Building Corporate Portals with XML (Paperback)

by Peter Aiken (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Getting a handle on an organization's related internal and external information is a daunting task. Building Corporate Portals with XML is a guide to moving to integrated Web portals to serve internal processes, external partners, and customers.

Heavily laden with theory, this title is best suited to system architects rather than developers under tight time constraints. Coauthor Clive Finkelstein is the creator of the Information Engineering methodology, which he uses to suggest approaches to moving legacy and relational data to portal access using XML as the information backbone. The discussions are thought-provoking and quite informative, but the acronym-heavy presentation is not for everyone.

After laying out the basic portal concepts, the authors move into the process of designing scalable information systems and modeling their data appropriately. The heart of the book focuses on enterprise metadata, how to define it, and how to implement it via XML. There are some concise examples of XML metadata implementation, but they are nestled within a rather complex discussion of the process of information analysis.

Although the focus of this title is Web portals, the majority of the book does not focus on Web site interfaces. Instead it probes deeper, offering a mile-high view of how to approach a wide-scale portal project. Don't look to this book for code snippets to implement on your Web site--instead, use it to develop a data-oriented mindset. --Stephen W. Plain

Topics covered: Strategic business planning, data modeling, metadata analysis and engineering, XML business reengineering, and quality initiatives.

Product Description
Explains how to solve one of the most common and vexing business problems: "I know the data is there but I can't get the information I need!" Presents corporate portal technology from planning and modeling stages to implementation. Special emphasis on converting legacy system data to modern data warehouses. For business managers who will use corporate portals, as well as the information technology staff developing them.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill (August 26, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0079137059
• ISBN-13: 978-0079137050
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,818,101 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Mostly a rehash of information engineering concepts, September 17, 1999

By A Customer

This book starts on a bad note by not providing a rigorous definition of a corporate portal. This gives the authors license to write as if any system is a corporate portal.

Most of the book is composed of the authors' ideas on information engineering. Though they keep referring to portals, the information the authors present seems much more relevant to traditional systems development. The authors seem to have no concept of a corporate portal as intellectual (and tangible) middleware. Also, though they repeat the assertion that over 90% of the information business people use is unstructured, they seem to have left out any further in-depth discussion of the peculiarities of unstructured information.

The information on XML is pretty standard stuff. The authors fumble their attempt to make a case how XML fits into the concept of corporate portals (which would be hard to do because they have never presented a clear concept of a corporate portal.)

If you are familiar with the concepts of information engineering, you may enjoy the authors' latest thoughts on the topic. But as a guide to designing and implementing corporate portals, this book is a major disappointment. In a nutshell, the authors do not provide the information on what makes corporate portal development different from development of other systems.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very pleasently surprised, February 19, 2000

By	Bob Dudas (Richmond, Virginia) - See all my reviews

I picked this book up expecting to acquire a working knowledge of how XML is used in the building of corporate portals. I anticipated wading through a myriad of coding examples and references to this ERP and to that language. I thought I would find a logical road map of how to use my company's metadata and XML to open new arenas in the realm of e-commerce. I was anticipating an academic treatise. I was pleasantly surprised when I found that the title of the book was somewhat misleading. The book is actually a text constructed to educate the reader on the design, development and functionality of corporate portals. If you are looking for a book that you will be able to refer to as a guide to acquire a better understanding of corporate portals, I would highly suggest this book. It is both educational and enjoyable to read. But, if you are searching for a book to function as a technical journal that focuses only on metadata and XML, you should look elsewhere

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars What's in a Name?, April 13, 2000

By	Carla Corkern (Bellevue, Wa) - See all my reviews

Good description of Data Warehousing techniques, etc but NOREAL HELP for XML Portal builders. I may be a little critical since Irun a PS organization that does this but really, there isn't much meat here around anything new. The title is only a clever marketing ploy and the writers admit as much in the intro. Pass it on by unless you need to understand DataWarehousing in General and are trying to sneak it by your manager as an "XML book".

Better for Data Warehousers is the Data Warehouse Life Cycle Toolkit by Kimball.