The trend toward adaptive software: making role-based, composite applications a reality.(Portals & Portlets)

The days of customers pouring millions of dollars into buying and customizing "stovepipe" proprietary enterprise applications are giving way to a new scenario: companies are building composite applications that provide their employees, partners, and customers with the ability to interact with their various disparate back-end systems. Composite applications span industries and can take many forms. For example, a manufacturing company might provide an intranet for its sales force to access customer data from its CRM system, check order status and order history from its ERP system, and chat or participate in threaded messages via collaboration software, all from one place.

Such a system enables slaes reps to be more productive, improves customer satisfaction, and increases forecast visibility inside the company. The same manufacturing company might also create an e-commerce extranet that allows customers to create, edit, cancel, and track orders by …