Chapter 14 - Building a Portal

Abstract

This chapter focuses on building portals, which are intended to be a user's entry point into the endless virtual world of the internet. The building block of portals is a user personalization. A portal creator tries to personalize and give the user as much control over the layout, colors, and display of the information as possible, creating the feel of a virtual community. There are two types of portals— namely, (1) public or commercial portals and (2) private portals or virtual offices. Most portal software offers centralized management tools. The ability to use secure sockets layer (SSL) in a portal offers an extra level of securing communications between the independent computing architecture (ICA) client device and the NFuse Web server. NFuse 1.6 offers Microsoft, Active Directory and Novell Directory Services (NDS) authentication support, thereby eliminating users need to log in twice. Setting the authentication type is also done in the NFuse.conf file. The chapter states that NFuse Web servers are the weakest component in a Citrix network design. The virtual server is supported by the physical servers, which communicate between each other through a technology known as heartbeat. It is the responsibility of keeping the virtual server up or dividing the load among the remaining servers.