Nexus

What is Nexus?

Nexus is an iSeries-hosted Web Portal solution designed to provide fast, secure and organized access to Enterprise information through web browsers. Nexus assembles Enterprise applications and documents, organizes content, and consolidates security and user information. Nexus lets you host the major user experiences for your Enterprise's web implementation. It also provides the framework for administering the portal.

Overview of Benefits of Nexus

• Management — Nexus provides the Enterprise with control over what specific business and personal productivity applications and documents are accessible by portal users.
• Users — Nexus provides users with the productivity tools they desire to customize and manage their work environment, all in a familiar browser interface.
• Information Accessibility and Consolidation — Nexus provides a single interface for accessing enterprise information, from iSeries-centric web applications to reports to documents such as Word or PDF documents. Users can design their own page layouts and choose available content, within the constraints of security and access rules defined by the web portal administrators.
• Ubiquity — Nexus makes Enterprise information widely available and easy to organize — provides access via Intranets, Extranets or Internet.

Justification

The Nexus portal provides users with a complete web-based desktop solution. The result is higher productivity. Nexus offers everyone — executives, consumers, vendors, employees — a simple, powerful way to interact with enterprise information systems. Nexus decreases the cost of delivering information to broad audiences, and increases the return on existing information technology. All the people touching the enterprise can find information more easily, without relying on information technology specialists, and without visiting separate sites or learning different applications.

The User Experience

The Nexus Portal's personalized pages are the face of the Enterprise site. Portal users can assemble the electronic information and tools relevant to their work.

Users design personalized portal pages by choosing the layout and content of their pages, creating a web-based desktop. Users can select 'wadgets' for their desktop. Wadgets are web gadgets (sometimes called 'portlets') — configurable components that deliver information and services from enterprise servers and the Internet, such as tree-structured links to documents, application or web pages, calendaring, to-do lists, inventory reports or Internet news. Wadgets can also provide an interface to corporate business web applications that access dynamic iSeries data, such as Order Entry, Sales Analysis, Customer Relationship Management applications, etc.

The personalized portal pages provide a complete customized web-based desktop, similar to a PC desktop, but available to each individual user from anywhere. This web desktop empowers users to customize their environment according to their interests and needs.

An Example 'Web Desktop' — Personalized Portal Page for a User

The Nexus user experience provides end-users with easy, secured and controlled access to corporate information, such as:

• Authorized web based iSeries programs and business applications (such as WebSmart-built applications)
• With the optional Catapult interface to iSeries reports, Word, PDF and other documents
• Personalized links to enterprise (internal) or external sites — including static pages or web-based applications — in productive, familiar Explorer-like tree views
• Value-added Personal productivity and groupware wadgets included with Nexus, including:
• Personal and Group Calendaring and Event Scheduling
• Personal To-do list
• Email and search wadgets
• External news and weather wadgets
• Enterprise (internal) news tickers
• Employee time sheet tracking system

Screenshot of Wadget selection for a User's Page Layout Design

Web-Based Portal Administration

Nexus has comprehensive Administrative functions, all done through a consistent, easy to use browser interface. You can appoint one or more administrators, with responsibilities for the entire portal, or for specific areas of it. This allows you to provide users with access to information according to your enterprise's structure and chain of command. Users can be assigned to one or more groups, with one or several people responsible as 'group managers' to control content availability.

Nexus also includes a unique web server plugin that extends the functionality of the iSeries Original HTTP Server and the iSeries HTTP server powered by Apache. The plugin allows portal administrators to secure and configure access to iSeries-hosted documents or web applications on-the-fly, without having to stop and restart the web server. The plugin provides a high degree of granularity for securing access to pages, and makes it impossible for users to access unauthorized pages.

