A portal-based approach for user-centric legacy application integration in collaborative environments

“Networked enterprises”are characterized by distributed teams of partner organizations, humans, computer applications, autonomous robots, and devices collaborating with each other in order to achieve higher productivity and to collaborate in joint projects or produce joint products that would have been impossible to develop without the contributions of multiple collaborators. In networked enterprises, special consideration must be paid to the IT systems which are in the position to integrate different applications across company boundaries as known from enterprise application integration. At the same time, high requirements are imposed on the employees within such alliances. The contribution of this paper is an architecture for legacy application integration in web-based portal systems, specifically tailored to the requirements of networked enterprises and focusing on a user-centric approach, allowing the user to customize his workspace to his own needs. Following its presentation, the proposed architecture is validated by a prototypical implementation.