To achieve a succesfull long tail strategy you need an online services platform that uses specific technology that is meant to integrate, aggregate and personalize data and services. The Java Portal technology is the only real technology that is meant for such a purpose. Other systems like CMS, CRM or E-commerce are meant to service specific content and transactions. Portal and SOA are proven technologies to organize these content and services in such a way that it will be easy to combine them into different offerings.
A typical portal is a dashboard with a combination of content and data from different applications. Such applications are integrated in the integration layer with SOA principles and are presented through portlets. The following key aspects make a portal the perfect window to your integrated systems:
- Each portlet represents an application and can function as such by offering different actions, views, preferences. As such a portal page contains many applications at the same time.
- Portlets can easily use the webservices that are enabled in your SOA architecture to provide online services in many different context.
- Portlets are meant to store preferences for specific user roles or users. This makes personalization for users very convenient.
- With inter portlet communication portlets can use events to show content / services that are relevant to each other. In combination with AJAX technologies a portal page can continuously change based on the actions of within some portlets.
- A portal framework contains very flexible layout and look & feel features to support different visual concepts. Different enterprise portal platforms offer user friendly management tools. Applying such chances can be as easy as setting up your own iGoogle page.
With all of the above combined a long-tail strategy will be within reach. After first 3 or 4 portals the portal platform will be generic and complete enough to initiate a more aggressive portal strategy. Your organization will be able to launch new portals with different configurations to service specific target audiences within 1-2 months with just 5-10% of the initial investments.