Screenshot of Portal Administration Functions

An enterprise can have multiple Nexus portals defined — all running off the same iSeries server. Each portal is called a 'site'. The site manager, as depicted in the above screenshot, can manage and configure these attributes of the portal:

• Site settings — color scheme, URL paths, rules for logging in, and for Portal session time-lengths, password rules etc.
• Portal pages — available for everyone, or for groups of users within the site.
• Menu tree links for all or a group of users
• Manage groups — create, change or delete groups and enroll lists of users in groups.
• Manage users — create, change, delete, activate or deactivate users, manage their passwords, enroll them in groups
• Define link protections — create or change rules that prohibit or permit groups or individual users from accessing specific areas of the portal.
• Manage Wadgets — work with available Wadgets for the portal — including creating new ones. As you incorporate more applications (business or personal productivity), you can choose to include these within a wadget framework

More Management and Productivity Benefits of Deploying a Nexus Web Portal

We've already described the benefits of providing an everywhere-available web desktop to Nexus Portal users. Now consider the management productivity gains of deploying Nexus:

Nexus:

• Provides the means to organize knowledge so it is easily and readily accessible by authorized users
• Secures your site so that authorized users can readily get to information they need, while preventing unauthorized access to sensitive data
• Provides customized entry points to the portal for different users, so each user gets their own personalized home page, suitable for their needs and level of security?
• Eliminates the need to maintain HTML pages by hand. No hand-coding of HTML is required. Instead, use a simple web interface to modify your front-end pages, and to include links to other pages.
• Allows you to incorporate powerful native iSeries security features such as site logins using validation list security or user profile security. Also uses AES encryption technology in conjunction with native OS/400 object security to provide maximum security of both client-side and server-side data.
• Uses sophisticated session-tracking technology to prevent another user from hijacking a session and accessing information belonging to someone else.
• Allows you to easily restrict or open up different areas of your site based on the login information.
• Allows you to easily manage login information using a web interface.
• Allows you to change the entire look of your site by modifying just the front-end pages — with no web server downtime and minimal risk of failure?
• Allows you to easily add or remove links to pages, either at a global level or individual level, without any coding required — simply use the administration web interface to add, change or remove links.
• Allows you to implement value-added features easily.
• Integrates seamlessly with existing WebSmart applications (uses the same Web Application Server component) or with any other web applications or pages.

Value-Added Personal Productivity Applications

Nexus provides you with groupware software, such as a calendaring system that could cost thousands of dollars alone.

Screenshot of Calendar Functionality View

The Calendar application integrates a user's private appointments with published events — based on the groups he/she belongs to. Events are color-coded for ease of identification. You can schedule for optional popup or email reminders prior to any event occurring.

Additional Features

• Security implementation

  • Login management: administrator can add, change, delete users using a Web interface
  • Options to email forgotten passwords to users when requested
  • Protect or open up pages either universally or by login id, or by groups.
  • Session management: option to expire a user’s session after a specified period of inactivity (forces them to login again).
• Flexible front-end page design
• Supports frames-based or non-frames based pages
• Six different pre-defined looks provided with Nexus
• Allows you to use your own corporate logos and look and feel
• Uses Cascading Style Sheets to make changing the look and feel of an entire site simple and immediate.
• Provides dropdown menus:

• Tree-style menus down left of page, with many options for display, including customized graphics to indicate if a node in a tree is expanded or collapsed, and to identify the type of node (e.g.: folder or file?)
• Optional login id required — administrator specifies location on page
• Web-based administration tool (These are features that are used by the web site administrator, to control overall functionality of the site)

• Web site administration tool is secured so only authorized users can access it
• Add, change, and delete links to pages or web programs (such as WebSmart applications) — by user or for everyone.
• Add, change or delete groups. Users can belong to one or more groups. (Groups might represent departments in your enterprise: eg: Accounting, Human Resources, Sales etc.
• Add, change, delete, change status of users (login ids)
• Change look of main site page — graphics, types of menus, color schemes, whether to use frames or tables, etc.
• Configure calendaring and task management functions by login id.

Server System Requirements

iSeries 400
OS/400 version V5R1M0 minimum
WebSmart Web Application Server (WAS) — a Nexus-specific version is included with Nexus at no additional cost.
OS/400 HTTP server or Apache server configured and active

Client System Requirements

Internet Explorer browser with Javascript support and cookies activated