Service Management Portals
The SDX software provides two types of management portals:
- Enterprise service portals—Let providers make services available to IT managers, and let IT managers manage the services and subscribers within their organization
- Residential portals—Let residential subscribers manage subscriptions to the services that they want to use
The SDX software includes a toolkit of APIs for developing Web-based portals, as well as a set of documented sample Web applications that demonstrate the use of these APIs. The sample portals are designed to be highly customizable and can be used for many applications with minimal development and integration effort. Portals developed with the APIs can run in any Web environment that supports CORBA or SOAP. Web-based portals can be tailored to a service provider's presentation needs and customized to each individual subscriber.
Enterprise Service Portals
An enterprise service portals a Web application that lets service providers supply a management interface to its customers for managing and provisioning services. We provide several enterprise service portals. You can customize a number of the enterprise service portals and employ them in your environment. Other enterprise service portals are intended for demonstration purposes only.
The following enterprise service portals are available:
- Sample enterprise service portal—Provides a sample portal that illustrates how service providers can make their services available to IT managers in an enterprise and that provides developers with a starting point from which they can create their own enterprise service portals.
- Enterprise Manager Portal—Provides an application that allows service providers to provision services for enterprise subscribers on JUNOS routing platforms and that allows IT managers to manage services. This enterprise service portal is a complete application that requires little customization.
- NAT Address Management Portal—Provides an application that allows service providers to manage public IP addresses for use with NAT services on JUNOS routing platforms and that allows IT managers to make requests about public IP addresses through the Enterprise Manager Portal. This enterprise service portal is a complete application that requires little customization.
The Enterprise Service Portal audit plug-in is also available. It defines a callback interface that receives and records events when IT managers complete specified operations, such as subscribing to a service or changing the parameter substitutions of a subscription. The plug-in reports the type of operation performed, the identity of the IT manager, and attributes specific to the operation.
Figure 9 shows a sample page in the sample enterprise service portal.
Residential Portals
A residential portal is a Web portal designed for use by individual subscribers to manage their subscriptions to Internet services and to log in to and out of a subscriber session. The portal pages, which are dynamically generated from information stored for subscribers, give subscribers instant access to personalized services, without the need to interact with customer representatives for a service provider. Proprietary client software is not required; subscribers can use a standard Web browser on a workstation or a personal digital assistant (PDA).
The residential portal can locate a specific SAE by using information that is dynamically obtained when subscribers connect. Because the data-processing function of the SDX software is separate from the access function, you can easily integrate the SDX software with existing portals, regardless of the technology used to deliver the portal. If your portal environment provides schemes for checking availability of Web servers and balancing loads between Web servers, you can also take advantage of these schemes for the portal.
The SDX software provides two examples of residential portals.
The sample portals show two different operating models:
- Equipment registration—Used by subscribers who use Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) connections to register their devices to receive an authenticated IP address.
- ISP service—Used by subscribers who use PPP, static IP, or unauthenticated DHCP connections to log in to the portal and receive an unauthenticated IP address.
Figure 10 shows a residential Web portal that could be created with the SDX software.
Portals for PDAs
Web-based residential portals that you develop for the SDX software are compatible with PDAs. Figure 11 shows a login page for a sample residential portal that is being accessed from a PDA.
