Customer Reviews

Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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This book explains the concept of portals and how Microsoft enterprise servers handle and implement the features that goes into a portal. The book is written by 3 authors and unfortunately the different writing styles and depth of the subject show.

For example in Chapter 8 Personalization, there is only one page on personalization with Content Management Server. Most of the content in it concentrates on how to do caching in a personalized setting without explaining how to do personalization with CMS in the first place.

In Chapter 5 Portal Framework, it details line by line codes on how to write a portal site in VB.Net. While the code is good, it is too technical compared with the rest of the book. I rather see code snippets on how to build some common components in a portal site instead of a portal application. It is a bit difficult to extract out the code you need as everything is tied together in the architecture. BTW, there is no CD in the book and no hyperlink is mentioned on where to download the source code.

The book has an entire chapter on Content Management Server. It also covers Commerce Server and SharePoint Portal Server quite well and gives a brief overview on BizTalk and InfoPath. I rather see more technical emphasis on how to integrate the different servers than having screenshots of numerous dialogs explaining what each of the fields does.

Finally the book retails at $50 which is far too expensive. It should be around $35 instead.

While most technology books either pander to Luddite executives or deliver pages of code to professional developers, _Building Portals_ is that rare breed, a tech book with content for managers and architects and developers. Townsend has done a great job capturing the spirit of portals and answering the hardest two questions: "What is a portal" and "What does it do". I passed a dog-earned copy around to some tech-challenged coworkers and it was very well received.

As a long-time user of Microsoft products, I have found the array and depth of the various products overwhelming and needed a comprehensive yet easy to understand presentation of the key parts of these products and how they can be used within a portal implementation. While the code fragments were far too technical for me, the rest of the book was very approachable and well worth the time investment to read. I strongly recommend this for all CIOs or people responsible for technical architecture and direction.

The title mentions portals, intranets and corporate web sites. But the emphasis in the text is clearly on portals. Where perhaps these might be regarded as special types of corporate web sites.

Townsend divides his book into two sections. The first deals mostly at the functional level. By defining what 'portal' means in this book. This functionality also includes the optional but probably preferred offering of a Web Service. He points out that many current portals lack this. Yet it seems the way to go. The promise is that a portal becomes more than just a collection of web pages for manual perusal by the visitor. If you furnish a Web Service, it permits the programmatic aggregation of services, by other entities on the Internet. Townsend devotes some space to showing how this is possible under .NET. Not in the least because Microsoft has standardised on using XML as the lingua franca for formatting data passed between .NET entities on a network.

The second section of the text delves into an implementation of this functionality. It describes the numerous Microsoft offerings, like the Content Management Server or the SQL Server 2000, and how these can be stitched together into a portal. Everything in this section is specific to Microsoft. While the first section can be read as a general description of portals.

This book is an excellent choice if you want to learn about portals but you must have some prior understanding of the software and programming languages to truly benefit from this book