NTUA Portal



General Introduction

NTUAPortal is a Web Application, based on the Portal and Content Management concepts. A Portal represents a web site that provides a single point of access to information and services. On the other hand a Content Management System is an application for organizing and facilitating collaborative creation of documents, articles and other content.

NTUAPortal fulfils these requirements by offering a robust and extensible functional framework for building and managing dynamic web sites with various types of content. It allows organizations to build portals that combine functionality and resources into a single interface while enforcing business policies and security requirements, and providing personalized views of information to end users.

From an end user perspective, a portal, based on the NTUAPortal application, is a web site with pages that are organized by tabs. Each page contains a nesting of sub-pages and one or more modules –individual windows that display anything from static HTML content to complex web services. A page can contain multiple modules, giving users access to different information and tools in a single place. Authorized users can also customize the portal by adding pages, adding modules to them, and changing the look and feel of the interface.

The main features and benefits of the NTUAPortal framework are:

  • Versatile: NTUAPortal is an ideal application for creating and deploying projects such as commercial web sites, corporate intranets and extranets, and educational portals.
  • User-Friendly: NTUAPortal is designed to make it easy for users to manage all aspects of the web site.
  • Security–Personalisation: Only authorised people can access the portal. Their level of authorisation will determine what information is presented to them. This means that a single portal can effectively manage information needs of a number of user groups.
  • Feature-Rich: NTUAPortal offers a set of built-in tools that provide powerful pieces of functionality. Site design, content management, security, and membership options are easily managed and customized with these tools.
  • Extensible: NTUAPortal is able to create the most complex web sites entirely with its built-in features. Yet also allows programmers to easily develop and integrate custom modules and tools.
  • Data Driven: NTUAPortal is 100% data driven. All information concerning the design, security and the content of the site is stored in and retrieved from a database.

NTUAPortal application is built on Microsoft’s ASP.NET platform and has been developed using the Visual Basic programming language. The database management system used for data storage is the Microsoft SQL Server. It can be easily installed and hosted with all Windows hosting plans.

In the rest of this document, the term portal will be used to describe a web site, as well as the related data, hosted within an instance of the NTUAPortal application. The following paragraphs examine the elements of a portal.

Technical Requirements

Software prerequisites

The NTUAPortal prerequisites for the installation and execution of a new site are:

  • Operating System: Microsoft Windows 2000 Server or Microsoft Windows XP Professional or Microsoft Windows 2003 Server.
  • Web Server: Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 5 or higher, contained in Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP Professional, Windows 2003 Server. Note that IIS is not included in Windows XP Home edition.
  • Microsoft .NET Runtime: ASP.NET 1.1, included in the .NET Framework version 1.1 redistributable package (it can be freely downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx? familyid=262D25E3-F589-4842-8157-034D1E7CF3A3).
  • Database: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (or later) or Microsoft SQL Desktop Engine (MSDE) version 2000 (or later). MSDE is a free, lightweight version of SQL Server that can be downloaded from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=220549b5-0b07-4448-8848-dcc397514b41.

Hardware prerequisites

The hardware prerequisites of the NTUAPotlal are determined by the software required for the execution of the application, as described in the previous paragraph. NTUAPortal can be installed and executed on any system running this software.

The initial hard disk space required for the installation of NTUAPortal is about 3.5 GB (2 GB for the application and 1.5 GB for the database). However, the actual space required depends on the size of content added to the site (content added to the database or documents, images, media files, xml files, etc, uploaded to the server).

Finally, because NTUAPortal is a web application, it is preferable for the server to have a large amount of RAM (1 GB or greater) to avoid disk paging.

Hosting prerequisites

Besides the software and hardware prerequisites required by NTUAPortal, it is important to mention an additional prerequisite in case of third-party hosts:

  • File Permissions: NTUAPortal requires the account that the ASP.NET process runs under to have the file permission of full control the root installation folder.

The account ASP.NET runs under by default in Windows 2000 and Windows XP is the \ASPNET account and in Windows 2003 it is the NTAUTHORITY\ NETWORK SERVICE.