Case Study #5  PT Explorer

PTExplorer is a smart client application which provides a highly graphical portal management interface. It is built upon a flexible and extensible business object layer which provides the details of communicating with the client’s portal. The business layer contains the basic object types used by the portal (users, groups, etc.) as well as a robust relationship engine for defining relationships between objects, such as user-group or security relationships. Properties for these objects as well as the relationships between them may be stored in one or more data sources. The data sources used currently include SQL Server, Web Services, and custom objects exposed via .NET Remoting. PTExplorer consolidates all these data sources into an integrated, easy-to-use interface. Wizards are used to facilitate the creation and editing of portal objects..

PTExplorer also leverages its smart-client nature to provide robust cut and paste and drag/drop capabilities. It provides search capabilities as well as several views into the data including a Windows Explorer-like folder view as well as a group hierarchy view and diagram view. Diagrams are used within PTExplorer to provide a view of specific portal objects and their relationships. The object model gives the ability to clone both objects and their relationships.

In addition to enabling cut and paste functionality at the business object level, this cloning ability is used to provide robust templating capability. Using PTExplorer, the user may define custom templates which contain virtual objects. When the template is used to build real portal objects, their properties and relationships from the template are carried over. These virtual objects may contain relationships to either other virtual objects or real objects, e.g., the Administrators Group. This templating functionality enables rapid development of portal experiences.