Building Corporate Portals with XML

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.