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

Behind the scenes in a portal is a database, usually a relational database. Depending on the portal elements you choose, other repositories will be involved as well, such as a directory service. What does the relational database contain?

• Structured data for applications that require it , such as online catalogs, inventory systems, payroll and human resources, and all manner of line-of-business applications. Web pages are used as the frontend for these systems to allow data entry, queries, and reports .

• Content (text and HTML tags) that is managed by the content management system. For instance, Microsoft Content Management Server uses SQL Server to store content that is dynamically generated into web pages, and also data needed to generate site navigation.

• Documents managed by the content management system. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 stores these documents in SQL Server.

• User profiles. This means user information such as name , email address, contact information, and preferences that relate to content that may be used by the personalization engine.

• Metadata. The database contains data about the databases (metadata) such as the table structure, relationships among the tables, and data definitions.

I chose SQL Server as the relational database for the examples in this book. It is the standard repository for several servers and services such as Microsoft Content Management Server, Commerce Server, and Windows SharePoint Services. As a result, we can take advantage of all the tools available for SQL Server to manage our portal data and metadata.

Not all portal data ends up in a relational database. Messages, for instance, are stored in Exchange Server, which does not use a relational database as its repository in the current version. SharePoint Portal Server 2001 used the Web Store as its repository rather than storing managed documents in the file system or in SQL Server. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 preserves this storage option but only for backward compatibility with the 2001 version. Figure 2.8 shows the roles of the primary portal repositories.

For the logical and physical planning of portal infrastructure, you as the portal architect must be aware of the repositories that will be used. For instance, scalability considerations will determine how many servers are applied to each of these repositories, and you must prepare failover contingencies.