Process Portals as a Fundament for Service Oriented Architectures

Process Portals are the fundament for he realisation of service oriented architectures (SOA). They are the central interface for all applications and their use by humans (human-machine integration). The role based personalization along user processes is the major added value of process portals which includes the integration of the necessary backend applications (machine-machine integration). SOA is based on the same concept, a process and service oriented view of the enterprise and the componentisation and flexibilisation of the IS/IT architecture. Compared with traditional architecture approaches, such as e.g. the client/server architecture, SOA expands this model with the process portal (human-machine integration) and the integration infrastructure (machine-machine integration) as two additional components. This article describes the construction principles of SOA with process portals as a starting point and presents a method for the realization of this architecture approach in the intra- and inter-organisational context (intra- and inter-organisational integration).