers (such as SQL Server). Exchange 2000 also has some potential to host corporate portals built with digital dashboard technology, but Microsoft is no longer recommending it for that role.

SharePoint Portal Server

SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) is Microsoft's product for document search and indexing. It also provides document management, including document check-in/check-out, versioning, and workflow. (See "'Tahoe Brings Document Management to the Masses" on page 3 of the Dec. 2000 Update and "SharePoint Portal Server Ships" on page 7 of the June 2001 Update.)

Installing SPS creates a Web site (called the dashboard site) that enables users to access most SPS features using only a browser. Developers can create corporate portals by customizing the dashboard site by adding or removing Web Parts and changing display settings. Developers and end users with the appropriate permissions can also add "personal dashboards" to the site. These customization functions can be done from a browser.

SPS ships with a collection of Web Parts for locating and working on documents. (See the example portal page.) An online gallery at the SPS product site provides Web Parts for other tasks, such as viewing customer records in Great Plains accounting systems or preparing expense reports in SAP. The gallery also provides tools and components for creating new Web Parts. One of the most useful is a downloadable Security Broker component for implementing single sign-on, enabling a user to simultaneously log on to all back-end applications accessed through a dashboard. (For relevant URLs and a white paper that explains the Security Broker, see the "Resources" section below.)

SPS portals support down-level browsers, back to IE 4.01 and Netscape 4.75, and might support other browsers that support HTML 3.2. However, users need IE 5 or higher for some functions, such as changing the layout of Web Parts in a dashboard. IE 5 also automatically signs users in to SPS portals with their Windows credentials. Users of Netscape or older IE browsers, in contrast, must sign on separately to the portal after logging on to the operating system.

The SPS store indexes all portal content for keyword search, and users can employ document management features such as versioning and workflow to control publication of content to an SPS portal. Administrators control dashboard customization and access to content using SPS security roles and privileges; for example, only users with "coordinator" privileges can remove Web Parts from a dashboard. The SPS store is based on the Web Storage System, which is also used in Exchange 2000.

Office and Outlook

Office XP, the latest version of Microsoft's business desktop applications suite, includes a few features that support corporate portals built with SPS. In particular, a portal user with "coordinator" privileges on an SPS dashboard can post a Web Part to the dashboard that encloses an Office document, such as an Excel spreadsheet. (See "A Simple Corporate Portal Page".) Oddly enough, Office 2000 can also post documents as Web Parts to SPS dashboards (although the SPS team says it will not support Office 2000 in this capacity).

Outlook has been frequently used as a dashboard client to support users who "live in e-mail." Outlook 2000 and XP provide a number of useful features for integrating dashboards with personal or public folders; however, IE and Outlook must have the latest patches and be carefully configured to avoid some nasty security threats. (See "Outlook Control Enables Remote Takeover".)

Office XP Developer

Microsoft is promoting Office XP Developer, an integrated development environment (IDE) for applications that call on Office XP functions, as a tool for building corporate portals with SPS.

The IDE enables developers to create and modify custom Web Parts and dashboards. Tools include editors for the HTML, XML, and script (useful for creating Web Parts); a property pane for inspecting and editing Web Part and dashboard properties; and a Dashboard Project extension to the Office Developer "Solution Explorer" that enables a developer to deploy and track Web Parts and dashboards in a store. (See the illustration "Office XP Developer Dashboard Project".)

Digital Dashboard Resource Kit

Now in its third version, this free, unsupported resource kit delivers tools and components for building portals on SQL Server 2000. This resource kit was Microsoft's principal offering for building corporate portals prior to the release of SPS, and it has been used in production projects and Microsoft's own showcase "Physician Digital Dashboard" for healthcare providers. Now that SPS is out, Microsoft might not devote much time to maintaining this resource kit

However, portals created on SQL Server with the resource kit have some features not yet implemented in SPS. In particular, they provide better personalization; users can make changes to a shared dashboard (such as hiding Web Parts) without affecting other users of the dashboard. With SPS, in contrast, any changes one user makes to a shared dashboard affect all other users. Developers can custom-code individual Web Parts to provide personalization in SPS, but most of the bundled Web Parts of SPS don't offer this capability.

The resource kit includes extensions to the Office XP Developer IDE that enable it to work against SQL Server-based portals. However, Office XP's features for creating dashboards and posting Web Parts don't work with SQL Server.

