Developing an Information Management Tool with Existing Technologies - Portal System Architecture
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The portal application project was designed to work on the Internet Information Server (IIS) 6.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 running on Microsoft Windows 2000 Server. The portal uses Dynamic HTML and Active Server Pages technologies. Even though only Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) was used for server side scripting, both Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) and JavaScript were used for Dynamic HTML on the client side.
The portal application also makes great use of the Active Directory Service. Portal users’ profiles are kept on the Active Directory and allowed parts can be modified within the portal. Information such as a user’s computer, organizational unit, and role are automatically retrieved, by the use of ADSI (Active Directory Services Interface), from the Active Directory on logon and user’s portal window is customized according to this information.
The portal application is made of customizable service windows, each a simple database application within itself, a page layout management section, a profile management section, and a project management application. Each service window is located in an iframe on the main portal application window. By using Dynamic HTML and iframe technologies, service windows’ position can be changed by simply dragging and dropping them to their new location. Service windows can also be removed and added back again to the portal application’s main window according to users’ preferences. After each session these modifications are saved to a database server. These preferences are read back from the database server on each session start for each portal user and placed in a client side XML DOM Document. All user customizations are saved in this XML DOM Document and kept on the client side until the session terminates. Then the modified XML DOM Document is written back to the database server, thus reducing the network traffic and the load on the database server.
In some of the services, ActiveX Objects such as the Outlook View Control Object and the Netmeeting Object were used to make these services accessible within the portal application. Some of the other services are also reliant on Microsoft technologies such as Active Directory and Microsoft Indexing Service. These services include an Active Directory navigation tool for profile queries and project indexing for project searches.
Some services in the portal application make use of several technologies at once. For example the video conferencing service window creates a list of users that are allowed to make video conferencing call according to their role using the Active Directory. It then filters the list according to the user's online status and retrieves the computer names of these online users to make it possible for Netmeeting ActiveX Control object to place calls to these users. The rest of the service windows are reliant on some sort of data stored on the database server such as weather conditions, exchange rates, dictionary, etc.
The portal application also includes a project management application. This feature helps the portal users to enter their project details to a database server and upload their related documents to a user folder on the file server in order to share their project details with other users who have access rights. Uploaded files are protected against unauthorized use via NTFS directory access rights. Project files are automatically indexed via Microsoft Indexing Service so that authorized users can query the uploaded project files catalog and have an easy access to information by using the portal’s projects service window.
The portal also serves as the single sign-on point for other web-based applications that run on other platforms. The authentication process of the portal is done by the help of Windows NT authentication, and the authorization is done by the help of Active Directory Services. Once a user is authenticated through the Windows NT authentication process, their role is determined by the help of the Active Directory Service, and the user is authorized to use the predefined services and other web-based applications for that role.
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