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## Function of Enterprise Service Portals

The SRC software enables service providers to use enterprise service portals to provision services to enterprise subscribers who connect to the SRC network by means of a JUNOSe router or a JUNOS routing platform. An enterprise service portal is a standalone Web application that runs in a Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE)-compliant Web application server. An enterprise service portal must have a corresponding configuration in the directory. Typically, a service provider provisions the router and configures the initial directory structure.

IT managers in an enterprise log in to the SRC network through an enterprise service portal. The managers can then activate services and perform some administrative tasks associated with their enterprises. When an IT manager requests an action through an enterprise service portal, the enterprise service portal uses the SRC software’s enterprise service portal application programming interface (API) to interact with the SAE and to update data in the directory.

More specifically, the enterprise service portal calls methods in this API to:

- Authenticate IT managers in an enterprise.
- Create, delete, and modify accounts for IT managers.
- Navigate among retailers, enterprises, sites, and accesses.
- Create, delete, activate, and deactivate subscriptions to services.
- Get feedback from the sessions that a subscription generates. This feedback, which comes directly from the SAE managing the session, indicates whether the session is active in the network and provides the values used for the service parameters.
- Get feedback about the use of resources, such as the number of bytes and packets the SAE has sent or received for a particular service.
- Configure values for service parameters .

## Consistency of Data in the Directory

Enterprise service portals can monitor the consistency of data as you enter it through the portal; for example, an enterprise service portal can prevent you from deleting a subscription if that subscription depends on other data in the directory. Enterprise service portals do not constantly monitor the consistency of existing data in the directory for all subscribers, however, because doing so would consume significant network resources. Consequently, if you use an LDAP browser to modify data in the directory that was entered through a portal, you must be sure that the data in the directory is consistent.

## Privileges of IT Managers

The enterprise service portal API controls the privileges that determine how IT managers can manipulate subscribers, subscriptions, and services associated with a retailer or enterprise. All IT managers in an enterprise share the same connections to the directory.

## Developing and Customizing Enterprise Service Portals

You can customize enterprise service portals to provide customer-specific Web pages and supply specified services. By modifying JavaServer pages (JSP), which use a set of customized tags to call methods in the enterprise service portal API, you can customize an enterprise service portal to suit a customer’s environment.

For information about the JSP tags that you can use to customize an enterprise service portal, see the documentation for the enterprise tag library on the Juniper Networks Web site at http://www.juniper.net/techpubs/software/management/src/api-index.html

## Identifying the SAE

An enterprise service portal handles a request from an IT manager by communicating with the SAE that manages the subscriber affected by the IT manager’s request. You can use the following methods to allow the enterprise service portal to identify which SAE manages a subscriber:

- For SRC implementations that use more than five SAEs, configure a network information collector (NIC) that takes the distinguished name (DN) of an access as the key and returns the corresponding SAE as the value.
- For SRC implementations that use five or fewer SAEs, you can use directory eventing to identify the SAEs. If you configure this option, SAEs update the addresses of their external interfaces in the directory at a specified time interval. Each update triggers an event that is sent to the enterprise service portal to confirm that the corresponding SAE is available. If the enterprise service portal does not receive the update event within a certain time, the enterprise service portal assumes that the SAE is not available and subsequently does not send any service activation or feedback requests to that SAE. When the SAE becomes available and starts to manage subscribers again, the enterprise service portal sends new requests to that SAE.

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