Many Web Parts (including all those in Microsoft's gallery) will work in both SPS and SQL Server dashboards. The CD-ROM version of the resource kit bundles a Web Part Development Kit, which includes a snapshot of the Web Part gallery and white papers and tools for Web Part developers. The Web Part Development Kit can be downloaded separately from the resource kit. (See the "Resources" section below.)

Developers might also want to investigate the previous (2.2) version of the resource kit, which allows developers to use Visual InterDev to develop Web Parts (instead of Office XP Developer) and enables the Windows 2000 Server file system and Exchange 2000 Server public folders to act as dashboard stores. Neither feature is available in the current version of the resource kit.

Exchange Not Recommended as Host

Microsoft had several reasons to remove Exchange 2000 support from the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit. First, Office XP Developer includes updated versions of all Exchange components formerly delivered in the kit. In fact, the Office XP and Office XP Developer features that work with SPS work equally well with Exchange 2000 SP1.

However, Microsoft is now recommending SPS instead of Exchange for portal hosting. Unlike Exchange, SPS automatically indexes content and provides change control (check-in/check-out, versioning). In addition, it provides many useful Web Parts for search and document management. As a result, portals designed to support document sharing and authoring will require less custom code on SPS than on Exchange. (See "Competing Products Create Collaboration Confusion" on page 3 of the Aug. 2001 Update.)

Avoiding custom code is important, because impending changes in Microsoft's corporate portal strategy could limit the lifetime of that code.

Corporate Portal Strategy Changing

Microsoft will continue to enhance the corporate portal features of SPS and Office. Likely near-term enhancements for SPS will be greater scalability, simpler configuration of proxy settings, and easier setup of authentication for non-Windows clients. SPS might also get personalization features to match those of the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit. Future versions of Office and SPS are also likely to clean up integration bugs, such as the error messages SPS users receive when trying to view properties of Office-generated Web Parts in Windows Explorer.

Over the next two years, however, the company's corporate portal strategy will shift as it assimilates the recently acquired Content Management Server product and rolls new Web server and database components into that product and the digital dashboard technology. These changes have important implications for portals built on those products today.

Content Management Server Supports Complex Sites

Content Management Server (CMS), Microsoft's product for hosting and managing publication of content to complex Web sites, could play a role in the company's future corporate portal strategy. (See "Microsoft to Acquire NCompass Labs" on page 3 of the July 2001 Update.) As many as 50% of CMS customers are using it for intranets and extranets. Microsoft itself uses CMS to manage MSWeb, a home page for the company's employees and partners. SPS provides only search and indexing functions on the site, although it hosts many of the departmental portals that MSWeb links to.

CMS and SPS can be used together in companies like Microsoft because they provide complementary functions. Strictly speaking, CMS isn't a portal product: it enables non-technical users to author Web content and helps administrators manage formatting and publication of that content, but it doesn't provide all the essential portal features, particularly modular application access and indexing of data and documents from across the organization. SPS can be combined with CMS to provide some of those features on a portal.

In the near term, SPS and CMS will probably evolve to work better together. For example, a future SPS might enable users to automatically convert Office documents into Web content formats and move them into a CMS-managed publication process. This would allow, for example, a company's marketing group to use an internal SPS-based portal to work on a white paper, then feed that paper into CMS for publication on the company's public Web site.

In the long term, however, SPS and CMS are unlikely to continue strictly in parallel. The two products use different technologies: digital dashboards and the Web Storage System for SPS; ASP and a SQL Server database for CMS. They also serve different markets: portals for SPS, all types of complex Web sites for CMS. However, they have to do some of the same things. Both host Web sites; both provide change control (check-in/check-out, versioning, and approval routing) for site content; and both deliver customized content. So while the products could well remain separate, they might eventually draw on a single, shared infrastructure for the functions both need. At least some of that infrastructure might come with the operating system. "You'll see file services in Windows evolve to take on more workflow characteristics, so you can see advanced properties and check-in/check-out on documents," suggests Eric Rudder, Microsoft vice president of technical strategy and an important advisor to Bill Gates.

ASP.NET Outdates Web Parts

Both SPS and CMS will need to evolve to incorporate ASP.NET, Microsoft's new engine for server-side Web pages. ASP.NET dynamically assembles Web pages from content generated by software components called Web Forms controls that run on the server. In effect, the ASP.NET engine plays the role of ASP and the digital dashboard factory combined, while Web Forms controls act as Web Parts. Current Web Forms controls generate only generic content elements (e.g., buttons, text input fields, calendars, tabular data displays), but developers can create new Web Forms controls using the ASP.NET APIs. The result could be a gallery of application-specific controls analogous to the current gallery of Web Parts.

