More technical considerations for Self-Service (part 2)

This blog part 2 continues the discussion on technical considerations for Self-Service and lists additional key aspects to successfully deploy Self-Service.

• Assure Personalization
  • Tailors content, site pages, layout, look & feel, components for the individual user when logging in.
  • Identity and authorization is important for sensitive user information & interaction.
  • Two kinds of personalization
    • Explicit personalization is driven fixed & static rules, user attributes, profile information & demographics, …
    • Implicit personalization is driven by dynamic rules and attributes such as type of device accessed from, existing customer status, products & services owned, previous clicks…
• Integrate with Identity management technologies
  • Assure connections and availability with authentication & authorization for securing user sessions
  • At minimum directory services (LDAP) and access management - Single Sign On (SSO)  and Federation Management - integration are required
  • Better are more sophisticated access control policies with integration of specialized tools for security auditing, compliance, role management, and policy administration
• Assure application-level security
  • Grant appropriate access for administrators and developers to pages/ components within the site
  • Assure Application integration to translate transactional functionality into experience
• Application Component Development
  • Component development
    • Component development allows for authorizing and deployment of independent micro-applications surfaced within the self-service pages.
    • These components are often referred to as portlets if they are built as standard JSR168/ 286 applications.
    • Widgets and Gadgets are another common component type.
  • Enable Inter-component Communication/ Events
    • Allows page components to interact with each other to create a unified user experience. A user click or entered data within one component triggers an event with another component or backend applications.
• Drive Content Integration
  • Allow for content publishing and management (articles, descriptions, documents,…) within the context of the site.
  • Cross Site Search searches within context of the portal application.
  • Use of search crawlers can be more difficult with custom application components.

The graphic as well as content from Oracle white papers has been incorporated into this article.