GXPortal, ARTech's tool to build portals, has been used to develop all the new GeneXus Inc. Web sites (http://www.GeneXus-usa.com/) that makes information access easier for the users and whose maintenance is no longer made by the developers.
The site maintenance is no longer a technical matter, "We work developing applications and we never have time to update our site or implement what is requested by the Marketing Department. With GXPortal we have found the way to free the developer from making the changes in the Web site", explained Verónica Buitrón, GeneXus Inc. Director.
Once the design made by Soho was approved, the development area prepared with GXPortal the templates where the Web site pages are based, and trained María Antonia Hernández, GeneXus Inc. Marketing Assistant, who does not have a technical profile, to manage GXPortal. She is now in charge of creating the pages based on the template, entering contents and images, changing options, making charts, adding pages and so on; summing up, she does the entire site maintenance.
Personalized menus. The GeneXus Inc. site is aimed at providing our public -clients, distributors or prospects- with a quick access to the information they are searching for. We must satisfy these three target audiences in the fewest possible number of clicks", Buitrón said.
For this reason, when someone enters the site with his user ID and password, GXPortal shows him the menu with the information and the available applications according to his profile.
Web Services. When someone wants to use one of the applications displayed according to his profile, his user ID and password must be corroborated through an internal database. GXPortal Web Services are used to make these validations as well as register new users.
If the person wants to register, a page is displayed that, indeed, is the internal GeneXus Inc. application that confirms the registration and saves the user ID and password chosen by the user in GXPortal, by means of the Web Services.
Similarly, when the registered user enters the site -from any page of the Web site- GXPortal communicates with the internal application, which verifies that the user ID and password are valid and then displays the menu corresponding to the user profile.
Integration of applications external to GXPortal. "We wanted the use of our applications -external to GXPortal- which are displayed in the menu according to the user profile, to be transparent for the user", the GeneXus Inc. Director explained. "To achieve this transparency, we used GXportlet, a GXPortal component that allows integrating external applications -developed in GeneXus or other technologies- and embed them in the pages generated by GXPortal with the same interface, without the user noticing that he is changing from one application to another.
Therefore, when our clients want to use the online support application (Web Support) displayed in the menu, they do not notice that they are changing the application since it is visualized with a GXPortal template design.
From now on, each time a GeneXus client logs into the Company's Web site with a user ID and password, a menu is displayed that includes the Web Support application, the download center and the forum. And if the client wants to use the Web Support application, he does it transparently, without noticing that his user ID and password are verified again and he is logging into an application external to GXPortal that appears with the same interface visualized when navigating throughout the rest of the site.
This is possible thanks to the use of the Web Services to communicate data between GXPortal and an internal application and the use of the GXportlets to integrate applications external to GXPortal.