Portal consulting

Portals are web-applications that enable companies to unlock internally stored information, and provide users with a single gateway of personalized information and knowledge to make informed business decisions. Portals are designed to aggregate, streamline and simplify business to customer (B2C), business to employee (B2E),and business to partner (B2P) communications and interactions. The ability to quickly and securely share information with customers, partners and employees is a must in today’s market.

Your website portal can be your source of income and it is often a customer’s first impression of your company. We can help you anticipate changing user needs and demands by creating intelligent portals to integrate and disseminate information and conduct business transactions with seamless functionality.

For recommending portal development architecture and platform, We consider following activities as the prerequisite:

• Full understanding of clients business and technical requirements
• e-Zest and client agreement on Portal's use cases/Usage scenarios
• Understanding implications of the availability, scalability, recovery, and other non-functional and technical requirements
• If previous application exists, then re-engineering and re-architecting within the context of client existing application architecture

Some of the best practices followed at e-Zest for architecture of enterprise portal solutions include

• Define success goals and criteria for portal implementation
• Get client's management buy-in and approval across all affected organizations
• Include user interviews as part of the requirements gathering effort
• Include usability testing to reduce project risk by solidifying requirements with end users
• Use a proven methodology to establish standards, consistency with the focus on project engineering and management processes
• Plan for and test performance throughput of portal
• Architect maintainability into the portal framework, including trace logging, error notification, error resolution and exception handling
• Use proven third-party components and frameworks to reduce risk and effort
• Carefully consider the payment gateway integration in the portal matching the business need
• Plan for portal security and privacy considerations early in the process. It may include application, data, payment gateway integration security or user data access privacy
• Use proven design pattern based approach utilizing Business, Integration, Application and Composite Patterns.

e-Zest's portal solution offerings focus on matching client needs with industry standard portal platforms and deploying solutions in a manner and form that best address our client's business goals. e-Zest's portal platform expertise spans from open-source portal platforms such as DotNetNuke, PHPNuke for small and medium businesses to proprietary enterprise portal platforms provided by Microsoft,Oracle,IBM,BEA for large corporations.We recommend popular open-source portal platforms such as Liferay, JBOSS, JetSpeed for customers favoring open-source portal platforms.