What are the components of Portal Server?

Portals should the user with an individual point of access to a broad variety of content, information, and services throughout an enterprise. The content advertised through portal providers, routes, and portlets on the portal page can be personalized depending on user preferences, user role or branches within an organization, site design, and marketing drive for customers as end-users.

Business intelligence portals support executives, managers, and business analysts with simple access to business intelligence for creating key business decisions. This kind of portal generally indexes business intelligence documents, analyses, and canned queries, and is related to financial management, user relationship management, and supply series performance management.

They also support a seamless approach to business intelligence tools (documenting, OLAP, data mining), and packaged analytic software. They also provide alerting, publishing, and subscribing.

There are several components of the Portal server as follows −

Web Clients − The web client is a computer or any device that runs a web browser and is adequate for advertising HTML and graphics. The web browser creates requests to the webserver and processes the documents the web server returns.

Web Servers − Web servers are file servers. Like traditional file servers, they acknowledge requests from web clients, then send requested files. Web servers are needed with portals because the data appearing from the application server should be transformed into HTML and pumped down to the web browser utilizing HTTP, HTML, graphics, and multimedia files (audio, video, and animation) have been stored on web servers.

Database Servers − In database servers, when leveraged with portals manage as they do in further traditional client/ server architectures they acknowledge requests and return data. Sometimes the requests come from web servers that link with the database server through a process currently on the webserver. Sometimes they appear directly from web user connection with the database server via a Call-Level Interface (CLI), including JDBC for ActiveX.

Back-end Applications − Back-end applications are enterprise applications existing either inside an individual enterprise or across several enterprises. These are generally a combination of ERP systems, including SAP R/3 or PeopleSoft, custom software existing on mainframes, and current client/server systems. Portals gather suitable data from these back-end systems and externalize this data through the user interface.

Application Servers − Application servers work with portal software by supporting an intermediate layer among the backend applications, databases, and web servers. Application servers connect with both the internet server and the resource server using transaction-oriented software development.