For SPS, ASP.NET will yield better performance and simpler development than today's ASP engine. However, ASP.NET is not backward compatible with ASP, which means it won't run scripts in current Web Parts. Developers might be able to migrate some code from ASP-based Web Parts to Web Forms controls, but translating such code to the new programming languages and APIs required by ASP.NET won't be simple or error-free. CMS, in contrast, will need internal changes to adopt ASP.NET, but those changes probably won't affect content currently in CMS sites.

ASP.NET is due to ship with Visual Studio.NET in late 2001 and in Windows .NET Server in early 2002, so it could appear in products by the end of 2002. This means that next year could mark the beginning of the end for current Web Parts. SPS might be able to run Web Parts built on ASP for some time after 2002, because the ASP and ASP.NET engines can coexist on the same Web server. However, Microsoft and its partners are unlikely to create additional ASP-based Web Parts or tools that support them, once SPS has adopted ASP.NET.

Yukon Clouds the Storage Picture

Beyond 2002, the most significant enhancement for SPS and CMS will be the new Yukon database engine, which derives from SQL Server. (See "Microsoft Rethinks Exchange Storage Architecture" on page 3 of the May 2001 Update.) Microsoft plans to build the Yukon engine into all its major server products, including SQL Server (the CMS database technology), Exchange, and SPS.

However, the company hasn't announced (or perhaps even decided) which protocols and APIs Yukon will support. So, even if future versions of SPS support ASP and run current Web Parts, Web Parts and the Office XP Developer tools to create them might not work against a Yukon-based SPS store. It's hard to imagine Microsoft dropping the current digital dashboard store protocol, WebDAV, which is implemented in Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000 in addition to Office and SPS. However, the company clearly intends to focus more effort on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) in the long run. For CMS, a Yukon-based store would require internal changes (as would ASP.NET), but current CMS sites could probably upgrade to a Yukon-based CMS with little or no change.

The Yukon engine is currently scheduled to appear in 2003, according to Paul Flessner, senior vice president of Microsoft's .NET Enterprise Server Group. Any Microsoft portal product shipping after that point will likely use a Yukon store.

Seek Quick Payback Until Fog Lifts

In summary, Microsoft is clearly committed to the corporate portal market, but the technology it uses to address that market could change radically by the end of 2003, as the company assimilates CMS and adopts new Web server and store technologies into CMS, SPS, and Office. In particular, the company has yet to reveal a strategy for migrating current Web Parts to ASP.NET and Yukon. Any such strategy might be long in coming, as the company's portal efforts are currently divided among its Office, server, and operating systems groups, and no single manager short of chief executive officer Steve Ballmer is in charge.

Therefore, corporate portal projects that depend on the current digital dashboard technology should be expected to show a quick payback until Microsoft's strategy comes into clearer focus. The best candidates will be portals designed for document sharing and indexing, which can use SPS and its bundled Web Parts with little modification. Least desirable are projects that require a company to build numerous custom Web Parts from scratch. Companies should minimize the amount they invest in developing Web Parts on the current technology until Microsoft reveals migration paths to the new.

Resources

Avanade's Web site is www.avanade.com.

Further information on Decision Support Panel is at www.dspanel.com.

For information on developing corporate portals with SharePoint Portal Server and Office XP, see www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/techinfo/development.

A discussion of Microsoft's internal deployments of SharePoint Portal Server is at www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/TechNet/itsolutions/techsol/showcase/knowmg/rapport.asp.

The SharePoint Portal Server SDK documents the product's bundled Web Parts at www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/downloads/tools/SDK.asp.

The Microsoft Web Part Gallery is at www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/downloads/webparts.

A paper that explains how to create custom Web Parts and use the Security Broker is at www.microsoft.com/Sharepoint/techinfo/deployment/ArchWebPart.asp.

The Web Part Development Kit is available at www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/downloads/WPDK.asp.

For the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit and further information on digital dashboard technology, visit www.microsoft.com/business/dd. Note that the downloadable version of the resource kit at that site is called the "SQL Server Digital Dashboard 3.0" and does not include the Web Part Development Kit.

Version 2.2 of the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit is at http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/default.asp?URL=/code/sample.asp?url=/MSDN-FILES/027/001/584/msdncompositedoc.xml.

A developer discussion group for digital dashboard technology is news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.digitaldashboard.

The Content Management Server site is www.microsoft.com/cmserver. Of particular note is the link "SharePoint Portal Server and Content Management Server," which points to a white paper that explains how companies can use CMS together with SPS.